E.T. in E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982).
© Universal Pictures
Holiday Special
By: Stephen LackeyDate: Sunday, December 23, 2007
A commenter here at Mania believes that I don’t like holiday episodes of TV series based on my review of the Christmas Special episode of Supernatural. Well, I didn't actually hate that episode, I just thought it was sub-par compared to the rest of the season of the show. With that said, the commenter is correct as a general rule with exceptions such as South Park holiday episodes and the good Treehouse of Horror episodes of The Simpsons. As a rule though, I feel that most holiday specials are just to schmaltzy and sugary, so much so that I feel like I have just contracted diabetes after the episode has ended. That’s the one thing that Supernatural had going for it, the series maintained it’s gloomier tone while doing a Christmas special. I probably should have given it more points for that.
At any rate, this is not a good time for TV, and it wouldn’t be even if there was no strike. What the strike does is make me dread the days and weeks after the holidays pass. I’d really be curious about what’s happening over in the WGA offices. I was really on the fence about supporting the reasons the strike was happening even if was annoyed at the consequences of it but now I just don’t get it. It almost feels like they either don’t really know what they want or they just want something, anything. The reason I say that is due to the new demands regarding unionizing reality show writers. These demands didn’t even appear in their original complaints. I believe the writers should be fairly paid but if the WGA is going to put up a fight they need to stay focused. This new demand just makes the whole thing feel like fighting for fighting’s sake.
So, the late night shows are coming back without writers, this should separate the men from the boys. I’ve never found Jay Leno amusing, in fact he really annoys me. I can only imagine how he’s going to do without writers. David Letterman on the other-hand is genuinely funny and really good at ad-lib so I expect he’ll still be fun to watch. Letterman’s production company in a unique move tried to negotiate a deal with the WGA outside of the network with no luck but as I said I think he’ll do fine solo. The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are both also coming back with no writers. To me these shows are much more challenging than your typical nighttime show so it’ll be really interesting to see how Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert perform. Not much on this week but movies we’ve all already seen....
Happy Holidays!
Monday
NEAR DARK (TCMe, 8PM EST)
An auspicious solo directing debut from Kathryn Bigelow, Near Dark combines such diverse genres as horror, western, crime, and romance into what may be the first vampire road movie.
Set in the contemporary American Southwest, the film begins as Caleb (Adrian Pasdar), a bored farm boy, spots the beguiling Mae (Jenny Wright) at his usual Friday night hangout. By the break of dawn, Caleb has been bitten in the neck by Mae and befriended by a bizarre "family" of vampires--led by Jesse (Lance Henriksen), undead since before the Civil War--who travel across the country in a Winnebago. To his horror, Caleb learns that he has been "nipped" (i.e., he's almost a full-fledged vampire), and to graduate he must kill and drink blood. Sensing that Mae is in love with the boy, Jesse gives Caleb a week to perform his first kill.
THE SCORPION KING (AMC, 8PM EST)
The Conan the Barbarian sequel fans have been clamoring for in all but name, this fast-paced bit of good-natured idiocy tells the backstory of the Scorpion King, whose fearsome reputation was established in The Mummy Returns (2001)
Tuesday
MONSTERQUEST (HISTORY, 8PM EST) BIGFOOT
Following a search for the legendary Bigfoot by an all-female team in Washington state. Also: The 1967 Patterson-Gimlin film of a supposed Bigfoot is examined using digital microscopes.
Wednesday
WIRED SCIENCE (PBS, 9PM EST)
Searching for new life forms in the Arctic Ocean; creating smokeless gunpowder from cotton balls; the Wired LivingHome, an ecofriendly, technologically advanced home in L.A.; West Virginia's "quiet zone," where radio astronomers search for life on other planets; creating "perfect water" for movies; how a cold medicine relieves symptoms.
ALIEN VS PREDATOR (FX, 9PM EST)
Two lethal alien species, three ancient civilizations and references to genre touchstones from Cube (1998) to The X-Files can't keep the fourth sequel to Alien (1979)/second sequel to Predator (1987) from being a reductive spook show in which a bunch of puny humans get chased around by scary monsters.
