The Finder stars Geoff Stults (of 7th Heaven, October Road and Happy Town – none of which I’ve ever watched), Michael Clark Duncan (The Green Mile) and Mercedes Masöhn (who?).

Stults plays Walter Sherman, a war vet with some form of trauma that makes him able to find anyone and anything. And he won’t stop. He’s good at what he does. At least in the third act, before that he makes several wrong turns. His sidekick Leo and a US Marshall round out the team. Oh, and the little girl the courts assigned to him. What?

Apparently almost nobody watched this show, and most of them didn’t like it. I’ll go out on a limb and say I find it quirky & interesting. Fox introduced this during Bones last year to try to draw the audience, which is why I watched it.

I hope it lasts. It has a Burn Notice type feel (filmed in Florida) visually (but softer) and a nice attempt at an ensemble.

Good luck!

So, last night I watched Sharktopus.

Nope. No questions. That was the rule.

I think Eric Roberts just wanted a Mexican vacation. That’s the only reason he would have made this movie, right?

Let’s remember that this is a Roger Corman movie. Yes. Roger Freakin’ Corman. King of the horrible movie.

This thing was horrible from the start. Corman seems to think that it takes 5 minutes of postcard video to establish a location, which is bad enough.

His beaches are full of women. No men. Just women, as if he shot the whole thing on the Island of Lesbos.

The writing was terrible. Or perhaps that was the fault of the “actors” who spoke them. They were just as terrible. The whole thing reminds me of a student film with an FX budget.

The effects reminded me of SeaQuest DSV in the beginning. Which was forgivable in 1993, less so in 2010.

The story was weak, the editing and photography would make the Razzy Awards cringe & look away. The director’s credits for directing and writing read like a what’s what of bad movies for the SyFy channel.

Actually now that I’m 25 minutes in, the FX aren’t too bad at times. Sharktopus just jumped out of the ocean and ate a bungie jumper! Nicely done.

Seriously, do yourself a favor and RUN if anyone suggests this movie.

Now that we’ve had the premiere’s, what’s the score on what we watched?

Now Showing:

Person of Interest (Jim Caviezel & Michael Emmerson) – Interesting premise, great characters, JJ Abrams involved, hard to go wrong.

Unforgettable (Poppy Montgomery & Dylan Walsh) – Interesting premise, hate Poppy’s accent. Overall, forgettable.

Glee (Ensemble) – I’ll keep watching, but they need to do something interesting & original.

Castle (Nathan Fillion & Stana Katic) – Continuously worth watching. Engaging characters etc. The tension helps diffuse the humor.

The Mentalist (Simon Baker & Robin Tunney) – They kinda blew up all the characters at the end of the season, and yet nothing stuck. Baker’s a delight to watch, but the Red John storyline needs to either end or get demoted.

Fringe (Joshua Jackson & Anna Torv) – This season will be subtitled “Where’s Peter?” and only astute viewers will spot him behind Walter at various moments. And what’s up with the Observers?

The Big Bang Theory (Jim Parsons & Johnny Galecki) – After sleeping with Penny, Raj comes out of the closet. Sheldon & Amy have a baby and Leonard moves to India. Bazinga. Just watch the show.

How I Met Your Mother (Ensemble) – the story drags on, and on, and on. But it’s funny enough to keep watching. Still no answer to the “Why does Ted grow up to be Bob Saget?” mystery.

Coming Soon:

Happy Endings (Ensemble) – Best new comedy of last season is back this week. Watch this show if you thought Friends was cool at one point, but sucked later. Or if you hated Friends (like me).

Terra Nova (Jason O’Mara) – Earth 2, with more dinos, less aliens, and no Clancy Brown. Sounds good.

House (Hugh Laurie & ?) – Cuddy’s gone, House is in jail. Now what?

Chris made a list of things we watch, but I can’t find it. For now this will do.

Overall, the 2012 season is starting with a lot of promise. Let’s hope it can sustain that.

