My Super Sweet 16 is a show on MTV that Corina likes to watch from time to time. Now this is a show that just boggles my mind at times. The premise of the show follows spoiled teens as they plan and celebrate their over the top sixteenth birthdays. It would be pretty much classified as trainwreck television. With most television you sit down and are entertained by humour, drama, suspense, mystery etc. I find this show doesn’t really use any of these mechanics to drive the plot forward.

What I find odd about My Super Sweet 16 is that it doesn’t really illicit the same emotions you might experience when watching other programs. I find myself feeling more angry then anything else when watching it. You can’t help but feel jealous of the life these kids lead. They were all pretty much born into a life of privilege and wealth, and now they have a half hour TV show to showcase their spoiled existence and overinflated egos. The episode Corina watched tonight featured a girl who threw a fit when her parents bought her a new Lexus and gave it to her on her birthday instead of waiting to give it to her on the day of her party, where all the party goers could see her get her massively expensive gift and rub their noses in it. She threw a fit, yelling that she hated her parents and that she was going to cancel her party because it had been ruined by getting the car early.

I find the show is wholly unfulfilling on an entertainment level. While I know most people like watching shows like this just for the faux disasters that happen along the way. The part that really makes the whole experience empty is the fact you know that the teenager featured in the episode won’t have learned anything. If this were a sitcom or movie the spoiled brat would get some satisfying comeuppance by the time the show finished. That just doesn’t happen on this show. Spoiled teen cries and wails until they get their own way. They abuse their parents and many others until they finally get the grandiose party they have envisioned for themselves. At the end of the episode nobody will come up and slap them upside the head like they so richly deserve. No life lessons will have been learned. They will still be the spoiled brat they started the episode as and will now have a Lexus to show for all the abuse they put the rest of the world through. Sure, this may smack of sour grapes on my part, but it really just goes to prove that life isn’t fair sometimes.

I’ve been meaning to mention these guys for awhile now since I first saw mention of them on Neiles Life a couple of weeks ago. I’ve been absolutely obsessed with The Flight Of The Conchords lately. It is a new show on HBO (The Movie Network in Canada), and also the namesake of the band featured in the show. They are a comedic 2 piece from New Zealand that has been doing their act for a few years now and have finally broken through to a wider audience. If I were to articulate the show, it’s kinda like as if Tenacious D were a folk band, mixed with the dry, deadpan humour of ‘The Office’. The show’s plot follows the lives of Bret and Jermaine, as they try to make a name for themselves as a band in New York City. The show weaves in about 2-3 of the bands songs into each episode, varying from The Humans Are Dead, Business Time and Hip-Hopopotamus vs Rhymenocerous.

I was just poking through the HBO site and noticed they have all sorts of cool stuff on there, including a podcast(which I’m going to be checking out), desktop background and a video blog by FOTC’s #1 fan Mel.

Flight Of The Conchords – Episode 1 [Free from the iTunes Store]

As I’m sure everyone is aware of, The Simpsons Movie is opening in wide release today. The marketing machine has been hard at work, turning 7-11s into Kwik-E-Marts, commercials since around the Super Bowl and running a contest to determine which of the 14 Springfields in the US would stand in for the fictional TV town for its movie premiere. Even the Booze Mail application on Facebook allows you to send Squishees and Duff Beer to your friends. They definitely did a great job of creating awareness for the launch of the movie.

Though something strange happened during this whole process. In seeing all this stuff going on I realized something about their promotional efforts. It was making me feel nostalgic about The Simpsons. Now if I were to guess on this, I’m doubting that was the reaction they were wanting to elicit with their marketing campaign. The Simpsons is still on and is going into season 19 in the fall, but in reality, who’s still watching this show? I know its probably been 5 seasons since I made a concerted effort to be home on a Sunday night at 8pm to catch a new episode. I know many of my friends are the same way. Almost everyone I know used to make The Simpsons a can’t miss during their weeks. You wouldn’t want to be caught out on some great line from the show the next time you see your friends. The days of quoting The Simpsons are pretty much over. It has come to the point that it is now uncouth to be caught uttering re-hashed Simpsons lines. And the reason for this is because the only stuff worth quoting is pretty much from the first 8 seasons of the show, when it was actually funny.

So to get nostalgic about the show seems only fitting when it pretty much jumped the shark a decade ago. I would say probably around seasons 12-13 the laughs were so few and far between that it was hardly worth watching anymore. I think everyone yearns for the days when an episode had more of a sub-text then the writers scripting a way for the Simpson family to encounter a random celebrity and for Homer to have a crazy new day job. We can only hope the movie will rise above the recent standard the show has managed.

Finally there are some decent videos on YouTube for Telefrancais. As with my previous posts on the topic, I aim to keep my readers up up to date on all sightings of talking pineapples on the interwebs. This video shows the first episode of Telefrancais, with the introduction to Jaques and Ananas, the theme song and a rock out performance by Les Squelettes.

I ran across this on YouTube and it definitely brought up some fond memories for me. If you were a Canadian kid growing up in the 80′s this theme is pretty much ingrained into your brain. The show followed the adventures of London, a German Sheppard who roams the Canadian countryside, solving crimes, riding the rails, driving trucks and generally helping people out. Then at the end of every episode he would mosey his way out of town to find his next adventure. As you could imagine, a show with a premise like this was clearly awesome. The dogs that were involved in the show apparently knew over 1000 different commands. Makes me wish I knew where to watch the show in syndication.

