Saying Goodbye to The Cape: Musings on Genre Shows

Even before the final episode of NBC’s The Cape was pushed to being internet-exclusive, it was clear that the show was done for. This was not terribly surprising seeing as the show suffered from mediocre writing, flat acting, and a premise somewhat flawed and filled with holes. This was disappointing, considering what The Cape could have been. The Cape had the right setup to make for a great superhero TV show. Because The Cape featured a powerless, Batman-like hero, it did not have to worry about a big budget for flashy special effects. The show also featured geek goddess Summer Glau on the cast, which gave the show a built-in audience right from the get-go. Once again, a great idea for a show was not given enough time find its feet, but seeing that the show had some flaws, I was okay with it getting the axe in favor of something better, at least until I heard that another superhero show was also getting the axe. I am talking about No Ordinary Family and unlike The Cape, No Ordinary Family had great acting and writing that resulted in compelling stories from week to week.

With all of this occurring I have to ask the big question: Are genre shows doomed from the start? It seems like the big networks are sending the message over and over again that the only shows they welcome are those that appeal to a large audience and if you can’t make your sci-fi/fantasy show appeal to the wider demographic, don’t even bother. In the last five years, a large amount of good genre shows have been canceled prematurely before they could build the sort of momentum needed to reach a larger audience. Normally I would be okay with this. The big networks are used to garnering the large American Idol-like audiences and the more niche genre shows can always find a home on the smaller networks. Recently smaller networks like Syfy have been trying to appeal to larger audiences, bringing such fine programs to their network as Friday Night Smackdown. Now I love overly-buff men fighting as much as the next guy but wrestling does not strike me as the right fit for a network that was created to build its programming around science fiction.

I think this is why I am so excited for the wave of new media that the internet has brought. I recently found a web series called GOLD that tells the story of a group of professional tabletop role players. This is not a show that easily extends beyond the geek crowd, and most of its jokesonly really make sense to those with D&D experience. However, Goldtheseries.com is entirely supported through fan donations and creates a great product that many people enjoy. The show could never be considered for a primetime slot on CBS, but the internet allows it to flourish. The point I think I am trying to get around to is that I fear the days of genre shows being on actual cable is nearing a close. If we, the fans, do not do something to keep these genres alive then we are going to be stuck with program listings made entirely of procedurals, sitcoms, and reality shows. Moving to the internet seems like the obvious choice and has worked for several series, such as The Guild and Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog, but that being said internet programming is still very much in its infancy and problems with funding and distribution still are waiting to be sorted out. In the meantime, the fans of genre programming need to support what we love, which luckily is not something we generally have a problem with. It still remains to be seen how the geeks and nerds of the world are going to get their sci-fi/fantasy fix, but just because the big networks try to tell us that kind of programming has no place on their stations does not mean genre shows will disappear anytime soon.


Thoughts? Ideas? Opinions? Let us know what you think in the comments. We may even respond.

Jane Eyre or Twilight for the Gothic Set

Zoe: After 2010 being the year in which I saw exactly five movies in theaters, I made a New Year’s resolution/pact with my friend Scotty to see at least one movie a week. Both being oral thinkers, once the movie lets out, we tend to find the nearest discussion bench and talk about what we just saw.

Scotty: And for some reason we tend to discuss these movies in such a way as if we have an audience listening to us, We even sit in the stage “V” position and periodically turn to face our nonexistent audience. We have issues.

So, to feed our fantasies of being prominent, well respected movie connoisseurs/critics we have decided to record our conversation via google docs. Unfortunately, for me, this means I cannot do funny voices. One day we may include audio, but for now we will stick the easily skimmable written word.

So, for our first review we’re gonna go chick flick on you. Jane Eyre, our most recent adaption of Charlotte (the one who people actually know and wasn’t crazy) Brontë’s novel that neither of us have read but both have on our bookshelves.

Emily was crazy? That explains Wuthering Heights.

