Amazon Prime on Paternity Leave - Grimm and Your Fourth Amendment Rights

Amazon Prime has a couple seasons of the NBC supernatural sorta-police procedural Grimm on it, but I didn't consider watching it while a small child lay sleeping in my arms (but not on any inanimate surface) until I read a graphic novel version of an episode thanks to the blind box service Comic Bento. This month was entirely comic books published by Dynamite Entertainment, so along with New Vampirella #1, I got a Grimm comic, and after reading it, thought, "this is not horrible as entertainment goes, and not particularly intellectually taxing, so perfect for watching at 5AM."

Strangely and perhaps positively, the new Vampirella series' writers make it seem like they feel unjustly saddled with her outfit but can't change it due to tradition.

If you haven't seen Grimm, I will explain it to you in a paragraph:

Nick Burkhardt (David Giuntoli) is a Portland, Oregon police detective who is also the latest in a line of "Grimms," humans who can see the animal- and myth-themed creatures that walk among us in human form. Most episodes, one of these creatures will act out, and Det. Burkhardt has to either kill or subdue it, depending on the creature's dangerousness. There's also some meta-plot about supernatural critters' politics, but it's safely ignored.

For example, Deep Space 9's Nana Visitor is a homicidal bee person in one episode.

It's a fun show in a "brain candy" sort of way, like Lost Girl or Gossip Girl, but the approach to law and policing drives me nuts.

Okay, so we've suspended disbelief that wolf people and bee people and whatever the heck hexenbiests are supposed to be live among us and follow their weird supernatural impulses but we rationalize it as crazy people, serial killers, etc. But the show does the thing I can't stand in most police procedurals, which is commit bad police work, which is why I stopped watching Mysteries of Laura.

Also, even on two detectives' salaries, how could they afford that house? In either Nassau or Westchester County, that's a >$2M home, and they clearly don't live in Jersey.

If you can't solve every crime without violating all the clauses of Amendments 4-6 of the Constitution, you shouldn't be a police officer. But shows where policing is sort of secondary to the plot, this happens all the time and is shown as, at worst, a "meh" thing.

For example, no, examining the "curtilage" of a house does not allow you to jump the fence in the backyard, Mr. Police Officer. And then finding a clue there does not give you probable cause to enter the house. This is what we call "fruit of the poisonous tree" in evidence law.

Or the time they ask a law firm partner for "all the cases" a dead associate was working on, and he says, "sure, full access," as opposed to, "you can have a list of the clients and litigation the attorneys were involved with, but anything involving our client confidences requires a subpoena or we all lose our licenses to practice law."

There's even an episode where a police officer character (not Nick) confesses to conspiring to keep Brady material from a defense attorney because he doesn't want a jury believing that this obviously evil guy might not be guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of the particular crime he probably did. As the defendant was, in fact, a vicious murderer possessed of supernatural strength, this is presented as a sort of defensible act. In real life, this behavior puts innocent people in jail. Also, makes a mockery of our constitutional system. Not everyone is a superstrong serial killer who can eat bullets.

So, when there isn't law, this show is fun. When there is, it's groaningly awful. Fortunately, the legal bits are few.

PBS on Paternity Leave - The Mystery of Matter: Search for the Elements

Who doesn't love talking-head PBS documentaries about chemistry with lovingly recreated if not Oscar-worthy historical reenactments?

If you say "me, because I'm not a nerd enough to enjoy that sober," you're either A) lying, or B) shilling for the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States.

Probable motto: "stop pretending that you like the bitterness of beer or the sour acidity of wine and pour yourself another Cosmo or apple martini or black Russian."

As I've mentioned before, I've been watching TV while bouncing a small person on a pilates ball, as y-axis movement is the only thing that will soothe her. She doesn't care what I watch, which has enabled me to watch Get the Gringo, the November Man, Expendables 3, and the 2013 Russian Three Musketeers.

It's really weird to hear people who are supposedly French speaking fluent Russian. This must be what foreigners think about our versions of the Three Musketeers.

...and now The Mystery of Matter: Search for the Elements, a gem of educational television I want to recommend to all of you.

The show is a talky piece of infotainment of a form you may remember from high school anytime after 1970; scientists narrating the history of science intercut with actors in period costume.

Honestly, I forgot how much fun it is to follow along with the chemistry discoveries of 1700s-1900s, especially with reenactors and speaking lines only from the letters and books their historical personages wrote.

