I didn’t think it was possible to top the last season of the dark, quirky drama “Dexter” on Showtime for this current season, but once again this show has proven it’s staying power and ability to outlast the time frame that you would think a serial killer show would be able to live without “jumping the shark”, so to speak.

Now, don’t get me wrong, there are some very far fetched ideas and plot lines in tne season, but there have been in previous seasons as well, but you have come to know and love the characters in Dexter so well, including Dexter himself, that you forgive this for the excellent acting and clever dialogue you get in exchange for suspending disbelief and delving into the world of Dexter headlong.

I always find that after watching this show, I was totally absorbed in it the whole time, and it flies by. I always wish the episodes would just last a little longer when they’re over, as it is one fo the truly escapist shows I watch where I can lose myself in the story line. This season’s protagonist is played by John Lithgow. Lithgow, in a turn from the generally good natured men he plays, is in turns an every day, sometimes charming and friendly family man who is in fact a serial killer called the Trinity killer.

We welcome back agent Frank Lundy, and the romance between him and Dexter’s sister Deb is rekindled, and we find out these two are really alike and really in love. SPOILER ALERT : I was really disappointed when Lundy is killed, and realized how well this show weaves characters.

You really come to love his twitchy intensity and workaholic manner that helps him be a virtual prodigy when it comes to catching serial killers, and you feel for him that it’s many times cost him his relationships and even one marriage for being so absorbed.

This season, the show really delves into Rita and Dexter’s relationship and fledgling marriage. It also deals a lot with Dexter’s “dad voice” that keeps telling him he is wrong to have a family, to try to be normal, and that he can’t camouflage his dark passenger much longer if he is to continute being a father and family man with a sociable persona.

I’m not sure if this is their way of saying that Dexter’s conscious is turning on him, making him believe he can’t have a normal life and continue hunting serial killers, or whether the show is trying to foreshadow some terrible demise, which of course, any fan would ultimately root against for the anti hero of this story.

Yes, I’m not ashamed to admit that I am a total BSG geek. For those of you who don’t know the lingo, BSG is Battlestar Galactica. I know, quite a mouthful for the name of a television show, but this gem is probably the best piece of television I’ve ever seen in my life. Period. End of story. Even if you’re not totally into sci-fi types of things, this show has it all. It’s got drama, it’s got love stories, it’s got the sci-fi aspect.

It’s got a little bit of blood, it’s got suspense, murder, action, you name it. More importantly though, Battlestar Galactica has the best cast I’ve seen on any show, the best dialogue and most original story lines, and most interestingly, it has it’s very own lexicon that totally works. For example, the books in the BSG universe have, and for that matter, every other piece of paper, is not squared edges, instead it is cut off across the corner edges, like someone cut a triangle off the tip.

There’s also the advent of the great sort of swear word, but really not “frak”, which believe me, if you started watching the show, you wouldn’t be able to stop saying and almost saying this when you mean to curse. That’s just one example of how this show gets inside your head. We watched it when it was all out on DVD, just a year or so after the last season aired it’s last episode, and I couldn’t imagine watching it while it was on, having to wait from week to week to see what was going to happen.

Enough with that though. We’ve been done with the show, all seasons, for a while now, and we’ve been waiting to get the new movie, which is the story told from the CYLON perspective of the human/CYLON war. We finally got it in the mail yesterday, and we’ll be watching it tomorrow night, the night afterThanksgiving. So I’ll have a review for you all shortly on what I thought. I’m sure I’ll love it, there’s really nothing they could do that I wouldn’t be totally enthralled with at this point, I’m convinced.

So I finally saw perhaps the most hyped movie franchise in the past several decades.  Shoot, all this hype takes me back to the days when movies like “E.T.” and “Star Wars” were all the rage, and virtual mania struck kids and adults of all ages over it.  The whole Twilight saga, which as you know, even if like me you had not read the books nor seen the movie, is about teenagers in love, except one’s a mysterious brooding and impossibly hot vampire who is eternally 17 years old and part of a family of vampires, and one is a brooding, somewhat boring young girl named, of all things, Bella Swan.