I kinda like Wuthering Heights.

You would. Let’s start this review.

Jane Eyre starts in medias res with the protagonist (Mia Wasikowska) collapsing on the doorstep of a reverend and his two sisters. She is brought in and nursed back to health when a flashback occurs to Jane’s depressing upbringing, first at the hands of a resentful aunt and then at boarding school that can best described as the complete opposite of Hogwarts. Child trauma ensues. She leaves to take a position as a governess at Thornfeild for an adorable little French girl. There, she meets the owner of Thornfeild, Edward Rochester, who woos her with his dark and brooding manner, albeit while also seeming to go after another genteel woman. However, this man and his mansion hold a secret.

So, let’s start with the obvious, I really liked Jane Eyre as a totally atmospheric period piece. Your average movie-goer might have a problem with the pacing, which is really quite slow, but serves to immerse you in the gothic, dreary, puritan England of the 1840s. The movie is told mostly through flashbacks, they cut out most of Jane’s depressing school days in favor of spending most of their time at Thornfield interacting with our tortured (very attractive) love interest.

Twilight fans will eat this shit up though.

I had a problem with the pacing of the film, but I actually felt that it was too fast in some parts, specifically the build up to the inevitable romance between the principle characters. It felt almost rushed and a bit awkward, especially in contrast to the first and third acts of the film which had such deliberate pacing. I would have been all right with the movie being a little bit longer to give more room for the second act to breathe. Then, maybe, the two characters would have shown a little more chemistry.

The place where this movie succeeds above all else is in its sheer gothic awesomeness.

You should have seen Zoe’s face during the movie. It was hilarious. (Zoe is such a wimp when it comes to anything remotely scary; I’m surprised she wanted to see this movie.)

I didn’t know it was going to be scary in parts. Pretty much as soon as Jane arrives at Thornfield, the ghost story kicks in. There are strange sounds, the young ward tells her about a vampire that supposedly roams the house at night, things catch on fire, someone is stabbed and it’s AWESOME! Sadly, this part of the movie kind of gets made the B-plot in favor of the romance. Romping around in a fully lit garden is so totally not as interesting being bade to tend to a mysterious visitor who has been stabbed and being told they are not allowed speak. All of this after following strange laughter in the dead of the night, lit only by two candles. After reading the book’s plot on Wikipedia (the god of all knowledge) after the movie was over, we found out there is the perfect climax to this creeptastic vein in the story already in the source material that is discarded for a much tamer reveal. Seriously, look it up, it’s so cinematic that it hurts.

Really, if you want to make a rich man / poor girl love story, stick to Jane Austen. The Brontës are the owners of dark mansions and tortured shadows. The cinematography to create these effects slightly remind me of the classic horror The Haunting, showing little but whispers and bangs. The film also makes the use of extended close ups to establish mood, such as a lit match meeting tinder to light a fire. (There is a continuous theme of things being lit on fire in this movie.) As well, there are sweeping scenes that are overarching Brontësque, for example, a dramatic kiss with a graveyard in the background. It can be a bit cheesy at times, almost like the film is overtly saying “oooh, it’s moody!” but it fits in some way.

When you notice it’s off, you just say “eh, it’s Brontë” but when the movie gets it right, it gets it AWESOME. And just so I get it in here, the costumes are amazing even if all the back closing dresses bothered me. They might be a bit somber for the time period but they fit the tone of the movie perfectly.

So, to sum it up, if you can sit through a slow, atmospheric romance, it’s totally worth it. And it’s Mad Men slow, there isn’t constant action.

But, if you’re into this sort of stuff, it’s a great romp in the dreary, depressing, tortured, moody world of the Charlotte Brontë. (Not Emily, her world is nuts.)

