And I thought the first episode was amazing!

I’m not saying it got cheesier. I’m just saying that if I ran a drive-in movie, this would be the summer special.

These men are just confused that they are one of the few promo stills available and 80% of them haven’t even appeared in the miniseries yet. Mostly because this miniseries is a battlefield they aren’t on. You know who’s on that battlefield? The people under this cut.

Five Things About Episode 2 of Pillars of the Earth

1. I have figured out the ham-off! The real goal here is to award the person who can steal the most scenes with other cast members in them, which means the second episode is just a lot of medieval thespians running around trying desperately to smarm on one another.

2. Notably absent from this game: Rufus Sewell and Matthew MacFayden, who have what is actually a great scene together discussing the feasibility and possibilities for the new cathedral. Their eyes are like lovely hostages. “Isn’t this nice?” they seem to say. “Why couldn’t we do this in some nice modern-politics miniseries?”

3. Rufus Sewell gets a sex scene. He and this lady Ellen get it on on the second floor of a barn, in the second-floor haypile where a goat lives, directly above where their kids are not-quite-sleeping, listening to the sex. In the haypile where the goat lives.

4. So many of these actors deserve better than this, none more so than Eddie Redmayne, who plays Jack. It’s like watching James McAvoy in Children of Dune when it aired and thinking, “This dude will do better, but I am feeling for him right now.” I AM FEELING FOR YOU RIGHT NOW, EDDIE, EVERYTHING WILL BE OKAY.

5. Sarah Parish completely wins the ham-off by not only filling up on her Other Character Bingo card first, but also for the scene where her son comes home from raping someone and she gives him a bath and asks him about it as her hand slides south of the bathwater, if you get me. It’s supposed to be super creepy, and I guess on the surface it is, but Sarah Parish plays the whole scene like it’s a Tim Curry Contest, and so what really happens is that the scene is hilarious and you laugh a lot. Sorry, everyone who thought that scene would work out the way you hoped. (If it’s any consolation, it worked better as comedy.)

I sort of can’t wait for this week; by now, every time I see Sarah’s wimple I smile, because I know it’s gonna be goo

And she…knows how to use ‘em? That doesn’t even make sense. This header is falling apart!

So, the Pillars of the Earth recap is coming, I swear. (Maybe tomorrow, just in time to make you not want to watch it on Starz, since no one actually has Starz! And also because it’s pretty terrible, and apparently no one but me likes watching awful things for comedy value. This is a mistake, which you’ll see when I talk about Sarah Parish sexing up her onscreen son. Oh, it happens.)

In the meantime, though, some publishing news! I’m pretty stoked about this:

My story “Things to Know About Being Dead” will be in Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s YA vampire anthology TEETH, alongside some seriously august company.

The final (awesome) cover is up there, the release date is set (April 2011), and the full TOC has been released – it’s at Ellen’s LJ for the curious (and you should be curious, because I am not kidding about august company).

So, I’ll be doing the episodes of The Pillars of the Earth one at a time, since it’s all my ancient laptop can handle before Netflix crashes my computer for the night.

The good news is, this kind of comedy gold is worth every frustrating moment. I’m going to hit five things in every episode worth watching it for. I’m not going to slap it behind a spoiler cut, I guess, since the book’s been out for twenty years. (Also, this is so unrelated to the book that it wouldn’t matter in any case.)

Look at those hostage eyes. You know you’re in for a treat!

Five Reasons to Watch Episode 1 of Pillars of the Earth.

1. It’s a ham-off. Basically, a bunch of seasoned actors all got together and said, “YOU GUYS, HAM-OFF ON SOUNDSTAGE 6,” and everyone was like, “HOLY CRAP CAN I WEAR A STUPID WIG AND/OR WIMPLE?” and everyone else was like, “IT IS REQUIRED,” and they all broke huddle to go dress like idiots and then meet back up and see who could deliver the hammiest performance of all time.

2. That competition is going to be tiiiiiiiight. Right now I give the edge to Sarah Parish, but that might just be the wimple. THE JURY IS OUT.

3. The pacing is so awful I can’t explain it in words. We open on a flaming shipwreck; the next scene is labeled “18 Years Later.” We see Ian McShane telling Brother Matthew McFayden (looking sad not to be participating in the Ham-Off) that he can make him a Prior, if Prior McFayden would one day make him bishop. Brother McFayden agrees. CUT TO all of them in church and McShane announcing that the old bishop has just now keeled over, what a shame, time to elect a new one, as Prior McFayden clutches his pearls.

THOSE SCENES ARE NEXT TO EACH OTHER. Did anyone ever teach anyone in this production how to develop suspense for more than thirty seconds? Anyone?

