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It is very stupid, and thinks that you are very stupid for watching to the point that rather than explain things via the plot, there is an unnecessary female character who spends 90 percent of her screen time in her knickers telling you technical information about submarines in case you turn over.  On one hand this is boxing clever - on the other, those without a penis may find it uncomfortable viewing.
It is basically The Unit again, but stupider and with more tits and this time the women know their place as sexy objects to the point that one recurring plot is about how women in the military is a shit and ridiculous idea because every so often you have to ask them if the men are hurting their feelings with their man talk - and no, I am not making that up, this is an actual scene in the show that occurs quite early in episode one just before the tough female sub pilot overhears someone saying she's only a girl and so goes and has a cry.

It is very rare in wealthy American families these days for military service to be seen as desirable.  I have thus no idea at all why they think it's great that the British monarchy does it.

Rich white guys - you do know the CW is the rich white guy channel, right?

Not quite - Evil Dad figure is mixed-race (and British).

I would argue that particular mixed-race relationship does more harm than good to the racial politics of the show, as it falls into the unhelpful sci-fi trope of "miscegenation is a sign of moral corruption or poor judgment", and sure enough his mum turns out to be untrustworthy.
The blonde lead's open hostility to his dad's replacement is also unhelpful - a standard b-plot for any soap opera, but still unhelpful.

If we ever get to see the bodyguard/chaffeur's house, I bet it's got a swimming pool.

Unlikely as he's a veteran - even in fantasy tv land rich white folks don't willingly volunteer for military service.  I bet you his apartment is fucking huge, though.

Apologies if this has been posted elsewhere, but I thought it amusing enough to share with Kindle owners: http://boingboing.net/2012/10/22/kindle-user-claims-amazon-dele.html

Rich white guys - you do know the CW is the rich white guy channel, right?
And that their flagship tv show started out being about a basketball team in Los Angeles that didn't have any blacks or latinos in it? (though in fairness to the show, they explained this in the context of the plot as being because all the blacks and latinos were kicked off the team for using drugs and/or being criminals)

Although Arrow does have a poor black dude in it - he drives Ollie about until Ollie gives his bumbling ass the slip.  Black chauffeurs also seem to be a recurring theme in CW shows, though I'll cede that it might just be the ones I can stand to watch.

I miss the doom-mongering already.

Alternatively put a black and white telly in their bedroom and put a Universal horror double bill on a loop as a nightlight.

Those massive budgets are (perversely and counter-intuitively) like security blankets to nervous executives.

Or huge budgets help to hide how executives are pocketing the money themselves and screwing everybody else actually involved in physically making the film out of their cut: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121018/01054720744/hollywood-accounting-how-19-million-movie-makes-150-million-still-isnt-profitable.shtml

[Encyclopedia of Things That Never Were]

Something which has had mileage undreamed of between myself, my little brother, five nieces, one nephew and at least four sets of parents has been our original and now well-thumbed HC copy of the Encyclopedia of Things That Never Were, a tabloid-sized tome which manages just the right mix of spooky illustrations and descriptive text, possibly, but all I know for sure was it was great for me, and it still seems to be going down well as it has been passed about quite a bit by now.  Very western-centric for the most part, but there's plenty of Eastern European lore in there, too.
Maurice and his Educated Rodents is a good read, too, spoofing as it does the traditional night-time reading material of books featuring mystery-solving children, though there's the odd allusion to more grown-up goings-on that I'm not sure will go over the head of kids.
Similarly Pratchett's Tiffany Aching series are good younger-reader entries to Discworld, (The Wee Free Men, A Hat Full Of Sky, Wintersmith, I Shall Wear Midnight) though I can't see them being much of a gateway drug as there's an odd undercurrent of melancholy to proceedings (especially in later books like I Shall Wear Midnight) that isn't really shared by 'proper' DW novels except perhaps some of the latter Witches entries or some of the Sam Vimes stories when he starts musing on his advancing years and the march of change.  Tiff herself is sort of unlikable, too, but her truculence and arrogant resolve in the face of kitchen sink horrors is quite refreshing.
Our own Michael Carrol's Quantum Prophecy series are also cracking page-turners, though they lack graphic disembowelings or people having their heads caved in with bricks, so might be a bit tame for the BT household.
It also suddenly occurs that Robert Kirkman's Invincible might be worth a look in its omnibus form, as its graphically over-violent as one expects of RK, but in that typically hypocritical way of US comics in that you regularly get five-page sequences of seeing a guy headbanged until his brains are dribbling out of his ears, but there's not a single nipple or cuss word.  Otherwise it's a pretty vanilla superhero drama with a main character who's effectively vapor, but some of the backing cast are interesting, particularly Robot and Invincible's dad.

