The SAG awards were last night! For those who get confused this time of year (it’s understandable, they really pack them in during Stylist Season), the Oscars are the ones people really want, the Golden Globes are the ones where everyone gets drunk, and this is the one where actors can finally stop pretending they care about any of the categories except the acting ones.
The red carpet presence for this affair was a little unexpected, both in terms of who showed, and how they looked. For some of these actors, they’ll regret not wearing their outfits to the Golden Globes instead; for some of these actors, they’ll just regret.
(Sad fact: right now the West Coast is suffering a crippling body-scrub shortage, and it’s all these peoples’ fault.)
This is going in tomorrow’s red-carpet rundown, too, but I’m a nerd and this can’t wait.
Patrick Stewart and his date, Marina Sirtis, at tonight’s SAG Awards.
(Fun fact: he brought her so someone can tell him that she senses the other nominees are nervous.)
This brings my inner ten-year-old a sense of great happiness, to think that people can still be friends after working so closely for many years, which you think would drive people to want to slap each other decisively about the face and head. Instead, apparently, it drives people to go to red carpet events together and make my baby-nerd heart explode.
Klima and Co. have released the cover and TOC for EV’s newest issue, in which I appear alongside a host of awesome people who know who they are. *waves*
Click on the image to visit the updated site, which contains poetry, interviews, and fiction teasers!
And now I vanish back into wordcount. Since I have plans to leave the house tomorrow (all may gasp, I’ll wait), I have to buckle down and get some stuff accomplished. Blog posts I’ve been working on, like the one about the comparative cultural merits of Ibsen and Newsies (oh, it’s real), are forthcoming but will have to wait until I’ve acted vaguely professional first.
So, because the internet exists, an image of the 2011 Thundercats (really, everyone?) leaked this morning. The studios quickly released an official image that offered a slightly less blurry portrait of their take on the Thundercats, for all the good it did.
First of all, bad-nerd alert: the Thundercats were only a blip on my childhood radar. When I looked up the show on the pretty impressive ThundercatsLair.org to find screencaps, I realized from their episode guide that I didn’t even make it through the first season. Looking through the episodes, I sort of remembered why.
In some ways, that’s nice, because it means I’m clutching my pearls a little less than usual over the idea of a remake. If they can give the overall plot something a little more mythic and compelling than “We’re being tricked and then attacked and captured one at a time!…again…and never use their latent sweeps-only psychic powers to communicate…and won’t think to use the Eye of Thundera until minute 28,” then they’re a step ahead of the source material.
On the other hand, this is what they used to look like:
I wish everyone had some sturdy pants on – or any pants on (you live in the jungle and jump around on rocks all the time, I don’t think pants are a bad idea here, I really don’t), and I would expect Snarf is due for a major facelift this round to something either more Pokemon-y or something more sinister, but otherwise, they seem generally fine.
And yet, this is what we got.
The thing is, given that it was not a particular fixation of mine as a kid, I don’t really have a hound in this particular race. However, I’d say I have a groggy Cairn terrier in this race; it doesn’t have to win, but I don’t want it to get trampled out there, either.
And looking at the new Thundercats designs? I just don’t get it.
Some of it’s not bad: the fact that Lion-O no longer looks forty might help during those moments of emotional immaturity that only made sense on the show if you saw Exodus and knew he was really 12. I also like the more practical look of his new uniform (he gave his ab-window cutout to Cheetara). Tygra is unexciting but unobjectionable, and doesn’t seem as young as Lion-O, which is about right.
But I must admit I’m at a loss as to why Panthro looks like X-Men’s Beast mixed with that weird bodybuilding uncle at the wedding who’s trying to recapture the 70s (though I’m pleased to see he’s wearing pants – the one thing all the Thundercats could have used was some more pants). And I’m disappointed, though not at all surprised, to see that Cheetara’s lost about 10 years, gained a few cup sizes, and forfeited most of her top. (The old, matronly Cheetara pictured above.)
(Also, new Cheetara, I’m not a weapons expert or anything, but that doesn’t seem like the most stable way to hold a bo staff for any length of time. Also also, I’m not a skimpy-armor expert, but you can probably forego having half a ShakeWeight stapled to each wrist and still be fine.)
I’d like to think that Thundercats is going to buck the remake trend and be able to take what was enjoyable about the show and actually improve on the source material. However, this production design seems a little scattershot, so I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
In the meantime, enjoy the best part of any Thundercats episode: the intro.
The second thing is that I went to IKEA today. The thing I find most frustrating about IKEA is that, for me, whenever I go, it’s worth it, and therefore whenever I realize that I should probably get a bookshelf so that I can stop stepping over piles of books on my floor, that’s the place I think of. Luckily, I go extremely rarely. Unluckily, today was that day.
I am the kind of shopper who can be in and out of the grocery store with exactly the four things she wanted in less than five minutes if the lines are right. Somehow the whole IKEA venture took something like 6 hours. How, I will never know. I just know that when I staggered, blinking, out of the building and into the dusk, I realized that it was very likely that time had ceased to have meaning, and I had just been wandering the Home Office section and unknowingly surviving on nothing but discount apple cake and 99-cent refillable coffee for days.
The SAG awards were last night! For those who get confused this time of year (it’s understandable, they really pack them in during Stylist Season), the Oscars are the ones people really want, the Golden Globes are the ones where everyone gets drunk, and this is the one where actors can finally stop pretending they care about any of the categories except the acting ones. 
