"Three Columns for the Price of One!"

Since the guy who uses that phrase rips people off all the time, I don't mind doing it to him. Moving on:


Leave you childhood memories in your childhood: Netflix is awesome. You can find everything short of Second Sight, Madhouse, and porn on there. This was made evident by the appearance of  Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, the show almost every kid in America loved.

Lord Zedd: Looks like the baddest
man on the planet. But he isn't.

Eleven-year-old Flan loved it. Twenty-seven-year-old Flan? Meh. Lord Zedd wasn't as badass as I recalled, I didn't really need to hear the PSA's about how hard work and perseverance pay off and how trees produce oxygen, and it's sickening how all six of those Power Brats won every competition they were in.


The biggest thing? Jason the Red Ranger just bends over and let's Tommy the White Ranger take over leadership of the Power Rangers. I can picture the conversation:


Billy: "Zordon what about Jason?"


Zordon: "Jason has been a fine leader. But for some reason all the children love Tommy and the amount of power it takes to keep my giant head floating in this tube isn't cheap."


Jason: "It's ok guys. Even though I'm a proven leader, saved you more times than I can count, kicked Tommy's ass when he was the Green Ranger, and am a better fighter than all of you combined, we're a team. I believe in you Tommy, even if you are a whiny b**** who can't get to second base with Kimberly."


Trini: "Yeah, we're a team!"


Zack: "And no one member is better than the other!"


Kimberly: "Totally!"


Tommy: "Thanks guys. I'll try not to let my low self-esteem, sexual frustration, multiple missed roundhouse kicks and annoying 'seet-hyuaw' grunts get in the way of leading the team."


Alpha: "Aye-yi-yi-yi-yi!"


On the plus side, Amy Jo Johnson? Waaaaaaaay hotter then I remember.


MMPR wasn't the only show I watched from the good 'ol days. Marvel/Disney dropped the majority of its animated series' on Netflix, among them X-Men and Spider-Man, which are exactly like I remembered: X-Men was great for two and a half seasons before taking a nosedive and Spider-Man told great stories but featured some of the lousiest (and laziest) animation you'll ever see.


Lastly, I watched one episode of the original He-Man and The Masters of the Universe cartoon. Awful. I've moved on to Star Trek: The Next Generation, which is good stuff.


PS3 RIP: A few months ago I made a "deal" with myself where I wouldn't play any video games until my degree was finished. An unhealthy obsession with winning PS3 trophies led to this.


This decision was recently made easier. A couple of weeks ago my Playstation 3 got the Yellow Light of Death with my Watchmen Blu-Ray stuck in it. Got the disc out but when the customer service rep told me it would cost $130 plus shipping and taxes so I told him to screw and said I would get a Samsung (which he agreed with, way to promote the brand buddy) and that's that. So I'm borrowing my parents BD player which they don't use until I graduate or I hit the lottery.


Summer of superhero movies: So I recently watched my fifth (and final?) movie of the summer. I will rank them from worst to first:


5. Captain America: The First Avenger- Good story with good acting from Haley Atwell and Tommy Lee Jones. But something was off with Chris Evans and Hugo Weaving, the beginning should have been the ending and the ending should have been cut altogether, and apparently someone at Marvel thought it was too much to have Nick Fury actually command the Howling Commandos. Not awful, but not great either.


4. X-Men: First Class- Didn't think they could pull off an X-Men film without Wolverine in a major role, but I was pleasantly surprised. The Xavier-Magneto relationship made the movie. It dragged every now and then and I couldn't have cared less about most of the mutants in the film but overall good stuff.


3. Transformers: Dark of the Moon- While this trilogy deserved some of the bashing it's received, particularly regarding the accuracy of the various Transformers personalities, one has to remember two things:


-These are three films about giant robots dragging Earth into a civil war.


-These are Michael Bay films. In both instances your brain is not required.


As far as DOTM goes, it still amazes me that Bay hires a Victoria Secret model for the female lead and people are surprised she can't act. That, and the ending bothered me a bit. The real Megatron wouldn't take s*** from anybody and the real Optimus Prime isn't that big of a p**** that he needs the help of his arch-nemesis to defeat someone.


2. Green Lantern- Almost exactly as I pictured it: A little slow, a lot of aliens, and Mark Strong as Sinestro=fantastic. What I didn't expect was how good Ryan Reynolds would do as Hal Jordan. Great film that was true to the characters. Unfortunately the box office sales have been below average so that might derail any chance of a sequel.


1. Thor: In terms of superhero films, Thor is right behind the Iron Man and the Nolan Batman films. Action, acting, story, faithfulness to source material, it's all there. Everything was great, I have nothing bad to say about this film.


That's it. Out.

The Rise and Fall of Rescue Me

July 13 marks the beginning of the end of one of FX's flagship shows, Rescue Me. If I got to say that five years ago the tone of this post would have been much more positive, but it's not. Rescue Me went from must-see to must-flee and it's all one person's fault.


Flashback to 2002. The FX Network began its rise to prominence with The Shield in 2002. Winner. Then 2003 brought the world Nip/Tuck and some show I'd never heard of until I started writing this post. While not nearly as good as The Shield, Nip/Tuck was good and in this day and age two out of three ain't bad.


Move forward to the summer of 2004, when Leary and Peter Tolan provided FX with another winner in Rescue Me. The drama centered around a group of firefighters dealing with the after-effects of the 9/11 tragedy. Leary's character Tommy Gavin was the lead, dealing with the loss of his cousin and best friend while his family, friends and co-workers dealt with the reality that Tommy was the biggest asshole to walk the face of the earth. Wikipedia said it best when it described Tommy as an "ill-tempered, self-destructive, hypocritical, manipulative, and a relapsed alcoholic."


