New fic rec

One thing the Fast and the Furious is not exactly drowning in is decent fanfic. There's very little out there besides the marvelous khaleesian and what is out there is often execrable, so big yay that mlyn has written Repair Work and posted it in her LJ today. Character! Smut! Dom and Brian! All for the goodness. It's the first time, too, that anyone's ever used one of my stories as a starting point; she's continuing it after they get together in Testing Gravity, which is really cool. It is nice to be able to drag people down with you into fannish decadence. And she has more planned for later. Please give her feedback and encourage her to continue!

And soon, I hope to have both a new chapter of Measure of a Man, and a new vignette in F&F, but I gotta get busy myself and edit like a fiend. Much work to be done.

Oh, the humanity

First thoughts on Hawaii: I normally give a new show a couple of episodes before I decide whether or not I will keep watching. Pilots are often done at different times from a series once it's picked up, and frequently have different casts, crews, etc., so everyone is trying to find their footing and get a handle on the series' potential. Sometimes, of course, a show is so bad that you know right away it's not worth even two tries. And sometimes you can see what's there even though the network has fucked it up: witness Firefly.

I can't say Hawaii has untapped potential that's being worked out, but it's definitely not good from the get-go. I predict it will succeed, though. ;-) Partly because I think many people are so hungry for a basic old-fashioned stupid cop show that isn't just about forensics (god, my loathing for CSI and its clones knows no bounds, and this year I have to struggle with my hatred because my favorite actor, Gary Sinise, is going to be on CSI: New York... arg) or yet another Law & Order: CPU or something like that (they start with a computer crime, and we follow the case all the way through to trial!). And also partly because the stupid but fun and glitzy Las Vegas did well for NBC last year, and Hawaii reminds me of that in many ways. Check brain at door, watch for hotties. (Though it's obvious that NBC yet again has no clue who is in the audience; they heavily promote bikini-clad babes without even evidencing an ironic understanding that it will be women and gay men tuning in for the hunks.)

And lots of hotties are there to be watched. While Michael Biehn is ostensibly the lead (yay!), it's clear that they're positioning Sharif Atkins, as his partner Declan (sp?), as the smoothie girl-magnet for the show; and also Ivan Sergei as the anti-smoothie but supposedly intriguing hottie. Though that one is a hard sell for me especially, as I find him eminently unattractive and his character is repugnant, and not in a fun way. I like repugnant but interesting or funny, but characters like this have nothing redeeming in their offensiveness (which is why I could not warm to Nip/Tuck like I usually do to FX shows such as Rescue Me or The Shield, most of whose characters are repellant and offensive but really fun), and I think they wildly miscalculated that his looks would be enough to make women swoon and tune in every week. This guy, at least in the pilot, is just a fuckwit, and he makes the fuckwitted-but-charming-in-a-bad-boy-way guys of Rescue Me look all the more complex by comparison. I really hope they fix him -- if you don't already think he's smokin', you'd have no reason to want to watch him. By conrast, funny-lookin' cutie-patootie Eric Balfour, late of Six Feet Under, 24, and Veritas (!), comes off much better as he struggles with being tainted by Sergei's character as his partner.

There are a lot of other great players in the cast, but so far they don't have much to do. I especially want to see Cary Hiroyuki-Tagawa get something to do besides be the same old same old police lieut (also, such an elegant man wearing only baggy shirts... what is with the baggy aloha shirts?). The story was very formulaic, but I did like the local color aspects (though their attempts at that hand-held camera immediacy kind of annoyed me frequently) and the attempt to get into native culture, and found myself going to a Lilo & Stitch place when the Hawaiian martial-arts guy talked about his "ohana." I was mentally going, "means family, and family means no one gets left behind." A part of me wonders why they premiered it so much earlier than other new shows; I wondered if it was because it's a rare drama that's not part of the above-mentioned franchises, and they wanted to get hold of the non-RNC-watching, bored to death audience as fast as they could.

And sadly, I know I will keep watching, if for no other reason than to see Michael Biehn in a grey t-shirt and flak vest (which, I would like to gripe about, we had to wait the whole hour for and see him in dorky baggy shirts instead), doing the thing he was born to do, carry and shoot guns. Yummy. He's finally added some poundage in his aging-gracefully years so now you can't see through him if he turns sideways, but he's still got the incredible bod and those arm muscles... I'm sorry, was I talking? It's certainly much better than MB's last show, Adventure Inc., which may be one of the most painful things ever seen. But it's a far cry from the show before it, Magnificent 7. I still weep copiously about the loss of that one.