Game Review: Play Bulletstorm

Since this will be my first review for this blog let me go over really quickly how I am going to do a review. The concept for my reviews will be the same for movies and television as it is for video games. I've done a lot of thinking about how to rate something and gone from extreme to extreme. I wrote out a detailed point based system that rates something out of 100 points. Ultimately I realized that on the most basic level a review does one thing; help you decide whether to watch/play something or not. Working with that in mind I will start my reviews with a simple statement reflecting that. That isn't to say that I wont also start using the point system later on. It still needs some work before I'll be happy with it. I'm not going to let it get in the way of getting out the ultimate point of the review though. Overall the concept of the reviews will be simple. I wont make you jump through hoops to find out my opinion. I'll state it up front and if you want to stop reading there, go for it. After that I'll get into a rough plot summary and a more detailed critique where I'll dive a little deeper into my original conclusion.


Play Bulletstorm

The first thing that you need to know about Bulletstorm is that it comes off like a 9th Grader who has decided that now he’s in high school and its going to curse his head off because it’ll make him cool; it tries to hard. Also it curses a lot. Come to think of it, that metaphor was more literal than it was figurative. To say that Bulletstorm has a lot of profanity doesn’t really emphasize how much profanity is in the game. I’m not someone who is really bothered by profanity. It’s not even the amount of profanity that is the problem, its that it just seems like it’s trying too hard to be cool.

Bulletstorm tells the story of an elite special ops group working as a special branch of the military. We find out through a flashback that they were ordered to kill people. They thought these people were militants and war criminals but really they are reporters and political opponents to the military regime. Understandably displeased with this realization, they go rogue and make it their new life goal to kill the General who lied to them. After that long bit of exposition we rejoin the crew years later as they are about to make an attack run on a new ship of the line that is being commanded by the very General they set out to kill. Ultimately they both crash and end up on a paradise resort planet that has been overrun by mutants. As the surviving members of the crew fight for their lives on the hostile planet the real game play starts.For all of its back story, the actual game play of Bulletstorm seems disconnected. The plot events seem contrived and arbitrary. The back story could have been a number of other archetypes without requiring much change to the game play. Most missions are in the style of get from Point A to Point B kicking down doors and killing everything in between. The story of Bulletstorm is unfortunately a lot like the level design for the game. Simplistic and set on a backdrop of something much more interesting.

The game play is based around your electronic “leash”. This is both a literal leash that you can use to pull and throw enemies around the field of battle and a HUD/upgrade system. The idea of the leash is this. The messed up military places their elite units on the planet and grades each of their kills as they fight for their lives amongst the mutant population. The most creative killers are rewarded with new weapons and ammo and the uncreative killers are left ammo-less to die. The story doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense but the bottom line is that you are graded on how creatively you kill the various mutants. Back story aside this is actually a pretty decent system. Although it does seem forced at times, the list of creative kills you get bonus points for is pretty long and most are simple to pull off.

Where the game really shines is the weapons themselves. You start off with a basic assault rifle. The game includes standard FPS (First Person Shooter) weapons such as a sniper rifle, a shotgun, and a pistol. The highlights are that you also get what boils down to a cannon ball gun, a drill launcher, and a “flail gun” that turns enemies into impromptu suicide bombers by latching explosives onto them. In combination with the leash that lets you pull enemies toward you and your ability to kick them in different directions the game-play offers quite a variety of ways to dispatch your enemies. This is good because the level design is pretty bland and once you’ve seen 4 or 5 different areas you’ve pretty much seen them all.

A strangely flat feature of the game are your allies. Throughout the bulk of the game you are followed by Ishi, the only member of your crew to survive the crash. Although your allies do seem to fire at the enemies I routinely felt like I was fighting alone. The upside to this is that your allies to not seem to take damage. This is another case of the back story overshadowing the game play. Ishi, for example, is critically injured during the crash and is rebuilt with robot parts. This causes a lot of story issues, but doesn’t seem to affect the way he fights during the game.