I'm curious about the claim that MJ is a gateway drug: is there any science to back this up?

Chop socky films are the lowest of the low *in my opinion*, and usually worse and more amateurish than the worst of porn.

Your opinion might have been worth more if the top of that page of the thread didn't have a review in which you extol the excellence of a Jake Busey film.

I'm just about to watch a chop-socky film now as it happens: Silver Hawk, a superhero flick in which the main character jumps a motorcycle over the Great Wall of China to rescue a kidnapped panda by fighting the kidnappers on, around and under the kidnap van as it is in transit, then gets her phone out to take photos of her and the panda wrestling each other.  Later, one of the members of Bros shows up with bionic arms.

[TLDR REVIEW:]

TLDR REVIEW:

I like how they take the time in the first episode to piss all over Lost, despite Arrow looking to be about the main character's time on a deserted island where he dealt with mysterious Others and which we find out about via flashbacks.
Because the deserted island where Green Arrow learns all his crimefighting skills (like archery, reading people's body language, free running over rooftops and computer hacking) features so prominently throughout the first episode (and going by the second episode seems to be a major plot thread), you would think that Andy Diggle/Jock get a story credit seeing as how they introduced that to GA's origin, but no, they get fuck all apart from Diggle getting a bumbling chauffeur named after him.
It's cliched and unoriginal, but it makes a grumpy face so most will probably like it and say it's clearly a bit like the Nolan Batmans because that was a superhero thing that had a grumpy face, but really what it resembles more than anything is Revenge (also a CW show), only with a sexy brooding blonde male lead who learned martial arts from a mysterious assassin to aid in his quest for revenge once he returns to rich white American society but also has to deal with a conniving mother and his little sister doing drugs, all the while skillfully manipulating people to get what he wants as he ruins a white collar criminal's life each week because his dead father who he is avenging gave him all the information he'll need to hoist them upon their own petard and reveal their criminal endeavors to the world,  instead of Revenge's sexy brooding blonde lady wait for it who learned martial arts from a mysterious assassin to aid in her quest for revenge once she returns to rich white American society but also has to deal with a conniving mother and her little sister doing drugs, all the while skillfully manipulating people to get what she wants as she ruins a white collar criminal's life each week because her dead father who she is avenging gave her all the information she'll need to hoist them upon their own petard and reveal their criminal endeavors to the world.
Did I mention that Arrow was not very original?
I know there's nothing original these days, but to rip off your own network's programming that your show will be aired and promoted alongside is really something else.  Luckily for Arrow, I like Revenge, though admittedly for the screaming levels of camp melodrama and Madeline Stowe's calculating evil bitch matriarch, but there's no such equivalent performance in Arrow to remind you that the lead actually has an antagonist rather than a nebulous cabal of names in a little black book to act against, and there's a sneaking suspicion - ridiculous I know - that they're just making stuff up as they go and don't have any long term plans beyond "we need a Green Arrow show on the air so we can pay DC Comics royalties so they look like they're turning a profit, just like we did for ten years while Smallville was on the air." http://airlockalpha.com/node/9073/smallville-lawsuit-could-cost-warner-bros-millions.html
I'll probably tolerate its lack of imagination or ambition for a while at least, especially seeing as there are much worse shows on telly right now to get appalled at*, but it's background-noise tv at best - something to have on while you're doing something else.  I would be quite worried if people actually sat down to watch this and took it seriously.



* Did you know that they remade the Ron Perlman-starring Beauty and the Beast tv show?  Beauty is a cop now, and Beast is not actually disfigured, he just has anger issues because the government turned him into a Wolverine, which means brooding a lot in the shadows.  The lass who played Lana Lang in Smallville is the biggest actor in it, and arguably the best: that is how bad it is.


SHORTER REVIEW:

It's a bit shite.

Oh yeah, good call on Mad Men.  Dull and over-reliant on "ha ha, look at the past and what they thought of things" - Carry On Cleo did that much better.

They've fixed Nightcrawler now - he's been killed off and replaced with a grim and angsty murderer in the apparently popular X-Force.  I'm sure if he had any fans they would be most grateful for this.

Once you legalise dope you go down the road of legalising smack and coke, followed by prostitution. Where does it end up? Slave ownership?

Please explain.

More addictive and dangerous narcotics than marijuana (alcohol, nicotine, caffeine) are freely available on the open market.  A cynical man - and I think the record will reflect that I am certainly not one of those - would suggest that the only real reason MJ isn't legal is because it's already so freely and widely available to anyone that actually wants it that taxing it would be impossible compared to taxing the existing alternatives like tobacco, alcohol, caffeine, and - latterly - cooked food.  Your lords want their bite of the pie and they wouldn't get that from making mj legal - if anything, they'd see a decrease in sales of some of the alternatives (except cooked foods).