hannah montana--IN 3D!!#@!@#!@#

while i could not stop focusing on the backup dancers or marveling at the incredible business model that is disney entertainment (or stop noticing the obvious reshot-for-3d inserts--and maybe i just missed it in the credits, but after a scene explaining how miley wrote a song for her dead grandfather i didn't see her credited after the film...), hannah montana's answer to U2 was an amazing experience. while the technology may have seemed less hokey in beowulf (obviously zemekis is the right man to bring 3d into the mainstream...), disney did a good job of using but not abusing digital 3d. and if you haven't had the experience yet, i recommend you go out of your way to before journey to the center of the earth sucks you in (and just generally sucks...). overall, i give it seven unicorns, two chocolate dipped dunken doughnuts, and a smiley emotocon with a hat.

hannah montana

can we get an episode more than once a month? the timing of the o-phone episode made sense (sort of), being nuzzled between the peak of the iphone's popularity and the release of the rock's hannah's-target-audience aimed flick, but nonetheless this defined the all-to-creepy-yet-all-too-perfect use of the word cocktease.


oh lord i'm going to jail.

miley's mammy

i touched on this last night, but today i got to thinking and realized that this probably deserves a bit more attention. what is with hannah montana's treatment of black peoople? the show has two black characters: one is an evil b-word who goes to school with miley and has no redeeming factors besides that she is cool for an unoriginal archetypal reason, and the other is roxy, miley/hannah's bodyguard slash maternal figure.
think about that for a second. a southern, tennessee family employs a rotund, jovial black woman to care for their white, petite child. she only breaks from her character's distinctly annoying drawl once, and that is in an alternate universe episode where the actress plays an angel that has simply taken roxy's form as to not intimidate miley. at the end of that episode, three white kids are rapping, and in a last-ditch move that adds nothing to the song besides a black presence, roxy--with a flava-flav clock draped around her neck--says, "peace out!" i thought disney stopped overt racism once song of the south caught so much fire and instead relegated itself to expressing racism only through its implied minority characters like ursula, scar, the hyenas, and everyone besides aladin (played by a white actor, scott weinger, aka steve, dj's boyfriend, in full house) in aladin.

ps...in case you need this-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Montana

interesting turn in the hannah saga...

a new development in the possible hannah montana shark-jumping. this week's episode ("when you wish you were the star" s2e5, even though it was the 13th shown of the season...) appeared to be ripe for the jumpin'--a trite "alternate universe" episode. the first commercial break, however, revealed that this episode was part of disney's "wish gone amiss" weekend. this new context excuses the episode's cliche plot, as long as the show manages to do something with it. and hannah did. the alternate universe provided great use of a guest star (jesse mccartney), excellent alternate personalities for all of the main characters, and it made way for the truly incredible rap duo of rico and oliver. seriously. (although the show's return to this shtick during the closing credits--while good at first--took a turn towards the absurd when they insisted on having the show's one regular black character, roxy, finish the closing rap by donning a flava-flav style clock and snapping while saying "peace out!" [another interesting note from today's episode: for the first time "roxy" briefly broke from her stereotypical ways and spoke in a normal voice, although it was rather brief.]) keep in mind, however, that this episode was the 5th of the season (from back when the season was still decent) and it simply aired out of order, so this may be a false hope.

other worthwhile observations from this week:

good observation by andy. during a very emotional scene, out of nowhere a crawl appears at the bottom. "penelope, 11, ca: i wish rico and i could play video games together!" that's all it said. nothing before, nothing after. it then disappeared. as far as we could remember, this was the only crawl all episode besides the normal post-commercial show-identifiers. amazing.

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normally i wouldn't post about something this stupid, but given last week's discussion about hannah's diagetic violations of late i figured this was worth mentioning. hannah's way of getting out of the alternate universe once canon had established that she had already used her one and only wish--brilliant. absolutely brilliant. for those of you who have not seen it but who were not scared away by the spoiler alert:

miley wishes on a star to be hannah 24/7. hannah tries to wish back but she is told her one and only wish has been used. at the end of the episode, she has a kind-of heart-to-heart with the estranged "hermit" (they meant "hobo"), jackson, who then sees a shooting star and uses his one wish to get them back to our world.

they do a great job of keeping canon in tact, but in order to continue, all of our newer episodes--
(and this is nit-picky, and by no means this should actually happen nor am i faulting the show for breaking this, because, in sitcom form, plot flexibility to a certain degree is completely both allowed and required in order to keep interesting episodes around)
--should feature a jackson who has no memory of our world pre-miley's wish and only of the world where he was a "hermit." hannah, after all, had no memory of her new post-wish world while she was there (but she had maintained all skills learned in that world, like the ability to speak french). just a thought.

hannah montana jumping the shark?

despite how fantastic the second cd is, i'm thinking hannah has started to jump the shark.
a show creates a diagesis--a universe--that it must operate in. that diagesis can break every law of our universe, but the workings within that universe must obied by all of the laws of it. every episode of the seconds season (least so in the jake ryan hour long double, but even in that) has violated the rules of the hannah world, indirectly mostly. the show has abandoned the idea that its characters are logical and un-absurd (relatively speaking) in their non-pop star effected lives. to a much less severe extent, they are suffering from a syndrome that is related to the boy meets world collapse.
the stories are loose; there are too many obvious ways out of any created conflict. in tonight's episode ("sleepwalk this way," s2e13), for instance, someone could have reassured miley that she need not be worried until monday, and jackson could have pushed his party forward to a day before monday. those would greatly alter the main plot arch (their refusal to acknowledge these obvious flaws is a violation of the psudo-cannon that the characters are logical). even the small conflicts had too obvious yet still ignored solutions. they could/should have woken miley up during her tirade in class (and why is she adjusting her shirt while asleep? and coming up with witty, non-obvious retorts to kunkle's every word while asleep?), and jackson could have realized that when miley said she was awake she could not have been sleepwalking since she can only tell the truth when she is sleepwalking and therefore would have to say she was asleep (his failure to acknowledge this led to his clanking of pans and dumping water on miley for annoyingly trite comic relief).
sorry if this made no sense. i'm a bit flustered/frustrated.

i'm off to watch entourage. expect notes on that soon.