The game has a lot of flaws. Its story is weak and frequently doesn’t stay within the rules of the universe that it has created. The level design, which initially interesting, becomes highly repetitive. The final battle is incredibly anticlimactic. On the other hand where the game shines it really shines bright. The voice acting is fantastic. It features Jennifer Hale of Mass Effect fame as well as blast-from-the-past Steve Blum who was the voice of Tom, the robot host of Toonami on Cartoon Network back in the day. The weapons are creative and even the standard FPS fare weapons have been twisted to make them very interesting. I recommend taking the game not as an overly vulgar Gears of War knock off, but rather as a reasonably well executed tongue-in-cheek poke critics of the level of profanity and violence in video games. While the game is certainly far from perfect I do recommend playing it. For all of its flaws I enjoyed it quite a bit.

Did I mention that there is a section where you get to play a giant robot dinosaur and stomp around a miniature city?

Who's Gonna Hear You Cry? A Preliminary Review of Fox's "The Chicago Code"

It presents like every other cop drama: commercials with drab colors, grizzled cops in a notoriously crime-ridden city, a vaguely badass title, and a splash screen with the main characters in confident poses with shiny badges and matte black sidearms at their hips. Except for the occasional Law & Order marathon, I generally don’t watch shows like “Detroit 187,” “Blue Bloods,” “The Shield,” or even the recent reboot of “Hawaii 5-0.” But something about “The Chicago Code” piqued my interest.

I can’t say it was the powerful female character: that’s nothing new for contemporary television or even this genre, with the likes of SVU’s Olivia Benson, CSI’s Katherine Willows, and NCIS’s Ziva with whom to compete. That being said, Jennifer Beals has outdone herself in “The Chicago Code,” making clear that her guest appearances on “Lie to Me” were far below her skill.

It may have been the geography: Chicago is not among the glamorous cities for criminals like New York (Law & Order) or the various locations of CSI (Vegas, Miami). It isn’t a center of federal government, like Washington D.C., home of “Bones” and “Lie to Me.” If Chicago fits any stereotype, it’s one of corruption, from which The Chicago Code seems to be drawing its primary content and purpose.

If not the setting or the characters, the allure of “The Chicago Code” must come from its plot. Six months ago, if someone with a nice suit and a stack of research told me that all the stories we can tell about modern, fictional policework have been told, I would have believed that person. But “The Chicago Code” brings something different to the cop narrative party. It uses something akin to the parallel narrative plot structure that can be found in any hour-long drama on the air today: characters have a specific conflict in each episode, but also devote between ten and fifteen minutes each night to advancing a plot that spans the entire season, or sometimes multiple seasons. In this, “The Chicago Code” is no exception to the norm. Its stock protagonists, the newly-promoted Idealistic Superintendent of Police and the Grizzled Veteran Detective With Authority Problems, are pitted against the slightly-more-original Corrupt Politician Moonlighting as a Crime Boss. What’s interesting about how “The Chicago Code” handles the story arc is the frequent intersection of its episodic stories and seasonal goals. Frequently, Superintendent Colvin (Jennifer Beals) is forced to enlist the aid of the devious Alderman Gibbons (Delroy Lindo) to solve daily crimes and injustices in Chicago, despite her ultimate intentions to bring him down, and his dubious awareness of her intentions.

Now that I have done my due diligence in highlighting clichés, it’s only fair to point out some more original things “The Chicago Code” does. Teresa Colvin, the Idealistic Superintendent, for example, is more than a James Gordon or Captain Cragen. She is a primary character with significant depth, who appears in roughly equal frequency in her full-dress uniform, bulletproof vest, business casual detective clothes, and (admittedly less often) casual civilian garb. The show admits she is a woman in a male-dominated world without it becoming a fetish: the occasional subordinate or villain will push her, she’ll push back, and the plot moves on. By the same token, her archenemy, Alderman Gibbons, is not an African American male by accident, but the show doesn’t constantly harp on his race or gender. Even Grizzled Detective Jarek Wysocki (Jason Clarke) is of overtly Scandinavian descent, though he otherwise remains in the uninteresting “middle aged white male” category. “The Chicago Code” is more interested in the problems of morality, loyalty, and integrity that are common to all of us, regardless of race, gender, or age.

