Awesome Mix Vol. 1.

I can't stop this feeling
Deep inside of me.
Girl, you just don't realize
What you do to me.
When you hold me
In your arms so tight,
You let me know,
Everything's alright, ah-ahah-ahah...

I'm hooked on a feeling,
I'm high on believing,
That you're in love with me.

The soundtrack for The Guardians of the Galaxy is made up entirely of pop hits from the 70s - the selection of music is based on the single cassette tape that the young Peter Quill has in his Walkman when he's abducted by the alien Ravagers, and it's not so much a soundtrack as a combination plot point and running gag.  The only down side is that after seeing the movie, I've had Blue Swede's Hooked on a Feeling stuck in my head for the last few days.  To be fair, it's actually not that unpleasant, and people tend not to sit beside you on the bus if you're muttering "ooogah chaka, ooogah ooogah" under your breath.

 - Sid

Hooked on a Feeling.

Originally I wasn't planning to see The Guardians of the Galaxy: I sort of felt that I'd filled my quota for comic book movies this summer, they're not the first gen Guardians that I'm familiar with, and even then, to a certain extent the Guardians were B-side heroes in the Marvel universe (no offense).

However, the movie hit with a box office bang, so I succumbed to curiousity, recruited a couple of willing co-workers, and headed off to the Scotiabank Theatre earlier this week to see it in 3-D with full Dolby 7.2 Surround Sound.

Guardians is a lot of fun - it's got a quirky, entertaining script, Chris Pratt is a great casting choice for alien abductee turned outlaw Peter Quill (who desperately wants people to refer to him as Starlord but doesn't have much luck with it), Drax the Destroyer was surprisingly funny, Groot and Rocket were better than I expected, and overall, I felt that it almost lived up to the hype.

However, it's not perfect. The plot is more than a bit dodgy, the romantic relationship between Quill and Gamora, the female assassin played by Zoe Saldana, seemed to come from nowhere, and both Saldana and Karen Gillan, who plays Gamora's sister Nebula, are hugely underutilized, both as actresses and characters.

All that aside, the movie made me feel like a genius:  it appears that in some ways, I accurately predicted the next five years of Marvel Comics movies a full two years ago, when Thanos the mad Titan made his post-credit appearance in The Avengers. 

After the movie, I tried to explain the significance of Guardians to my two co-workers Glen and Terry over a pint, but ran into a minor problem.

I think that it's fairly clearly established at this point that I'm a geek.* As such, for me, Guardians of the Galaxy was filled with hints, references, foreshadowing and Easter Eggs.  To my educated eye, it's not so much a movie as a huge teaser for Avengers 3 - and yes, I realize that the second Avengers movie isn't even out yet.

Glen and Terry, although admirable people in their own right, completely lack the background for any of that. (Apparently they spent their childhoods enjoying fresh air and sports, that sort of thing.) Because of that, I actually felt a bit cautious in asking what they'd thought about the movie, I wasn't sure how much sense it would have made without some kind of back story. They both cheerfully announced that they'd really enjoyed the movie, but I couldn't help but be aware of how much they were missing.

As an analogy, imagine going to see a movie about D-Day with two people who had never heard of World War II.  D-Day certainly stands on its own as a significant event, filled with drama, excitement, sacrifice, and so forth, and as such would probably be accessible to people who skipped History class in high school.

But think of all of the depth that they'd be missing  - they wouldn't know anything about Hitler, the National Socialist movement, the Holocaust, Neville Chamberlain, Dunkirk, the Battle of the Bulge, Pearl Harbor, or Hiroshima, just for starters. (Not to mention the Cold War and the Iron Curtain.)

Taking that as a comparison, Glen and Terry don't know about the Kree, what the Nova Corps should really look like, Supremor, Captain Mar-vell, Jack Kirby's Celestials, Thanos' romance with Death, the possibility of the Skrull Empire showing up (or the Shi'ar, for that matter), the history of the Infinity Gauntlet (seen briefly in the first Thor movie), the other Infinity Stones (seen all over the place if you know where to look), the sad semi-suicidal life (and death - or not) of Adam Warlock, the Watcher, Eros/Starfox, Moondragon, the Magus, Pip the Troll, Gamora's death (or not), and how Spider-Man saves the galaxy.

Not to mention the identity of Peter Quill's father.

I did my best to explain some of this to Glen, and then asked him if he thought that he would retain any of the information until the third Avengers movie comes out.

"Sid," he replied, "I don't think that I'll ever forget this conversation, but I know that I'm gonna try really, really hard."

 - Sid

*Anyone who is reading this who hasn't figured that out, maybe you should go to the first posting and start reading, I'll wait. 

How long have you had your ticket to China?

"It's about time..."

Idris, The Doctor's Wife.

Patience does not come easily to me. In spite of that, I'm very used to waiting for things - I learned how to wait in the hard schools of hitch-hiking and film processing, where impatience gets you nothing but high blood pressure - but there's no philosophic background to it, I wait because I have to wait.

That being said, let's talk about the manner in which the BBC has been trying my hard-earned patience for a year and a half.

The new season of Doctor Who will start next Saturday, on August 23rd, 2014.  The final episode of the seventh reboot season of Doctor Who aired on May 18th of 2013, followed on November 23rd by the 50th Anniversary episode - yes, six months later.  The Christmas episode was shown on, you guessed it, December 25th, 2013, and introduced the new Doctor, Peter Capaldi*, in a brief post-regeneration sequence.

In other words, over a 16 month time span, they only managed to broadcast TWO episodes, an average of one every eight months.

I realize that these things take time to put together, but I have to think that there must have been some way to better allocate the available time.  Surely it cannot have been a surprise to discover that you were expected to continue producing episodes? Regardless, we're here now.  I sincerely hope that the new season, with the new Doctor - and apparently a new approach to the show - will have been worth the wait.

And, who knows, perhaps it will even be shown on a regular schedule.

 - Sid

* Mr. Capaldi's eyes also made a brief appearance in the 50th Anniversary special.