Priestley and Lavoisier (in reenactment) discussing the properties of then-unnamed oxygen gas. Madam Lavoisier, like Danaerys in Game of Thrones up-aged from her jailbaity actual age, is in the middle.

Back in the 18th Century, all you needed was some lab equipment and something of a disregard for personal safety and you could discover new elements. This is how Joseph (not Jason, as I kept mis-remembering) Priestley got oxygen from mercury calx. 

Joseph and Jason Priestley are easy to confuse, especially after that "discovering how to carbonate water" episode of Beverly Hills 90210.

Watching scientists do old-timey science (or, by the third episode, 20th century atomic science) is just plain fun, and it was really interesting for me to rediscover how the elements came to be identified, combined with reenactments of Dmitri Mendeleev's amazing Siberian beard. 

I expect this show to remain on PBS's website a little longer than Vicious as far fewer people are likely to want to spend their own money (as opposed to their school board's money) on it and Oregon Public Television is less interested in recouping their investment than ITV is with theirs. But it's on now, and worth a watch if you love science (which you do, because science is amazing). 

Netflix I Watched on Paternity Leave: The Transporter, The Series (designed and written for teenage boys, apparently)

Another thing that I've been spending my time on as a small person is being fed from a bottle or being held while I bounce on a pilates ball making soothing noises is Transporter: the Series.

Did you see the Luc Besson action film The Transporter with Jason Statham? (Note that I am not asking if you saw the two sequels; they were pretty crap.) It was an insubstantial but well-constructed action film where Jason Statham is a getaway driver par excellence in a tricked-out BMW doing jobs for criminals in the south of France, but he gets tasked with delivering a package that turns out to be an attractive Chinese woman in a duffel bag, and he ends up breaking his traditional non-intervention code of conduct and instead just beats on a bunch of people who really deserve it (also two cops who then get blown up by a car bomb, but Statham totally didn't know his car was going to get blown up when he stuffed the knocked-out cops in his trunk, so let's give him a pass on that).

One of the best scenes in the film Transporter is this balletically choreographed fight where Jason Statham stands on bicycle pedals in the middle of a giant oil slick and everyone else is playing slip-n-slide on the floor.

The movie had two great attributes: amazing driving sequences and some of Luc Besson's best fight sequences.

The TV show is capitalizing on the popularity of the movies, but also needs to make its money from somewhere (Canadian, French, and German TV subsidies only go so far), so it uses the Audi sports cars from the later movies as promotional consideration, as well as Fords whenever the show is shot in Canada (more on Canada later). Also for TV, intensely bald and working class-looking Jason Statham is swapped for Chris Vance, who looks like how teenage Sherlock slash-fic writers probably imagine Martin Freeman in sex scenes.

No, ladies, he is not shirtless enough. You get to see some fat, hairy British dude's not-as-tan-as-the-rest-of-him butt for like two straight minutes in one episode, but Chris Vance is rarely shirtless.

Chris Vance is good at following creative fight choreography, and he has appropriate looks of grim determination while pretending to upshift, which is really all you can ask for in a show like this.

This show was shot with a ton of Toronto film subsidy money, so if you know how to spot Canadian soundstages portraying everywhere else in the world, you will see them here. However, there are legitimately scenes shot in France and Berlin, possibly to get local content requirements high enough to be considered "local shows" in some European markets and avoid foreign (read: American) TV rebroadcasting limits, so unlike some "pretends to be NYC but shot in Vancouver" shows, there are some real locations.

So, what's the show, well, about? Basically, imagine watching someone remake the first movie in a 45 minute version. Over and over and over again. I liked this, you may not.

Frank Martin, "the Transporter," has a secret package he has to deliver. There is a problem with delivering the package. Car chases and fistfights and maybe some gunplay ensue. The package is either delivered to the good guys or not delivered to the bad guys, or maybe the package is delivered to the bad guys and Frank Martin then comes back to beat the everloving tar out of them. One of those three.