We’re good gays. We celebrated Sunday with home-made brunch and Glee. It was fab!

Ok, I won’t do that again.

But seriously, Glee was – meh.

So here’s what you missed on Glee.

Sam’s dad got a job offer and they’ve moved out of state, which affected Mercedes so much she want from dating the puny white boy to dating a giant black guy.

Sue is running for Congress on a platform of banning all arts education in the district, just to get back at Will.

Santana is co-captaining the Cheerios with Becky and they hate each other. Sue made them light a piano on fire and Santana was dismissed from New Directions.

Will is living with Emma, who packs his lunch into a Superman lunchbox every morning. He packs hers too but I missed the logo. They haven’t had sex yet, and Will is horny. There, I said it.

Quinn has gone all Madonna in VisionQuest or something and is hanging out with The Skanks. A group of girls who’s self-image is as bad as their hygiene apparently. “Quinn, your friend smells like soap, make her go away.”

Blaine has moved to McKinley to be with Kurt, who recently had his and Rachel’s dream of moving to New York dashed twice in one week. Once when they found out Julliard didn’t have a musical theatre program, and next when they went to a meeting for a local college and found out they suck in comparison. Oops.

And that’s what you missed on Glee.

Yawn.

Oh – the highlight was Blaine doing “It’s not unusual” – he was great, despite the clothes.

http://vimeo.com/29445709

The Avengers movie has been hinted at as a teaser at the end of Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2 and now Captain America – The First Avenger and has fanboys everywhere washing their bedsheets regularly. (Think about it for a minute, you’ll get it)

So, back to the point at hand. Captain American. Tiny stick of a boy, Steve Rogers, desperately wants to serve his country, but has everything wrong with him, except polio I think. But his tenacity catches the eye of a defected German scientist working for the US government on a Super Soldier program, having failed back in Germany.

Steve get’s injected, turns into the hunky Chris Evans and goes on to win the war for the US. Or close.

I saw a preview a while back that made me think of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, which was pretty crappy and didn’t give me much hope for Cap’s movie. But thank god I was wrong.

Except for the rah-rah-USA number in the middle, which made it’s point about 30 times more than needed, the movie holds together pretty well. The FX were good, the story got you cheering for Cap etc. and the bookends of his discovery in the ice make a nice tie-in for The Avengers.

Chris gave it a 7.5 and I gave it a 7. It’s a comic book movie, but the anachronisms are a bit much. I know the tree of power cube, or the Energon or whatever is key, and comes back again in The Avengers, but do we really believe that in the 1940′s the German’s had this (or anyone) and didn’t manage to disintegrate everyone? Really?

Anyway, as a lead in to The Avengers, this is a pretty decent movie. As a popcorn movie, it succeeds as well. So if you’re looking for somewhere cool to hide from the heat and have some fun, then this is a good choice.

Hoarding Example - This is not our house!

I’ve mentioned before that these 2 progams, Hoarders & Hoarding: Buried Alive, are guilty pleasures. I’ve downloaded all 3+ seasons of each of them.

There’s numerous patterns that emerge when watching episodes back to back like I have, and some of them are concerning when I look at my own behavior. I’m not a hoarder. I know that. Hoarding is a serious mental health issue, and certainly not something to be taken lightly.

We all have issues with letting certain things go. Whether it’s because we have attached old emotions or memories to them, someone told us we need to keep things, or we believe that we can see a use for them in some other way.

Those are some of the patterns. Every person on these shows (and myself) takes a look at certain things and build stories around them. One of the things the psychologists & therapists on the shows focus on is that memories are not IN the items. Sure, the items work as triggers to the memories, but there are other ways to access the memories.

One of the most fascinating tests the cognitive behaviorists (I think) use is to randomly pick any item (usually very inconsequential) and ask the hoarder “What if I took this out of the house right now? How would you feel?” Which is usually met with questions about “What will you do with it? Will you bring it back?” To which the answers are “I don’t know and no” and the expressions on the hoarders face is usually shock, horror and sadness. It’s a great test & question, I think.

