First off — it’s great that Laura Ling and Euna Lee got home safe. Lucky them. It’s not an exaggeration to say that they escaped a fate just as horrible as those faced by the victims of Hitler’s concentration camps.

It pretty much looks like a win-win situation. Two big dummies got themselves in more trouble they deserved, but Our Hero flies in and saves the day. I’m sure Kim Jong Il is patting himself on the back for the all-important ego stroke he got from getting Bill Clinton to come over and suck up to him. And luckily for us the North Korean leader is so self-obsessed that he’ll never realize that the West doesn’t give a crap about the all-important concept of saving face and subtly leveraging symbolic importance over others. Kiss for the cameras, hooray, nobody dies. (At least, the Americans don’t die. Nobody’s talking about all the North Koreans still in those awful camps.)

It’s hard for me to see this as some kind of amazing victory, because I can’t figure why Ling and Lee were in North Korea in the first place. The kind of reporting they were doing — creeping over the Chinese border with a camera — is unlikely to produce anything spectacular. The expedition is extra high on the Not Worth It Meter when you factor in the consequences of getting caught. And I’ll hazard a guess that neither Ling nor Lee had brushed up on their black ops training, so that risk was pretty high.

Both of these women have husbands. Lee has a daughter. But they intruded on a country that (a) is run by a psychopath and (b) doesn’t treat intruders well. (Read: tortures and executes them.) What were these chicks thinking? If they want to go for the Darwin Award by playing Intrepid Girl Reporter in a country that Navy Seals would be nervous to visit, great. But you don’t exactly win Wife and Mother of the Year (let alone a Pulitzer) by doing something so stupid and dangerous. It’s no surprise they got caught and handed a stiff sentence by a kangaroo court. It’s North Korea. Duh. The real wonder is that they were lucky enough to get bailed out. Boy are they lucky Kim Jong Il’s stroke didn’t affect the part of his brain that contains his massive ego, and the only price for parole was a charming song and dance from President Clinton. This wasn’t really a win; just looks like Ling and Lee’s epic fail (luckily) failed.

Next time, geniuses, stick to somewhere safer, like Detroit or Baghdad. Or just realize that you’re gonna die and it will be your own fault. Because I’m guessing private plane rescues from heads of state are kind of a one-time deal.

< / cynicism >

Especially tickling my funnybone has been two recent reviews of Dollhouse from Charlie Brooker and his nearly as witty cohort, Kathryn Flett. It’s impossible not to adore the bitchy, prissy snottiness of a British journalist unafraid to vent their spleen at the flashy hoop-dee-ha coming out of Hollywood. The commentary is supremely snobby, but has so much panache you can’t help but enjoy it. Flett had me laughing out loud with her jabs at the all-too-true image of L.A. with her description of the setting:

. . . some sort of illegal laboratory-cum-spa called the “Dollhouse”, wherein beautiful young women (though I think there may be some beautiful young men kicking around, too) have had their memories wiped of personality, and indeed everything that makes them able to do anything other than walk around in skimpy garments looking Stepfordishly blank, so obviously the show has been a godsend to the LA acting community.

Brooker not only gives Dollhouse the finger, he gives it to Whedon worshippers too. He has none of the wide-eyed, optimistic gullibility of an American viewer. Calling the show “bloody awful,” he slathers on the cynicism extra thick:

In week one, Echo (that’s her name) was transformed into an expert in Latin American kidnap negotiations, which meant she donned glasses and wore her hair up in a bun.

My goodness, it’s so true. And I never spotted that. Shame on me, I should have known better. But my favorite:

Tahmoh Penikett from Battlestar Galactica shows up as Agent Jawbone Hunk, an improbably gorgeous FBI bloke determined to uncover the truth about this “Dollhouse” thing he’s heard about which his colleagues insist is just a wild rumour but he’s got this hunch there’s more to it than that and blah blah BLAH BLAH OH WHO CARES?

Hee hee hee! He nailed it. Penikett hasn’t really brought much to the part, other than being very tall, in spectacularly good shape, and having a chin the size of Montana.

The jury is still out for me on Dollhouse. Some of the episodes have been fascinating and thought-provoking. Others I never finished because I got bored and there’s better stuff on Hulu. I’m not going to worship this show just because I loved Firefly. I have hope for it, mainly because Wash showed up in the last episode, and I could see him carrying the series much better than Dushku is managing to.

But I wasn’t able to pinpoint the reasons that I’m not sold on the show until flipping over to The Guardian. Local reviews on the show were useless. American entertainment reviewers hate everything as much as their British counterparts, but I can love the reviews in The Guardian and not The Los Angeles Times because of the difference in where the bitterness comes from and the way that translates to the value of the review. The Londoners have a tired, bored, patronizing voice, and the dry bitterness comes from knowing that something will be awful, and then it is, but being right brings no joy. But they are nothing if not honest. On the flip side, the entire entertainment staff of the L.A. Times is made up of failed screenwriters, so their hatred of every movie on the screen stems from their own pouty insecurity, and they frequently shortchange a good thing because they’re jealous that they didn’t write it.

I’m sorry I’ve neglected you, Guardian. Please keep bitching and I’ll keep reading.