I have to admit, I sort of didn’t understand all the hype, and I read a few pages out of the book when I was in Borders one day, and honestly I just don’t think that the writer’s style was quite appealing to me, but after seeing the movie, I can see why teen and adult women are totally gaga over this whole idea.  First of all, it’s total escapism and totally unrealistic love.  Edward Cullen is the impossibly good looking, smoldering, seeming bad boy that all girls want to save.  Then, when he apparently is so uncomfortable as to even be seated next to Bella, he becomes even more irresistible, leading us on that heart beating love chase that we all love to feel.

One minute he’s hot, the next minute, he’s pushing Bella off of him “because he just can’t handle her smell” and if he even gets a taste of her, he can never stop drinking her in.  Wow, talk about dramatic!  I have to say, the movie is not bad at all.  The CG is pretty bad, if not almost nonexistent, but I don’t think the second movie, which just debuted this weekend, is going to have that problem now that studios are probably throwing money at them after the unexpected crazy success of the first one.  Heck, New Moon has already broken the Dark Knight record for the biggest opening weekend, and it has a cast of virtual (until now) unkowns.

Twilight is a bit slow at times, and the baseball scene with vamps playing baseball is a bit too cheesy for me to bear, but I have to say, I was really intrigued by the way it was filmed. t was filmed in beautiful, foggy Vancouver, and the lush surroundings and small town atmosphere really added something to the story that made it way more romantic and appealing, and I’m even a full grown adult woman.  That being said, I’m going to see New Moon now, but I will most likely wait until it’s either in the cheap theaters or it’s out on Blu Ray.  I’m still up in the air about reading the Twilight books, but hey you never know, I’ve already converted to the movie, who knows I might like the books too!

I have to say that lately I’m quite a fan of the films that Clint Eastwood has directed.  Although I’m not a huge fan of his acting, especially not the older Dirty Harry good cop/bad cop type of stuff, he’s come a long way as an accomplished director.  The last movie he directed that I saw was Gran Tourismo, and I was surprised at how much I liked that film.  The latest, with super star and mega celebrity Angelina Jolie, is not an exception . There are only a few minor things that I found wrong with this movie, but other than that, I really enjoyed it and found it quite a moving story.

Angelina Jolie is such an interesting force to me. I think that her mega celebrity status and personal life overshadow her acting career, and I find it very hard to watch her in movies and believe that she’s anyone other than Angelina Jolie. I also happen to think her acting chops are limited after seeing her in a few movies where I thought she over used her sexuality and didn’t really give a convincing performance.

In plain English, Angelina does not endear herself to the viewer usually, at least not to me.  I find the same problem ironically with her partner Brad Pitt, whose celebrity has overshadowed his ability to convincingly transform himself into different characters.

These are cases where I think that celebrity really hurts that actor’s ability to actually be convincing as another character other than themselves, and you can really tell with these two. However, in Changeling, I think Angelina was pretty good as a broken up mother who’s son was taken and vanished without a trace. She plays Christine Collins, a single mother in 1920′s Los Angeles. She is a manager at a switchboard business.

I found it so interesting that Angelina was in roller skates that I think that sort of bringing her down to human level really brought her out of herself and her celebrity persona for me, so although it was probably just a realistic historical depiction of how switchboard directors got around to busy operators at their job, this did a great deal in developing a believable character, for me at least.

Christine is called into work one day, and she leaves the 9 year old Walter Collins at home, where he watches himself, which is not unheard of, and returns home from work to find him gone without a trace hours later.  The LAPD, at least as depicted in the movie, are not much help in finding him, and when they find a boy that they say is her son who is really a runaway child who lies (according to the movie he was coaxed into lying by the LAPD) and says he is Walter, she is ignored by the police department when she claims this is not her son, and the search for him is called off.

