Disappointments
This just in; Ian Thorpe has retired from swimming, at 24 years of age. I’m sure he’ll get murdered in the press — they’ll call him lazy, pathetic, a disappointment. But I for one know that if I could have retired last year I would have. The daily grind is getting to me. My 3-day weeks are wearing me down. The pressure of updating a website on a semi-regular basis. All the television I’m forced to watch.
Like Thorpie, Torchwood is also failing to live up to expectations. I’ve fallen behind on reviews mostly due to rehearsals for the Revue that happened on the weekend, but also because they’re not that exciting. I don’t enjoy writing negative reviews much, and I’ve got at least two that I need to do to catch up. It’s not the worst show ever, but it suffers from a strong case of “what the hell are we trying to do?”
And even though it looks from the outside like an ensemble show, it’s miserably failing on such things, partly because it keeps insisting on only having one plotline to sustain you for 50 minutes of runtime. This sort of thing works in Doctor Who, partly because you’ve only got two regular characters, and more because the adventure genre’s really good at stringing excitements together in a row. Putting five cast members together running through the same plot just gets dull. Let’s have multiple cases in an episode please. Or something.
At least some of the characters talked to each other this week. That was nice.
Putting on the Revue was something of a disappointment too — not that anything was wrong with it, particularly, but the fun of putting on a musical, putting all the songs and scenes together and getting something bigger and cooler as a result is completely missing from stringing a bunch of unrelated songs together. Of course, there was a lot less effort involved, too, but I’m left feeling like I paid half price for something a quarter as good.
Everyone online is talking about how good the new James Bond flick Casino Royale is, but it’s not out here for another two weeks. You’d think I’d be used to this sort of crap, but I’ve grown accustomed to getting everything at the same time as everyone else in recent years, for one reason or another.
Not everything’s disappointing. Battlestar Galactica continues to rock. There’s a Christmas special of Doctor Who around the corner. The next Harry Potter film looks like it might be better in film-form than in book-form.
Retiring at 24. Jealousy just doesn’t cover it.