But the thing is he was a funny ill-tempered, self-destructive, hypocritical, manipulative, relapsed alcoholic. Talking to dead people (including his cousin), encouraging his daughter's lesbian behavior, asking his godson to mess up the bank accounts of the man his estranged wife Janet is seeing, one night stands with a woman he can't remember the name of, sleeping with the aforementioned dead cousin's wife Sheila, brawling with his priest cousin at his mother's funeral, trying to get free psychological advice from a doctor he was building a porch for, the list goes on and on. And that was only the first season.


The second season showed everyone the only thing funnier than a drunk Tommy Gavin is a sober Tommy Gavin. Tommy retained most of his lesser qualities but got it together long enough to give his wife a second chance and rebuild their family and, more importantly, kept his sobriety throughout. The hilarity of seeing Tommy talk to Jesus and Mary Magdalene, telling off a racial sensitivity teacher and arguing with his brother Johnny over who gets to date their alleged half-sister was all washed away with the death of Tommy's only son, by ironically, a drunk driver. This was the best season of the series and quite frankly Leary was robbed of an Emmy.


Season three saw Tommy caught between his wife Janet and brother Johnny, who had begun a relationship and conceived a child, which led to a "rape" incident and ultimately broke Tommy's sobriety. I doubt fans will forget the brutal beating Tommy gave his brother (at their father's birthday party, typical Gavin behavior) when he found out about the affair with Janet. Nor will they forget Johnny's apologetic voicemail, which came hours before he was murdered by a street thug. The season ended with Sheila unable to convince Tommy to leave the fire department behind, which led to her drugging him and accidentally burning down her new beach house with Tommy still inside.

And since hindsight's always 20/20, that's where he should have stayed. Let me sum up the last three seasons:

• Janet gives birth to a boy but has no clue if Tommy or Johnny is the father
• Chief Reilly blows his brains out, is replaced by a Jew with an extremely large penis
• The drunks in the Gavin family decide to hold their own AA meetings, fail miserably
• Tommy and Sheila try to have a sexual relationship, fail miserably
• Tommy and Janet try to patch things up, fail miserably
• Tommy starts running around on the night shift wearing his cousin's old fire jacket
• The drunks in the Gavin family decide to hold their own AA meetings again, fail miserably
• Tommy and Sheila try to have a sexual relationship again, fail miserably
• Tommy and Janet try to patch things up again, fail miserably
• Janet and Sheila sabotage Tommy's relationship with a woman similar to him
• Uncle Teddy shoots Tommy
• Tommy's oldest daughter becomes a destructive drunk like him
• The drunks in the Gavin family say to hell with each other
• Tommy and Sheila try to have a sexual relationship yet again, fail miserably
• Tommy and Janet try to patch things up yet again, fail miserably. See a pattern?

The only two highlights come from Season Five, where Tommy and Janet make fools of themselves during a trip to their younger daughter's private school and the episodes where Michael J. Fox returned to television as a drug-addicted, alcoholic cripple. A hilarious, drug-addicted, alcoholic cripple. Quite frankly with writing this bad I'm surprised the show's still on the air.

So what happened? The answer's pretty simple:


Denis Leary. Peter Tolan is probably to blame as well, but I'm sticking with Leary.


There's two ways to cast your show. The first way is to create an ensemble cast that's so good when one or two have an off day other's can pick up the slack. It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Grey's Anatomy, Arrested Development and The Wire are good examples of this.


The other way is to have a lead actor so good the rest of the cast can suck and no one will notice, much like 24, The Office and House (all due respect to Dennis Haysbert, Rainn Wilson and Lisa Edelstein).


Leary and Rescue Me fall into the latter category. As Leary went, so did Rescue Me. With the exception of Jack McGee (Chief Reilly), Dean Winters (Johnny Gavin), and John Scurti (Lou), the rest of the main cast was incredibly inconsistent and when Reilly and Johnny were killed off this was more apparent. The phenomenal guest stars over the years (including but not limited to the aforementioned Fox, Susan Sarandon, Marisa Tomei, Robert John Burke, Lee Tergesen, and Peter Gallagher) covered for some of this, but bad acting is still bad acting. I doubt any of them have improved their skills for this final season.


While Leary isn't the best actor in the world, he fits the d-bag role pretty well, which, in case you haven't been reading, is exactly what Tommy Gavin is. Either he jumped the shark and won't admit it or he just doesn't give a s*** anymore. And if you don't believe me read his piece of trash book Why We Suck (I'm sure the followup was equally terrible), watch his piece of trash appearance on the O'Reilly Factor or watch his piece of trash stand-up Douchebags and Donuts on Netflix. The only one of these I finished was the BillO appearance, only because it was a five minute interview. In any event Leary carried the show for a long time. He is Rescue Me, and his decline has coincided with the show's decline.


Why am I still watching Rescue Me? Why is anyone still watching Rescue Me? No clue. Loyalty to Leary, boredom, routine, who knows. Thankfully, the end is near and the end starts Wednesday.


But the end should have come much sooner. Or better yet, Leary shouldn't have gotten so damn lazy with his television show that he had to constantly regurgitate the same three storylines again and again and again. I'm sure the fact that this season finishes four days before the tenth anniversary of 9/11 means we'll see some fresh stories over these final nine episodes.


Yeah, right. Out.