Some Stuff on Hulu

Here's a two excellent things available to watch on Hulu Plus:

Journeyman was a casualty of the writers' strike, but it's worth giving it a shot.  It's about a newspaperman (that guy from Rome) set adrift in time, solving mysteries and righting wrongs.  In many ways, its very similar to Quantum Leap, but with much more of an ongoing story-arc.  Also, unlike Quantum Leap, there's a lot of "love triangle" plot (I'm not sure if that's good or not).  This show is well written, and the acting is good, but its nothing extraordinary.  B+ if you like sci-fi.  Probably only B- if you don't.

Fact is, NOVA is awesome.  If I need to tell you about NOVA, you're not the sort of person who would like it.  There are almost 50 episodes of NOVA available on Hulu.  I haven't seen all of them, but I particularly recommend Becoming Human, Mind Over Money, and Hunting the Hidden Dimension.  You can also watch several episodes on PBS.

The Colony

So, faithful readers know that I have an embarrassing prediction for post-apocalypse fiction.  Recently, I ran across a post-apocalypse "reality" TV show called The Colony.  About 10 people are stranded in an abandoned urban-blight warehouse/industrial compound and have to forge a new life.  There's no "game show" aspect to it.

The first season is made awesome by the presence of not 1, but TWO mad scientists. The first is a gray bushy-haired computer engineer named John.  Not too much of a spoiler:  at one point he builds a bad-ass fire-thrower.  The second mad scientist is even more awesome:  his name is Vlad.  He's a Croatian mechanical engineer, who's quite the woods-man.  He escaped from Communist Croatia when he was a teenager. Bonus: a second middle aged Croatian, a grumpy green contractor named Michael.

The show isn't intended (I hope) to be a "real" post-apocalypse scenario.  It's more like Mythbusters crossed with The Real World.  It's good fun, and has lots of awesome engineering porn.  (How to make wood gas, how to build a solar array, etc)

The second season, peopled primarily by attractive young people, is not nearly as good.  I stopped watching after the fourth episode of season 2. B+ for season 1, C for the first part of season 2.

Brother Born Again

Brother Born Again is a documentary by a late thirties lesbian Jewish woman.  Her younger brother, about 10 years ago, ran away from their family and its complicated New-York/Jewish/intellectual drama, and joined a fundamentalist Christian community in remote Alaska.  Although they've been estranged for a long time, she sets off to visit him, and try to, if not reconcile things, at least try to understand.  Because my own younger brother escaped our family to move to Europe (although we're not exactly estranged, we're not tight the way we used to be), the movie was particularly touching for me.  It's a sweet, fair look at a man who just couldn't handle the world, and fell into religion as a crutch.  B+

8: The Mormon Propostion

This documentary came highly recommended, but I was somewhat disappointed.  It was really biased and one sided, but not in a fun "preaching to the choir" way like a Michael Moore movie.  This documentary doesn't have the faith but won't have the fun.  It was dull and poorly organized.  It was just poorly made propaganda (don't get me wrong, I agree with its propaganda), and it's not really worth watching.  For all that, it's not actively bad...just forgettable.  C+

Into Eternity

I just saw this amazing documentary. It's not yet available on Netflix, but you can watch it on YouTube. It's about building an underground repository for nuclear waste in Finland, but it's really about the philosophical implications of trying to make something that will last 100,000 years (that's more than 5 times longer than the cave paintings at Lascaux; 20 times as long as the pyramids at Giza). It's haunting and beautiful, and everyone has these Finnish accents, which makes it seem extra ethereal. Highly recommended. A+