I would be remiss if I neglected to mention the show’s significant cast of supporting characters. Junior detectives Vonda Wysocki (Devin Kelley), the younger sibling of the protagonist Jarek Wysocki, and Isaac Joiner (Todd Williams), to whom any “In Plain Sight” fan will be unable to refer as anything other than Bobby D, have thus far been marginal at best as far as the show’s plot, but are certainly fertile ground for development. Deep-cover cop Liam Hennessey (Billy Lush) is lucky to see five minutes of screen time each episode, but faces a plethora of his own moral dilemmas as he sinks deeper into the corruption Colvin’s team is determined to root out. Wysocki the Elder’s sidekick / apprentice, Caleb Evers (Matt Lauria), is barely worth mentioning as more than eye candy, although this early in the season, it would be premature to disregard him entirely. All that being said, the show’s characters (both primary and supporting) have a well-directed, polished feel to them. From their imperfect wardrobes that speak of hurriedness, dishevelment, and urgency to their subtle but noticeable accent work, they fit in their setting and never distract from the themes of the narrative.

“The Chicago Code” is young, having aired only six episodes since its premiere in early February, and is expected to run for at least seven more. However, let’s not forget this is on the Fox network, which is infamous for executing fledgling shows with significant promise (a generalization based almost entirely on its widely criticized destruction of Firefly before the completion of even a partial season [though I personally enjoyed the short-lived “Canterbury’s Law” as well]).

Did I mention Tim Minear (“Firefly,” “Drive,” “Dollhouse”) is one of the executive producers?

I’m not ready to give The Chicago Code a permanent spot on my television docket. There is still too much that can go wrong, even if it survives its first dozen episodes under Fox’s Damoclean cancellation sword. But I am cautiously optimistic, and would encourage the curious and open-minded to take a look at The Chicago Code. It’s fast, but it’s fun.

A Trade Magazine's Trade Magazine

I was having a conversation with a director of photography that I was working with at the time. The course of the conversation we were having eventually brought up the topic of American Cinematographer magazine. We agreed that it was a fantastic magazine to read and he went a set further and proclaimed it to be the single best trade magazine of any trade in the film industry and perhaps out of all trade magazines. This is a bold statement but flipping through a few issues of the magazine should make it clear to anyone, even non-cinematographers, that if it is not the best, than that there is something special about it. For those of you that do not know, American Cinematographer is a monthly trade magazine published by The American Society of Cinematographers. The reason he elaborated on as to what makes American Cinematographer is such a great trade magazine is its flow of information. In any trade magazine, the flow of information is essentially what makes or breaks the magazine.

This flow starts at the wellspring, the work force and knowledge base. American Cinematographer pulls from the resources of the American Society of Cinematographers an organization chartered in 1919 and is, to quote from their website, "committed to educating aspiring filmmakers and others about the art and craft of cinematography". This mission statement says something very powerful about the A.S.C. which I will return to later. With the A.S.C. you have an organization that has for all intents and purposes been around since the origins of the film industry. With over 300 members from over 20 different countries, the A.S.C. encompasses a significantly large cross section of professional directors of photography working in the industry today.

More important than simply the knowledge base of a trade magazine are the kinds of people that are in that knowledge base. For example directors, of both film and theater, are notorious for their secrecy. Without generalizing the field too much, directing is an art and when a director finds a successful method of getting a performance out of an actor, they are well known for being very secretive about those methods. To some extent, this is true in a lot of fields. Businesses protect their business secrets. No one wants to give their competitors their secrets. This attitude is surprisingly not a popular one amongst cinematographers.