SLEEPY HOLLOW (TNT, 9PM EST)
Tim Burton's stylish and creepy homage to the Hammer horror films of the late '50s is also the most atmospheric piece of grand guignol gothic since Mario Bava's Black Sunday. This time out, Ichabod Crane (Johnny Depp) is a New York City cop in dutch with the department because he prefers searching for clues to torturing suspects. As punishment, a nasty judge (Hammer star Christopher Lee) dispatches him upstate to investigate three mysterious decapitations; once there, the fiercely rationalist Crane is disturbed to learn that the locals blame the deaths on the Headless Horseman, the ghost of a monstrous Hessian soldier (Christopher Walken at his feral best). Crane also discovers he's not much of a hero (he twitches and faints a lot), and begins to have troubling dreams, perhaps inspired by the beautiful Katrina (Christina Ricci), the witchy daughter of the village's richest citizen.
Thursday
GOTHIKA (AMC 9PM EST)
A gloomy-doomy ghost story that gets off to a creepy start and then spirals into flat-out preposterousness, French actor-director Mathieu Kassovitz's English-language debut features Halle Berry in the kind of bravura role for which actresses claw out each other's eyes. As brilliant criminal psychologist Dr. Miranda Grey, she starts out on top of the world: She's beautiful, highly respected and happily married to her boss, Dr. Douglas Grey (Charles S. Dutton). One dark-and-stormy-night fender bender later, she's a patient at her former place of employment, the spooky Woodward Penitentiary for Women. When she asks for her husband, she is told that he's dead, then accused of having hacked him up with an ax. No one believes Miranda is innocent: Not her lawyer (Dorian Harewood); not her doctor, flirty former colleague Pete Graham (Robert Downey Jr.); not Sheriff Ryan (John Carroll Lynch), her late husband's best friend since childhood; and certainly not the other patients. Miranda doesn't help her case by insisting she remembers nothing about that night three days earlier, except that the storm forced her to take a detour over a small bridge, where she nearly mowed down a bloodied, traumatized young woman standing in the middle of the road. But no one's found any sign of a girl, and when Miranda identifies her as the subject of a photo belonging to Dr. Phil Parsons (Bernard Hill), another former colleague, her credibility is further damaged. The picture is of his teenage daughter, Rachel (Kathleen Mackey), who committed suicide by jumping off that isolated bridge four years ago. Fiercely rational Miranda doesn't believe in ghosts, but ghosts clearly believe in her: Rachel has chosen to torment Miranda with the enigmatic message "Not Alone," and uncovering the cause of the unquiet spirit's misery may be the only way Miranda can clear herself.
Friday
AFI’S 100 YEARS, 100 MOVIES (BRAVO 7PM EST)
Morgan Freeman hosts the 10th annual cinematic countdown, which this year lists the 100 greatest American films, as chosen by a panel assembled by the American Film Institute. In addition to film clips, celebrities comment, including Tim Allen, Halle Berry, Peter Bogdanovich, Jeff Bridges, Laurence Fishburne, Peter Fonda, Harrison Ford, William Friedkin, Dennis Hopper, Norman Jewison, Spike Lee, Shirley MacLaine, Liza Minnelli, Martin Scorsese, Martin Sheen and M. Night Shyamalan.
Saturday
E.T. THE EXTRA TERRESTRIAL (ABCFAMILY, 8PM EST)
One of the most popular movies ever made, E.T. translates religious myth into cute, familiar terrain with its story of a lovable alien stranded in suburbia. Elliott (Henry Thomas) finds E.T., a visitor from another planet left stranded on Earth, hiding in his backyard and, like any kid who finds a stray, decides to keep him. Hiding the alien from his mother, Thomas and the neighborhood kids befriend the creature. Though E.T. becomes attached to Elliott and his friends, he wants to get back to his own planet; meanwhile, the children must save him from some government types who are trying to capture and study him.
Sunday
STAR TREK: FIRST CONTACT (SCI FI 10PM EST)
The historic first Trek movie entirely divorced from the original cast is no blot on the franchise. And if non-Next Generation devotees feel a bit left out of the fun, well... now they know how all the non-Trekkers felt about the previous seven films. Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) and his crew get mixed up in a proper mess involving time travel, the monstrous Borg and flawed great-man-of-future-history Zefram Cochran (James Cromwell), inventor of the warp drive. This allows them to dress up in awful 21st-century rags, butt up against quaint old customs like cranking up the Steppenwolf and boogeying till you puke, and worry that the fate of Earth's future rests on their shoulders. Alice Krige, who plays the leader of the Borg -- a race of cybernetic zombies who conquer worlds by absorbing their inhabitants into their collective half-flesh, half-mechanical society -- is the best thing about it.
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