Also, there's usually a woman involved. Either she is immediately enraptured by Frank Martin's animal magnetism (he's got the Irish mythological figure Diarmuid's love spot or something, seriously) and will have sex with him on or off camera if she doesn't die during the episode, or she is someone else's girlfriend/wife who will have sex with that character on or off camera. Odds are 50/50 you will see her topless, except for Vikings' Katheryn Winnick, who managed to keep all of her clothes on and wear normal clothes (as opposed to the usual form-fitting slinky clothes) for her guest starring episode, and even managed to fight a bit. Lost Girl's Rachel Skarsten apparently did not have as good an agent, and is for her episode both gratuitously naked a bunch and basically a useless Macguffin object of a character.

This is Frank Martin's fixer/computer hacker partner. This particular bikini scene is less gratuitous than the scene where she spills red wine on her blouse and you watch her take the blouse off along with her bra to immediately spot-clean as she talks to Frank on the phone, or the episode where she's naked for a couple scenes because the guy she's having sex with turns out to be tangential to the plot of the episode; the latter being an episode which is otherwise entirely about people with their clothes on driving from Paris to Marseilles.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that this show does not feature women as actual human beings, but as occasionally topless plot points and eye candy. If this is a deal-breaker for you, then you have been forewarned.

"So what," you say, "what about the driving and the fighting, which is what The Transporter is about?"

Let's start with the driving, which is weaker. The driving is awesome on closed courses, such as off-road and in parking garages; the stunt drivers do some pretty amazing things. The show is also willing to crash some real cars in some impressive ways.

However, the show can't afford to shut down the streets of any of the cities (Nice, Marseilles, Berlin, and Toronto) it's set in, so the on-street driving scenes are mostly scenes of cars weaving back and forth jump-cut to stock footage of clutch pedals being depressed and sticks being shifted. It is lame.

Just look at this, then look at a picture of a road, then look back at this, and you'll get the idea of what the city street driving sequences are like.

On the plus side, Chris Vance's Frank Martin doesn't always drive an Audi, but will drive other cars (including a Smart car and an ATV) when necessary.

The fighting? It's pretty great. Lots of clever work with improvised items; for example there's a great fight in a lingerie store where mannequins, clothing racks, and some fabric items are put to great use. Any fight in a kitchen is going to be amazing; my favorite ended with a knockout via cutting board.

To recap what the show is about, Transporter: The Series has Chris Vance in a suit and tie either delivering or not delivering a package via an Audi. Car chase and fisticuff complications ensue, as well as occasional female nudity. If you were ever a 13-year-old boy, this will hit a little fun zone in your brain even if you find it problematic from an "is this good for culture" standpoint. That's why I keep watching.

Netflix I Watched On Paternity Leave: Marvel's Agents of SHIELD, Season 2

I know, I know, I really did a hatchet job on Attack on Titan [sic], even though I tolerated it for about 13-14 episodes more than I did Vexed or Red Data Girl. 

You know what I also watched a lot of while holding a six-pound child? Marvel's Agents of SHIELD, season 2.

To recap for those of you who just picked up this blog today and don't watch any comic book related TV, Marvel's Agents of SHIELD follows the efforts of SHIELD, a sort-of-spy agency tasked with being regular folks who fight supervillans and whatnot. They have invisible planes and spy gadgets.

I watched this show all the way through Season 2 for the following reasons:

1. Clark Gregg.

If you do a Google Image Search for images of Clark Gregg as Phil Coulson, you will get something like 200 pictures basically identical to this one. 

Clark Gregg is just a lot of fun as "responsible dad figure of SHIELD." It's basically the role he was born to play.

2. Patton Oswalt sightings.

Patton Oswalt shows up in Agents of SHIELD about as much, proportionally, as he showed up in the Diablo Cody dark comedy Young Adult. Only in the latter, however, does he have a deeply awkward sex scene with Charlize Theron.

I was really, really hoping that, from the end of Season 1, Patton Oswalt would be a regular on the Agents of SHIELD cast. But he's not. Apparently the Whedons who executive-produce the show don't want to pay him for regular appearances. Which is sad, because he is amazing.

3. Kyle Maclachlan.

Paul Atreides from Dune and Agent Cooper from Twin Peaks is in this season, letting his inner Bruce Campbell free. His plot line is deeply, deeply stupid, but he is so gleefully over-the-top you don't care.

There are no good production stills of Kyle Maclachlan looking as unhinged as he usually does on Agents of SHIELD, so I'll go with this one where he's his usual scruffy. 

To explain what the heck is going on with Kyle Maclachlan's character would basically require a step-by-step spoiling of the whole season, because his character is (sometimes inexplicably) written into every part of it, from the Hydra plotline to the Kree plotline to the Inhumans plotline.