The movie depicts her fight against the LAPD, which was at it ‘s height of corruption back then, and even details her stay in a mental ward.  John Malkovich is great as the leader of a church who takes Christina’s side, and later helps her fight the LAPD in court.  You may want to check this movie out, although there is a bit too much of the same dialogue by Jolie (if I had to hear her say “my son” one more time, oy ve), it’s a gripping drama that is realistically painted, with great cinematography that transports you back to the twenties.

Well, I have to say, I’m more than a little bummed that Joss Whedon’s latest stab at television, the fun and mysterious Dollhouse, is going to be cancelled from the Fox netword.  I wondered why, when I thought it was one of the more fun and interesting shows I’ve seen on television in a while, and Eliza Dushku does a great job as the brainwashed bad ass Echo, but then I read that they were only averaging about 3 million viewers this season, which is pretty dismal for any television show (I have to admit, I wasn’t savvy as to how many million made a hit vs. a ratings flop), which is puzzling, because they were down almost half their viewers in their second season.

I can’t imagine that anyone who watched the first season of the Dollhouse, which we’re still in the midst of on DVD, would not want to watch the second season, so I tried to figure out the reasons they might have had such a dramatic drop off, to no avail.

Who’s to say that they don’t come back on another network though, that has happened with other shows before, but it’s hard to say whether another network will take a gamble on it or not. I’m sure it can’t be cheap to make, since it has some great fight scenes and the production of it doesn’t look cheap on it’s surface, so a network would have to take that expense on and perhaps market the show to a different demographic.

I’m sure a lot of their demographic now is the typical same audience that watches shows that are either supernatural or science fiction in nature. Whedon’s other hits include Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly, so there’s a chance that much of that same audience might transfer to the Dollhouse, which is puzzling since it’s ratings weren’t that high.  It bums me out that good shows like this get cancelled while other crap that’s really not imaginative or well acted gets to stay on the air.  I guess such is life.

Another show that bit the dust was Southland, a cop show, and a few others that I never heard of.  Let’s hope Dollhouse gets picked up by another network, that’d be awesome!

Well, we finally rented the second installment of the ultra riveting (yes I’m being sarcastic) Transformers series of movies starring Shia Lebeouf and Megan Fox.  Not that I really have anything against either of these actors, in fact I sort of like Shia in some other things he’s done, but they’re not given much to work with here.  Don’t get me wrong, some of the special effects in Transformers are nothing short of breathtaking.

I couldn’t believe how realistic some of the sequences looked, and they really went all out on some of the action scenes.  This time I actually felt like you could tell what was going on a little better, especially in one scene where (spoiler alert) Optimus Prime is killed, the leader of the good Transformers, where they are surrounded by lush greenery. Usually it’s all metal on metal, and hard to see what’s happening, but I have to give them credit on changing that up this time.

Here’s the problem with the movie.  First off, it’s WAY too long for the type of movie it is. It clocks in over 2 hours long, actually it’s just over 2 1/2 hours long, and that’s just much too long on something that is essentially action filled fluff with hot girls, jive talking robots, and cornball dialogue the whole way through.  I know what they were going for here, and they definitely achieved their goal. They wanted a summer blockbuster that appealed to a lot of people, and that it does I must say, but I must concede that even the ones who liked this movie had to have been itching to get out of their seats after the first hour.

The story is pretty much dragged out and kind of predictable, and I think the part that bothered me most was it’s juvenile, dumbed down attempts at humor.  I mean, when you have a little robot humping Megan Fox’ leg in amorous affection, that’s just not really funny unless you’re in the third grade maybe.  And the dogs at the beginning constantly humping?  Again, that humor was lost on me, in fact it was embarrassing to watch.  Those types of moments were what made Transformers Revenge of the Fallen pretty much an annoying, brainless action flick.

Then again, what do I know, it was the highest grossing movie of last summer?  And hey, if you see it for anything, check it out for the special effects, which were pretty good, and if you’re a dude, check it out for the shameless amounts of hot college girls (who by the way all looked like they had a spray on tan, but hey, who am I to say!)