It’s a lot like the 6 month test. If it’s been packed away in a box for more than 6 months, do you really need it? Usually not.

There are some exceptions. Most people have a lot of childhood memorabilia that they don’t want to part with. I have tons of photos, my first baby shoes, baptism cup etc. and even though these have no real value, there is sentiment attached to them. Do I pull them out and look at them? No.

In part I think I keep these for my parents. Although I’m not sure why. How would I feel if they were taken away? I probably wouldn’t feel anything much after the first 30 seconds. Or maybe I would. (NB: Chris, do not throw this stuff away.)

So, now what? Chris and I have a small storage area in the condo, and it’s full. I don’t mean entirely stuffed to the rafters, no more room. I mean there’s an aisle down the center and shelves full on each side. Some of it’s winter bedding & gear that’s stored seasonally, and some of it is bulk storage for supplies (water, paper products) and that’s fine. The rest is just stuff.

Chris (he’s wonderful) cleans this room about once a month. I have no idea how it gets to be messy again when we hardly use it, but it does. I think this weekend I need to go through my portion of this stuff and make some hard decisions using what I see on the show, and what I wrote about above, as a means of purging some of it.

I’m very good at rationalizing why I need it. Just like the hoarders are. “Oh, I could use it for this” or “It cost a lot of money and I don’t want to just throw it away” and the classic “Let’s donate/give/take it to XCY Agency” which almost never happens.

So – Saturday for a couple of hours, I’m going to go through a TON of stuff and lighten the load. That’s something they haven’t talked about. Everything we own is in our head. If you have a lot of stuff, you figuratively carry it with you all the time. If you have a messy home/workspace, that physical clutter becomes mental clutter.

So – now what? A reboot. Hollywood’s way of saying “Yeah, we screwed up, so we’re gonna start all over again and you can just forget any of those other movies happened. Oh, and we’re gonna shove the origin story down your throat again. And again in the sequels.”

This time out – Andrew Garfield is the titular Spider-man. I like that word. Titular. No, now I don’t.

Garfield you should recognize from the brilliant “The Social Network” about Facebook. Also he’s adorable and super fit. So of course I hate the bugger (ha!). Ok, enough puns.

Anyway, the trailer just hit the inter-webs (ha!) and I really liked the look. I hope the POV stuff at the end is either not in the movie or at least used very little!

Of course, being a movie it’s not quite as easy as it sounds.

Captain Colter Stephen’s (Jake Gyllenhaal) is the lucky soldier to be sent back to determine who blew up a commuter train heading into Chicago, and the cargo train next to it. He does this by becoming Sean, a teacher on the train. Sean is travelling with Christina (Michelle Monaghan), a co-worker, and of course being the woman he’s closest to, they fall in love. It was her or his handler in the Beleaguered Castle program.

So, for 8 minutes at a time, using a computer reconstruction of the events, Colter can go back and re-live it. Not just relive it, but do whatever he wants within the timeline. Some computer program right? In the real world, Sean sat in his seat on the train and didn’t move. In the project, Colter runs around the train, finds things hidden and even leaves the train and interracts with people the real Sean never did and couldn’t have.

And yet, they are all taken as “real” by the military. Intel gained in the sim is verified in the real world. If the computer sim had all this knowledge, why didn’t someone just ask it? “Computer? Hello, Computer? Where’s the bomb and who did this?”

Of course, there’s no love story then. Nor the shocking surprise about Capt. Stephens.

Cool fact – Colter’s dad is voiced by the venerable and popular Scott Bakula.

So – overall, I’m gonna have to give it a 2 / 5 stars. There’s nothing new or exciting here. The ongoing deaths of Christina and Colter on the train are very well shot, but that’s about the most redeeming quality. Even the usually charming and handsome Jake seems wasted in this movie. Vera Farmiga as the handler (Colleen Goodwin) is even more wasted.

Yet another movie with a decent premise, wasted by poor writing and direction.