You should consider yourself very lucky, because this is the last time I’ll write about Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip…at least until the DVD set comes out. That’s right; last night was the season and series finale of Aaron Sorkin’s erstwhile series about the behind-the-scenes drama of a late-night sketch comedy show hampered by conservative America. The final six episodes were a strange mix between limping to the finish line and going out in a blaze of glory; the same can kind of be said of the entire series. Marketed as a comedy at the same time as a show with an identical ad campaign (30 Rock, which will be coming back for a second season), Studio 60 was never presented to audiences the proper way. At the same time, Sorkin never managed to spread out his political sermons among stories that could keep the show moving at a good pace.

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It wasn’t too long ago that Facebook was the place to go when you were tired of the noisy, ad-laden social networking found elsewhere on the web, most notably the platform’s biggest competitor, MySpace. Facebook was meant to be…well, a facebook—a place where students from a college could interact with and get to know one another. But in the age of venture capitalism and billion-dollar site acquisitions, it was only a matter of time before Facebook turned itself into a moneymaking juggernaut, disregarding the very intentions under which the site was first created.

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I just ran an upgrade to WordPress; the magical blogging elves that run the technical end of Movie Hawk should be working under much better conditions now. Please let me know if you experience any problems, particularly with the RSS feed.

In the meantime, go check out my Flickr photo sets. It’s the reason I haven’t been updating here as often as I’d like. Extremely amateur photography is a new hobby of mine, and so I’m sucked into that right now.

Speaking of sequels, this summer also brings us the follow up to one of 2005’s most lamentable films with Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. The first go around, for all the promise of the premise, gave us nothing but indiscernible plot, stony acting, amateur writing, and just enough special effects shots to keep you in the theatre but not enough to make you forget everything else. With two years in the corner to think about what they’ve done, director Tim Story and screenwriter Mark Frost return with an improved effort, even if they haven’t recovered from all their bad habits.

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Like them or not, there is no escaping two things this summer: money-grubbing sequels and the gang of Ocean’s 13. A well-constructed ensemble of leading men and character players, Danny Ocean (George Clooney) and his crew first burst onto the scene in 2001 with a slick remake of the 1960 Rat Pack could easily fold into the mix of tepid trilogy cappers, especially after Ocean’s 12, which felt like an inside joke that nobody in the cast bothered to explain. Fortunately, this installment recaptures the fun of the first movie and serves as an acceptable apology for what happened in 2004.

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I know that I’m the umpteenth person to make this joke today, but it’s nice to see that Charlie Conway finally made the big time. Don’t get me wrong; I’m happy for the people of Anaheim. It just irks me that a hockey team named after a movie won the Stanley Cup. That makes the last three champions from California, North Carolina, and Florida. Every time a warm weather team wins it all, I die a little inside. Way to go, NHL. Your game is on the verge of extinction, and your best teams are in cities that can’t even produce a decent ice-covered pond in the winter.

During a summer where it seems destined that over-hyped, adrenaline-fueled regurgitations of the over-hyped, adrenaline-fueled franchises of two to three years ago will dominate the box office (not that there’s anything wrong with that), it’s a welcome sign that, once again, we can turn to a smart, innovative comedy to clean the palate. Two years ago, writer and director Judd Apatow provided perhaps the finest example of the phenomenon with The 40-Year-Old Virgin. This year, Apatow brings us Knocked Up, a refreshingly droll story about a goofy schlub whose one-night stand with a hottie turns into an unexpected wake-up call to adulthood.

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