---

...and here's a bulleted, nitpicky list of what I didn't like about Season 2.

• Skye. Weakest link of Season 1, now critical to the plot but even less compelling in Season 2. 
• Not enough Lucy Lawless.
• Not enough Edward James Olmos.
• Not enough of that guy who plays the FBI agent on White Collar. 
• Stop trying to make Fitz and Simmons kiss, writers. She can just be not that into him.
• Not very good Avengers 2 tie-in.
• I was really hoping we were done with Deathlok. 

MOST IMPORTANT: Editors and fight choreographers of Agents of SHIELD -- I can tell when you cut from the actual actor to a body double from behind to do a fight scene, and it is really, really cheap and distracting, since you do it nearly every fight. If your actors suck at fighting, train them better. 

Netflix I Watched On Paternity Leave: Ben Nitpicks Attack on Titan

So, I've been spending some quality early mornings feeding and rocking and otherwise caring for a small person whom I am 50% responsible for. As a result, I've watched a lot of streaming video. Also I am writing this with a baby in my left arm.

First up: Attack on Titan. It's a diverting show, not a complete waste of time, but a bunch of things keep wrecking my suspension of disbelief:

1) The Title. The show's English title is "Attack on Titan" because that's what the Japanese designer wrote in English under the Japanese title, in English only slightly better than my Japanese.

These two lines of text are not the same.

Basically, the way this was translated is if I wrote a manga-style comic called "Revenge of the Otters" and titled it in Japanese "Revenge on Otter." Depending on whom on the Internet you ask, the Japanese literally translates to "advancing giants" or "the giants' attack." Also, in Japanese grammar you don't always have to indicate whether a noun is plural (you can leave it to context), but this is kind of an important thing in English.

And the Japanese version makes a lot of sense, because the story is one of mankind under assault by giant, man-eating, genital-less naked people with varying amounts of skin and/or grotesque physical deformities (for which "titan" is an acceptable homonym). So the titans are attacking. 

But with every opening sequence, I'm smacked with that English title and I say, "translation fail!" Which opens me to be critical of-

2) That's How You Intend To Kill 50-Foot-Tall Monsters?

So, you are being attacked by giant, super-strong, regenerating monsters, and cannon are not ideal weapons against them because you can only kill them if you hit a precise spot on the back of their necks. Let's further add that you have a century to develop an awesome steampunk way to combat these giants.

The obvious development in weapons technology is to arm the traveling cast of Peter Pan with Batman grappling hooks, jetpacks, and mini versions of those utility knife swords from Evangelion, right?

This makes so much more sense than developing man-portable, semiautomatic artillery with high-explosive shells that could be mass-produced for use by minimally-skilled troops.

As you can imagine, when humankind's soldiers fail to be the absolute perfect combination of Spider-Man, Zorro, and Cirque de Soleil, they get eaten. And as this show keeps a plausibly low number of characters with superhero-level talents, casualties are high.

So, every episode, I ask myself, "why aren't you doing something more efficient?"

But this is not what made me say, after episode 15 or so, that I could put this down and watch more episodes of Leverage when bottle-feeding a newborn. That was:

3) Obligatory Magical Teenage Boy.

So, after watching a lot of Lost Boys fail to think enough happy thoughts to avoid getting eaten by titans, the plot decides to give one of the obligatory Overly Moody Teenage Boys magical powers. Of course it goes to the Harry Potter-like one with the impulse control issues.

An aside: this show's Harry Potter has as his potential love interest his sort-of adopted sister (who has the same name as the company that made my wedding china), which is made even weirder because the reason she's sort of his sister is that as pre-tweens they teamed up to kill the slavers who murdered her family and were going to sex traffic her, so she ended up living with his family. In my mind, that's a set of facts that do not lead to a romantic relationship that I am comfortable endorsing.

The powers, sadly, do not go to the show's Ron Weasley.

Sorry, Armin, you're totally the Ron Weasley of this show.

So, basically, now I have to get smacked with bad translation title, cry with frustrated despair at futile wire-work swordplay, and deal with the least deserving, most irritating main character with magical powers, plus at least Ron gets to mack on the brains of their trio. I may finish the season; I'm a little curious what's in Magical Angst Teen's Creepy Unethical Medical Dad's basement, but I'm in no hurry.