Star Trek: The Next Generation - Season 7

Well here we are, at the end of the road. I still have the movies to watch (people have told me not to, but that was half the point of doing this), but I have finished watching The Next Generation. The final season wasn't the greatest, but it had a few good episodes, including the finale, which was pretty fantastic. It ties back in to the very first episode and has Picard saving humanity across three different timelines. A suitable conclusion to a show that made some missteps but ultimately provided a heck of a lot of solid science fiction. There was some weird stuff going on in this go around, I have to say. Deanna and Worf? Really? Among all possible pairings, that one seems especially unlikely. And Wesley deciding Starfleet isn't for him after all, when he spent the entire series aspiring to do great there? Well if you insist. And really... there weren't too many good episodes beyond the finale. I liked the one where Worf keeps shifting between parallel universes. And the one with Data's nightmares was an interesting exploration of that topic. But yeah, the first time the show definitely stepped down in quality since it reached its plateau years earlier. I'd say something about the characters if there weren't four films to send them off with. I guess the question is whether seeing these 178 episodes was worth it, and I can't say I regret much of it.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars - Season 2

I have to admit this show's come a long way since the execrable movie that kicked it off. It's still not great, and rarely even better than decent, but at least it's not plain bad anymore. They've found some sort of groove and realized what sorts of stories will work for both kids who like shiny lightsabers and grown up dorks like me. There's less goofy crap and more simple yet respectable stories and homages to classic movies from all sorts of genres and periods in cinema. The main characters aren't as annoying, they've been introducing villains that pose an actual threat, and in some cases, like the stellar second half of the season finale, they actually pull off something pretty darn cool.

Not that I didn't have things to complain about. Because the show is kid friendly, not every plot handles some of the dumbed down elements as well as the others. Just things like the sort of logical holes in alien cultures that would never allow them to survive long enough for the Jedi to meet them, and isn't justified as well as other similar science fiction shows because the main audience doesn't care enough to think about it. And when some leaders make bad decisions and miss obvious information, it's easy to wonder how the republic lasted this long before Palpatine took it over. Not that he's immune from some terrible ideas of his own. Also, it's hard to root for the good guys when they spend so much time protecting him. Just screw up and let him die, idiots! You'll save the whole Jedi order! For now I'm going to keep watching though, to see if the upward trend in quality continues, especially since there's a very sad dearth of competent genre television right now.

Drunken Master

I saw this movie's sequel (which would actually be closer to a reboot if they used that term in the 90s) years ago, and liked it quite a bit. Definitely my favorite of Jackie Chan's movies, simply because it was packed with so many quality fights, and the drunken fighting styles are so entertaining. I was hopeful the original could be as entertaining, but unfortunately there were a number of factors that prevented that.

I will say that I didn't dislike the movie, I just had a lot of issues with it. There were a few good fights throughout, but there was almost too much action, and the movie is really too long. With as little story as there is, there's no need for a nearly two hour running time. You can't go five minutes without some sort of action, and while a lot of it is well choreographed, there are plenty of bland moments that are just padding the length. And the movie's greatest sin is the lack of actual drunken mastery happening. A large part of the movie is Jackie being trained, and the way he's taught the fundamentals of drunken boxing without even realizing it are pretty clever and entertaining. But the actual drunken aspect of it doesn't get introduced until the movie is more than two thirds over, in the last half hour or so. It's really disappointing when a movie is called Drunken Master and only has two real fights using those techniques. It would be like remaking The Karate Kid and having him learn kung fu instead. Oh wait.

Another problem with the movie is that it's just hard to like Jackie's character. There's a certain roguish charm to some of his boorish antics, but mostly he just comes off as a huge, arrogant jerk that I have a hard time sympathizing with. He only starts being respectful after the villain kicks his ass and rubs his nose in the dirt, which I can't deny getting a bit of enjoyment out of. Still, this was Jackie at the peak of his physical ability, and watching him fight at his best can be pretty exciting. Not a great film, but the production is surprisingly solid for a 70s martial arts movie, and it's certainly enjoyable enough for fans of the genre.

MC Chris - MC Chris Goes to Hell

Your ability to enjoy MC Chris Goes to Hell depends on two things besides whether you like MC Chris. The first is whether you already heard the "Part Six" EPs that led up to this album's release, and if you have, the second is whether you appreciate remixes as a way of releasing music. The album comes with 15 tracks, two of which are skits, four of which are new songs, and the rest of which are remixed versions of tracks from the EPs. Chris did a good job of selecting the best songs to keep, and as far as keeping things fresh I can't say I was really displeased with the job they did. A few of the tracks are hardly distinguishable from their original versions, which makes you wonder what the point was, but of the ones that are noticeably different, I felt evenly split on ones that were improved with the new production and ones that definitely weren't. I will never like what they did to "Awesome Fucker", but the new twist on "Neville" is fun and fits the content better. It goes back and forth like this for a lot of the album, and for the most part it's hard to be disappointed. Some songs even have new lyrical content to go with the new version, although most of it didn't thrill me. The two skits aren't amazing but still pretty solidly hilarious, with the first being yet another meeting between Chris and his manager and the second a (real?) preview for his next album, making it sound like an action movie featuring every movie trailer cliché ever. It's all not quite what I've come to expect from a full album by Chris, but it's still pretty fun to listen to.