Dead Like Me.
Finally got the movie into me...and it's abysmal. Mandy Patinkin has been replaced by Desmond from Lost! I keep expecting him to run around with a shotgun saying "Brothaaa!" But that's not all that's wrong with the movie...
The show fits in this thread generally. The first season was quirky and cute. The second season was a Titanic kind of disaster, where you're drinking cocktails and listening to the band and never really believing that the ship is about to sink until it's too late and the lifeboats are gone.
And the movie is kind of like a remake of Raise the Titanic if my little cousin were to write and direct.
The first five minutes is sort of trying to catch us up on the most basic elements of the first two seasons -- subtracting all the shit that went on with our characters. And, to explain aging and so on, they do say that it's been five years (which it has in real time).
After that, they open up with that sort of reboot feeling -- Der Waffle House has burnt to the ground, Rube is missing, and our four reapers are summoned by a mysterious Brit in a limo, who takes them to Desmond, their new boss, who reviews how they all died (with footage from the series, except for Daisy who has also been replaced by a new actor).
Rube's absence is casually brushed off -- he moved on to heaven, having fulfilled his duties -- and all mystery of the inner workings of reaping is dumped (Rube had been trying to expose who brought the notes). Even that is gone. Rube got his list from an unknown source and wrote out the Post-It's. Now there's a big deal about catching up with the times. Cell phones and palm pilots, lists downloaded and so on. It's like they sat down and thought long and hard about how they could remove the joy from the series.
And, despite George kind of making peace with her family issues (who can't recognize her, nor can she communicate with them), it's back in the movie. The mother and younger daughter. And, especially in the format of a movie, it's just about 100% annoying as fuck. At least the family shit was spread out as a subplot in the series... Now it's kind of like Movie B: If you aren't enjoying Dead Like Me, then tune into a day in the life of white suburbanites!
Even though there was clearly a chain of command, and Rube was low (and George and the reapers were lowest of the low) in the series, things seem different now. Desmond's a spoiled banker who died on 9/11 and seems to lack any sense of respect and, so, that's used to weakly explain why our reapers start to break the rules. Driven by greed, lust, etc., to cheat here and there and advance their own once humble station in life. Of course, it all falls apart, and the chain of command is reinforced, and that's the movie. It's an embarrassment.
