Problem: OPTIONS:
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Answer: My rating refers to the first 4 Seasons of Stargate SG-1 which are wonderfully fresh, creative and addicting. When the cast stepped through the gate, you never knew what lay on the other side! Starting around Season 5, the show took a different focus - still good, but different.

The series follows the adventures of a team of humans (and one alien) who regularly venture into a planetary transport device called the "Stargate". The backstory of the series is based on the characters and events of the movie "Stargate" in which the device is discovered during an archaeological dig in Egypt.

The episodes are light (innocent and easy to watch) and very creative. Many of the inventive stories could easily have been made into great sci-fi movies of their own. What happens next was always unpredictable.

The characters on which the show rests are also well-defined and brilliantly performed. Their tone is serious, but the dialog is flowered with incredible wit and humor. They are simply fun to watch.

Starting somewhere around Season 5, the series started to evolve into a continuing storyline based on fighting a single foe (the Goa'uld, then the Ori). The plots become more complex (a lot more political/strategic oriented) and interdependent. The characters were still as great as ever but the show was different in nature.

One thing that must be mentioned is to watch the episodes that commemorated the 100th and 200th episodes. They are simply can't-miss shows. They exhibit the creative and wildly humorous genius that carried the series through 10 seasons.

If you are a sci-fi fan, watch a few episodes of the first 4 Seasons and you'll likely be hooked. If you like evolving story lines between two opposing sides, you have 10 seasons of shows to look forward to.

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Answer: Shiner, directed by Christian Calson, centers around three "couples" and their relationships with obsession and violence. Pretty good start as far as I'm concerned. Interesting. The couples break down into a heterosexual couple, two heterosexual male friends and a straight guy being "harmlessly" stalked by a gay man.

The "het" couple really don't have much of a role in the film. There are some scenes that show how they like to be aggressive when having sex or playing around with each other, but seem to have no real purpose since the are so marginalized. My assumption is that they represent a more day to day illustration of how sex/violence are integrated in a couples life. The couple aren't very aggressive and it's not even shot in any kind of erotic way. As characters, they don't add much to the theme or plot.

The two male friends make up the bulk of the plot. They engage in some gay bashing of sorts by convincing a homosexual man to have sex with them in an alley. This escalates into violence. And the violence changes them. It becomes a means of sexual gratification. And their need for violence t release grows as the film progresses. The main problem I had is the violence is not convincing. Never once does it seem that any of the characters is in any real danger. It just doesn't work. Given that the whole theme of the film is about the characters' relationships with violence, this is a major problem. Unfortunately, the make-up doesn't help either. Sometimes, it's okay, other times it is very bad. In one scene, I really wondered why one of the characters had rouge smeared on his face. Confusing.

The more interesting pair of the characters is the "stalker couple." Here Calson seemed to have more to say and was able to develop a more coherent storyline. Perhaps it is because the characters seem to develop more and have resolution at the end. Shiner may well have been much better if it had stuck with these two.

I appreciate that Calson wanted to achieve a lot with this film. It is admirable. Most low budget flicks don't aspire to much. I don't think Calson achieved want he was aiming for. Myself, I found nothing particularly controversial or unsettling. Shiner was unconvincing. This doesn't mean, however, that the director can't achieve something with his next film.

He seems to have something to say.

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Answer:
There's been a vogue for the past few years for often-as-not ironic zombie-related films, as well as other media incarnations of the flesh- eating resurrected dead. "Fido" is a film that's either an attempt to cash in on that, simply a manifestation of it, or both -- and it falls squarely into the category of ironic zombies. The joke here is that we get to see the walking dead in the contrasting context of a broadly stereotyped, squeaky-clean, alternate-history (we are in the wake of a great Zombie War, and the creatures are now being domesticated as slaves) version of a 1950s suburb.

It's a moderately funny concept on its own, and enough perhaps for a five-minute comedy sketch, but it can't hold up a feature-film on its own. The joke that rotting corpses for servants are incongruous with this idealized version of a small town is repeated over and over again, and loses all effectiveness. The soundtrack relentlessly plays sunny tunes while zombies cannibalize bystanders. The word "zombie" is constantly inserted into an otherwise familiarly homey line for a cheap attempt at a laugh.

The very broadness and artificiality of the representation of "the nineteen fifties" here can't help but irritate me. It is so stylized, in it evidently "Pleasantville-"inspired way, that it is more apparent in waving markers of its 1950s-ness around than actually bearing any resemblance to anything that might have happened between 1950 and 1959. There is something obnoxiously sneering about it, as if the film is bragging emptily and thoughtlessly about how more open, down-to-Earth, and superior the 2000s are.

Because the characters are such broad representations of pop-culture 1950s "types," it's difficult to develop much emotional investment in them. Each has a few character traits thrown at him or her -- Helen is obsessed with appearances, and Bill loves golf and his haunted by having had to kill his father -- but they remain quite two-dimensional. Performances within the constraints of this bad writing are fine. The best is Billy Connolly as Fido the zombie, who in the tradition of Boris Karloff in "Frankenstein" actually imparts character and sympathy to a lumbering green monster who cannot speak.

There are little bits of unsubtle allegory thrown around -- to commodity fetishism, racism, classism, war paranoia, et cetera, but none of it really works on a comprehensive level, and the filmmakers don;t really stick with anything.

Unfortunately, this film doesn't really get past sticking with the flimsy joke of "Look! Zombies in 'Leave it to Beaver!'" for a good hour- and-a-half.