My friend Ahmet explains this for me. When you're shooting something, he explained, you are in a specific location, at a specific time of day, with a specific lighting set up to work for a specific mood for the specific part of the script. You are shooting on a specific camera with a specific lens. All of these things build into the uniqueness of the shot. The probability that anyone else, yourself included, will ever be called upon to create the same atmosphere for an identical shot, in an identical location is almost astronomically low. To that way of thinking, why not release your craft secrets.

It is this attitude of willingness to share and teach that makes the flow of information from cinematographers to American Cinematographer so great. With no fear that their trade secrets will be stolen and used by their competitors, there is no reason not to document the exact position of every lighting instrument they used. If you open any issue of American Cinematographer there is a good chance that there will be diagrams of lighting and camera placement. One of the first magazines I really sat down and read cover to cover was the issue that came out in July of 2010. Inside it had a great article talking about the film Inception. As part of this discussion the article included a blueprint of, not one but at least two of their set pieces with detailed notations for where their lighting instruments were (and what models and color they were using) and their camera placement. Reading an article with that much detail in their diagrams, you really get a complete understanding of how that scene was shot.

Now as a filmmaker myself I'll probably never have to shoot on a rotating stage set in a dream world with the exact look that Inception had, but I may be able to use some of the techniques they developed in order to make that work technically. An even better example is in the February 2011 issue. The article on the Green Hornet talks about how they polarized the windows of the Black Beauty and used a polarized lens. They could then rotate the lens 90 degrees and create an in camera effect of the car's windows blacking out. This is a technique, which could easily be taken out of the context of the Green Hornet and used in another film for a completely different shot.

If you are an aspiring filmmaker or even someone who works in the industry, you will benefit from reading American Cinematographer. I'm saying this not as someone who works for their marketing staff but as a student of film and lighting. I don't always read every article in an issue. I don't always understand everything that I read. Every single time I sit down to read an issue of American Cinematographer, I come away with at least one new piece of information. I realize that my ability to do that comes directly from the attitudes of other professionals working in the field and their willingness to share their knowledge. That makes me feel really good about the career that I've chosen and the people that I'll be working with in the future.

Netflix: The Next Content Creation Giant

If you are like me, then you can’t imagine how you lived life before Netflix. Netflix has become one of the largest content delivery systems in existence and Sandvine, a network company, released a study that claimed that 20% of internet bandwidth is taken up by people using Netflix during primetime hours.

Gizmodo recently broke a story stating that Netflix has sunk $100 million into a new series titled House of Cards. It will star Kevin Spacey and be directed by David Fincher, the same guy that brought us Fight Club and The Social Network. This story, if it is true, marks the first time that Netflix has taken a role as not just a deliverer of content but as a creator of content. The biggest obstacle to the growth of Netflix has always been getting the content companies on board with allowing use of their content. The library available for streaming is a tiny fraction of what is available as mail order dvds. If House of Cards ends up being successful and Netflix becomes a major content producer, the giant TV networks could have even more to fear from Netflix. I personally am very excited to see Netflix’s library expand. However, if the model for content changes, and we see Netflix both creating content and delivering it, Netflix will have a major strangle hold on the entertainment business and even a possible monopoly. Either way this is a big move for Netflix and I will be adding House of Cards to my instant queue as soon as possible.

What do you think about Netflix joining the content creation game? Does this mean more good content available for streaming or does it mark the beginning of the Netflix’s monopoly over everything we watch? Make sure to let us know in the comments.

Review: Battle Los Angeles

I was happily surprised when I went to see this film. Ever since I saw the first trailer, I was expecting some horrible Independence Day knock-off, but this film was a much better time than I had anticipated for a March premier.

The premise is rather simple; we follow a bunch of marines as they try to get themselves and a group of civilians out of LA in the middle of a global alien invasion. This is where the movie really gets it right though, because it is about the marines and not the aliens. We learn very little about the aliens and their plans, just enough to move the plot along. The aliens are not the stars of this movie and I think that is what separates this from other alien invasion movies. The plot could have gone almost exactly the same had the invaders been from some foreign country. The idea of aliens with weird space age weaponry instills an extra sense of danger, but this film does not feel like it was directed at hardcore sci-fi fans it is a war movie first and a sci-fi movie second.