4. At one point, one of the bad guys leads a raid on Donald Sutherland’s castle (sure). His troops have been ordered to murder, pillage, and rape their way through the castle. Donald Sutherland comes into his overrun keep, sees that things are not going well, decides to surrender, and calls out, “Stop!”

EVERYONE STOPS. Like, bad guy soldiers literally stop mid-molest and step back to wait politely for whatever happens. (These filmmakers do not know a lot about how battle works, I guess. Or acoustics, or history, or anything.)

5. This miniseries is so far afield from the books that it’s basically left them behind entirely and is now just medieval soap-opera soup, so there’s literally no knowing what will happen. Which at least means that if you read the book, you can still be surprised! By…almost all of it!

Tonight, Episode 2. I CANNOT WAIT.

The Pillars of the Earth premiered on Friday! It’s based on the Ken Follett bestseller, which means that, as with any Ken Follett book, there will be a lot of research into the topic, many people will die in gruesome ways, and women will do ridiculous things at all times for no reason.

Still, that book was my jam when I was 11, so I thought I might as well check it out, since it’s got every ham actor who ever hammed. It’s an Ultimate Ham-off!

After seeing the first episode, I can tell you with authority: this is the kind of Ham-Off they will write about for a hundred years. And by “they” I mean “me,” and by “a hundred years” I mean “for the next three weeks.”

I mean, the cast aside (Rufus Sewell, Ian McShane, Donald Sutherland, Sarah Parish, just for starters), the subject matter is perfect for half-starved scenery-chewing. I think most of what I’ll be doing the next three weeks is developing a drinking game for this thing, because I suspect it will need it.

For those who doubt how much cheese you can get in less than two minutes of footage, I give you a vaguely-spoilery trailer!

Tomorrow, Episode 1 (A New Ham-off)!

Or, if you’re me, any day!

Up at Fantasy Magazine this week, I posted Ten Cheesetastic Fantasy Flicks for Summer. For once, there’s no competition for which one is best, because they’re all the best!

Except maybe Xanadu is the best.

(Look at those hostage eyes. Yipes.)

The thing is, some of the movies on that list are cheesy but legitimately good. The Mummy, for example, is pretty unapologetic summer-blockbuster pulp, but I’ve seen it quite a few times and it always holds up, because Pulpy and Bad are not synonymous, even though a lot of things that aim for Pulpy end up at Bad. (That’s another essay. I’m just noting it here.) Lost Boys is awesome, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure is amazing. I’ll even make a case for Earth Girls are Easy being a pretty solid flick! (Somewhere, Joseph Campbell is cringing.)

But there are some movies (…XANADU) that defy explanation.

I mean, you CAN explain it. You can say Xanadu is about Kira, one of the Muses who routinely get sent to inspire various artists to great heights, and her job is to inspire an album-repo artist to quit his job and open a Xanadu-themed rollerskate nightclub with Gene Kelly.

But look at that sentence. Nothing in it makes any sense! The whole movie is like this.

Explaining it more doesn’t help. Kira and Sonny (Malone, his name is Sonny Malone, people tell you that constantly in this movie) accidentally fall in love, which the guy is supposed to do because stalking people gets the creative impulse going, but she’s not supposed to because her dad Zeus will get mad at her (literally, her dad is Zeus and he scolds her through a reverb pedal), so their love is Forbidden, just like her love with Gene Kelly was Forbidden back in the ’40s when she came down to inspire Gene Kelly to…do something artistically amazing that will make him rich and famous. (It doesn’t seem to have panned out. No one mentions it. Maybe it’s awkward.)

How will Sonny ever find the heart to take Gene Kelly away from his beach rock and make Gene Kelly shop for suits in a store filled with dancers and find the strength to keep the club going when all he can think about is that girl he keeps seeing who never, ever takes her rollerskates off, except during the animated love sequence, in which she turns into a bird with legwarmers?

(I’ve seen this movie like, six times. It never gets any less confusing.)

It was hard to choose a representative clip. The scene where the sisters wake up from the mural they’re painted on (really happens) is pretty good. It gives the right tone for the film, both because the song makes you want to slap your ears off, and because it looks like the people actually in the scene were just as confused as anyone else, and the choreography was called out in a series of impromptu orders. (“Look at your hands! You have some hands! Have more hands! HAVE MORE HANDS.”)

But I think this clip has to win.

Notes: this clip has been severely chopped, so you are missing out on the Gene Kelly-led rollerskating step routine and the part where Kira and her sisters sing this in half a dozen different styles, including Country Western, in which Michael Beck (SWAN, WHY) has to shake his shoulders like he’s trying to wrench an arm out of the socket so he can be excused to the medic and just keep running and never look back.

Also, many of those sisters aren’t the same sisters from the beginning of the movie. I’m just saying, that’s the kind of show you’re in for.

An awesome one.