I have one those guilty little pleasures going on right now. It’s name is Mark Burnett’s Pirate Master. As much as I thought the whole concept was stupid when I initially heard about the show, I gave it a chance a couple weeks ago and it managed to lure me in.

The whole premise of the show is pretty convoluted, but the more I watch it, the more I like it. It starts with 16 would be pirates on a ship. There is an elected captain picked out of the crew(which since I didn’t watch the first episode I don’t know how that happened at first), then the Captain picks 2 officers. There are Survivor style challenges, where the crew is divided into 2 randomly selected teams and they go in search of treasure. The black team is always the Captain’s team comprised of himself, the officers and a few crew members, while the red team is always comprised of the rest of the crew. If the black team wins, the Captain stays in place, if the red team wins they elect a new Captain from among the teams ranks. They then divide up the treasure, half is entitled to the Captain, then the rest of the gold is split among the winning team. The Captain and officers then decide which three crew members will be given “the black spot”, which puts them in a position to be cut adrift from the boat.

I find that where the intrigue of the show comes from, the fact the players have money. So far there has been the use of bribes. This week they introduced a pardon letter, which allows players who think they might be in peril of being voted off to bid for the letter. Then when it comes time and the votes have been cast the host of the show reveals who the highest bidder is, so it adds a little bit of intrigue to the proceedings. Players having currency in the game definitely amps up the show in ways other reality shows can’t, mainly because players can pretty much make their own luck if their willing to spend some money.

This week was the first week where the intrigue and twists of the show really shone through. My favourite member of the crew so far is Joe Don. He was the ships first Captain and has played the game pretty shrewdly so far. He made a fair amount of money during his 3 episodes as Captain, which really pissed off a couple of crewmen, mainly Louie. Louie is pretty much a carbon copy of Rupert from Survivor. He seems to be the only one on the show that I suspect actually thinks he’s a pirate, either that or he’s Hacksaw Jim Duggan’s brother. Overall he’s the type of character that most of the viewing audience will love his bearded curmudgeon style. Personally I really dislike him and enjoyed seeing him getting a little bit of comeuppance in tonight’s episode. He got voted into the position of Captain after his team won the challenge and immediately set his sights on taking down Joe Don. When it came down to justifying why he decided to black spot who he did he made a point of saying that he put up crew-member Cheryl because of her association with Joe Don, then mentioned why he harbored so much resentment towards him was because of the fact he had taken more then Louie’s perceived “fair share” of gold while he was Captain. The host of the show called him out on this, as the Pirate’s code entitles the Captain to half of any treasure the crew finds. Louie’s gambit failed as well, as not only did Joe Don buy the pardon letter to save himself, but he didn’t even receive enough votes to be voted off, which kinda showed the crew wasn’t entirely with him on the whole vendetta against J.D.

If you like Survivor you’d probably enjoy this show, and I think given the added intrigue and leverage that money brings to the game it definitely makes for some half decent summer television. And since the guilty pleasure that was “Rockstar: Insert Band Name Here” isn’t back for a third summer run I guess it will have to do.

Robot Chicken recently did an entirely Star Wars themed episode, so here it is, broken into 3 parts.

Star Wars and I haven’t been on good terms for a long while. Since seeing Revenge Of The Sith in theatres and my scathing review of the movie I’ve been pretty much out of the Star Wars loop. I begrudgingly bought Revenge Of The SIth on DVD, mainly because I needed to complete the set. Well after seeing this trailer for the upcoming Clone Wars CGI series, I can definitely say it gave me that old feeling again. I’m genuinely looking forward to seeing this. I think that as long as George Lucas doesn’t do any of the writing it has potential to be very good, much like the previous Clone Wars animated series.

Yesterday’s finale of LOST was pretty awesome. Here’s a top 10 list of the best moments. Though myself I found the finale a little bittersweet. It was a decent finale, though really all it did was usher in a new era of exceptionally long waits between seasons. Waiting until January is going to be balls.

A Tribute to sad White Man Beards, as inspired by Jack Sheppard

Speaking of waiting, I have to say I’m quite pissed that the Stanley Cup final doesn’t start until Monday. Monday! Ottawa took care of business last Saturday afternoon and they have to wait 9 entire days to pick up the next series. The NHL has to do something about this scheduling for next year. Allowing the home team to pick and choose when their next series should start is ridiculous. Makes me wish Ottawa had nabbed a few more points this season so they would have had home ice advantage. They probably would have been playing game one tonight. I find the hockey season is long enough, dragging it well into June just makes no sense.

Apparently since the show was canned there has been a huge groundswell of support for the show, with letters, petitions and lots of nuts being sent to CBS in tribute to one of the shows recent storylines. Many people are not happy that the show was left entirely unresolved after a cliffhanger season finale. The online petition already has over 65,000 signatures. So far CBS has responded saying that they are looking into ways to provide resolution to the series. Personally I hope they bring it back for another season. The show itself was frequently up against tough competition in the form of American Idol, and managed to hold its own in the ratings. Hopefully CBS reconsiders their choice to cancel the show especially since if they intend on selling a DVD boxed set for the show it’ll be a pretty tough sell at this point.