This film also has something that I had almost forgotten you could do in action movies. It has developed characters. One of the marines is getting married prior to the invasion and another is in the marines to become a doctor. The protagonist is an old marine with a dark past that was just one day from retirement (I know how it sounds, but it actually works). Each of the marines is more than just a soldier and the movie actually takes the time to make us care enough about them that when one dies it means something. This is the story of the marines, not the invasion of earth. We do not see anything that happens outside of LA and at the end of the film, though the marines score a small victory for the human race, the invaders are not defeated and in fact, it still looks like the human race is kind of screwed. This movie was not perfect, but it was a great deviation from what I have come to expect with Hollywood action films. 3.5/5

Make sure to tell us what you think in the comments.

Welcome to ScreenFix

Welcome, pop culture aficionados, to a blog by nerds for nerds. Our goal here is to take the latest in pop culture and try to build a community around it, whether that is spreading the word on the latest cool shows, discussing the biggest blockbusters, or pontificating on the meaning of blowing people away in the latest FPS. Music, movies, books, games, TV; anything is fair game here. This blog was started by a group of people who met in college and found that they all spent more time talking about movies and last night’s episode of “How I Met Your Mother” than was really healthy. So, I guess now it is appropriate for us to introduce ourselves:

Ryan – My major vice is TV and I follow close to two dozen shows. I came up with the idea for this blog mostly out of boredom and a desire to find other people that want to talk about TV as much as I do. I really like sitcoms and police procedurals though I still don’t know why. I have a B.A. in English so I tend to over analyze things.

Zoe - While I definitely on average watch more TV than movies, I have been trying recently to better keep up with both although I may or may not have ten saved episodes of Chuck on my DVR. I have a thing for off beat plots and historical dramas but good luck getting me to watch anything scary, Ghost Hunters is my limit.

Brian - I like to pick and choose my pop culture according to my whims, which flit unpredictably between movies, television, video games, and music. Fantasy and science fiction are my comfort zone when it comes to fiction, though like most 18-24 year olds, I’ve wasted countless hours on the Law & Order franchise, CSI, and NCIS as well.

James – Film and Television are my specialty. I actually work in the industry, which means that unlike the rest of the poor sops who write for this blog, I can write off my DVD purchases on my taxes as research material. I'm an aspiring cinematographer and I'm currently working mostly as a PA or grip. I also dabble in video games and literature. I've got a degree in Film and Cinematography Studies as well as Philosophy so that means that I have a private collegiate institution that says I know what I'm talking about.

Manda - The hours I spend reading and watching television and movies have significantly increased since my college graduation. I enjoy things from a very broad spectrum of genres. While I have a soft spot for science fiction and stories with historical settings, I have been known to get drawn in to the occasional medical drama marathon.

drmamaje (Jess) - I too have a degree in film, with some hope to break into the industry. My tastes range from the popular to the obscure, from Die Hard to Dil Se. I can probably tell you more about Hou Hsaio Hsien then you would ever want to know.

Scotty - It's a rather long story on how ended up contributing to this blog. I am the only contributor, so far, with a (mostly) quantitative background. Mostly, I do reviews with Zoe in a dialog format. This usually entails us sitting at the same table with Zoe typing something profound while I play Farmville. Sometimes I interject with witty phrases such as "I liked it" and "bleh." One day I might write review of my own, but that would require me to write something longer than a paragraph.

That’s us. I assume the cast of characters might change slightly from time to time but these are the brave souls that were somehow convinced to put their names to this blog. Have something to say? If you are interested in contributing to ScreenFix send an email to Info.ScreenFix@gmail.com and let me know what you want to talk about.