Skip to main content

Now That's Entertainment

Television has undergone something of a rennaissance, by comparison to the quality of movies. The Sopranoa, Mad Men, Weeds, 24, Six Feet Under and the like are imaginative, finely observed and compelling in a way that Will Farrell movies and endless superhero, comicbook reworkings are not.

If you reading nothing else this weekend check out James Woolcott's commentary on the topic over on the Vanity Fair website.

Looking forward to seeing:

"In AMC’s disturbingly funny and darkly absurdist Breaking Bad, Bryan Cranston, the wacky dad in Malcolm in the Middle, is Walter White, a chemistry teacher with cancer who turns to meth production in order to provide for his family after his approaching death, racing the clock against his own inner rot. He’s an Arthur Miller Everyman transplanted into a sunstruck no-man’s-land in a show that whips along with the laconic fury of Alex Cox’s Repo Man."


and:

"And although I haven’t screened it yet, Shirley MacLaine is starring in a Lifetime cable biopic about Coco Chanel this September that has to be scary-good. The publicity stills alone of an imperious MacLaine in hat, pearls, and gorgon stare were enough to knock birds out of the sky."


I have to say, in closing, that the reemergence of game shows like Who Wants to be a Millionaire and Wheel of Fortune and the unscripted dirge of New Zealand's Got Talent…serves to remind that it's just TV and no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the average mook stuck in front of the box.

For a British counterpoint you can't go past Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe review of 07







Right then, as you were.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ze Frank thinks so you don't have to

Ze Frank appeared on my radar when I saw his presentation among the excellent TED Talks videos . This morning I was reading Russell Davies planning blog in which he referred to a clip by Ze Frank - Where do ideas come from. Here's the transcript: "...Hungry Hippo licks Aunt JEmima [sic] writes, "Are you ever gonna break into song again? Are you running out of ideas?" Hungry Hippo licks Aunt JEmima, that's a good question. I run out of ideas every day! Each day I live in mortal fear that I've used up the last idea that'll ever come to me. If you don't wanna run out of ideas the best thing to do is not to execute them. You can tell yourself that you don't have the time or resources to do 'em right. Then they stay around in your head like brain crack. No matter how bad things get, at least you have those good ideas that you'll get to later. Some people get addicted to that brain crack. And the longer they wait, the more they convince themse...
1 comment
Read more and leave a comment

Johnny Bunko competiton

The Great Johnny Bunko Challenge from DHP on Vimeo . There's a young chap in Indiana, one Alec Quig , who has written to me about creating a career based on a polymathic degree, from which he has recently graduated. He's an interesting young man and his concerns about going forward in life are the anxieties we all face at crossroads in our lives when we are forced to make choices. Dan Pink's latest book The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need might help: "From a New York Times, BusinessWeek, and Washington Post bestselling author comes a first-of-its- kind career guide for a new generation of job seekers.There's never been a career guide like it.the fully illustrated story (ingeniously told in Manga form) of a young Everyman just out of college who lands his first job. Johnny Bunko is new to parachute company Boggs Corp., and he stumbles through his early days as a working stiff until a crisis prompts him to find a new job. St...
Post a Comment
Read more and leave a comment

Why billboards must go.

The problem with billboards and advertising in public places is they are an invasion of privacy. Unlike magazine, tv, radio (etc) advertising you cannot choose to turn it off or avoid it. Nor does it offer anything in return. It is a medium that offers no benefit or advantage to the person it is inflicted on. At least television ads subsidise the programming. Without doubt some billboards are entertaining - I thought the anti GE poster for short lived MADGE activist group was particularly good. But most are rubbish. Literally. Badly executed. Nothing important to say. The debate has led to a great deal of hysteria - mostly from people with a vested interest in perpetuating the deployment of hoardings. Perhaps the idea that the issue at stake is 'property rights' is the creepiest. If you own a building you have every right to plaster anything you like on its external surfaces. Is that an antisocial point of view? I think so. In the UK you could have an ASBO slapped on you for si...
Post a Comment
Read more and leave a comment