Please, I beg the world and all things good in it to stop talking about Kayne West in a non-netgative context. After seeing him last night on the Grammys and then reading that he said, “I changed the sound of music more than one time… For all those reasons, I’d be a part of the Bible. I’m definitely in the history books already,” I just want to gouge my eyes out with a dull spoon.
Someone smite him.
Mike Wallace has never been able to interview President Bush, but if he did finally get a chance, he would ask him this brilliant question:
What in the world prepared you to be the commander in chief of the largest superpower in the world? In your background, Mr. President, you apparently were incurious. You didn’t want to travel. You knew very little about the military… . The governor of Texas doesn’t have the kind of power that some governors have… . Why do you think they nominated you?
My favorite part is something I always said about Bush: the governor of Texas has very little authority or power. In Texas we give most of the executive authority to the Lt. Governor, so there goes Bush’s one piece of work experience.
On Sunday night The West Wing featured a live debate episode, where the two candidates in the fictive election threw out the traditional timed question-answer-rebut format in favor of an actual debate. They moved around, they interrupted, they argued, they pontificated. It was —albeit completely contrived — wonderful. It was obviously a rating stunt and possibly an effort to prepare the audience for a end-of-season online vote for the winner of the on-screen election. However, a clichéd idealist (or a clichéd cynic like myself), might also see an attempt to show Americans something that hasn’t happened in a long time — what an actual debate between presidential candidates might look like and how much more enlightening it could be.
Read a New York Times piece about the episode
Maybe it’s giving a television show too much credit or just plain being a sentimental fool before my time, but Six Feet Under has encouraged me to look at death more than anything else in my life. Having not experienced much death at all really, it’s easy for me to consider it only as an abstract concept to be dealt with when it comes along in its many ways and times. No doubt the show intended to do much more and far less, but to me that will be the enduring memory of the Fisher’s and their relations.
For what is at it’s core a 50 minute picture show SFU definitely drew me in far deeper than anything else. The characters came to feel like an extension of my social world, however silly that may sound. So many episodes left me feeling emotionally and physically taxed to the point that I had to just switch off my mind and go to bed in order to recharge. How can a TV show do that to us? How can something that we know is wholly artificial become so real? As what amounts to a former media studies major, I should be able to offer some hypothesis, but I don’t have one to give.
What I do know is that the series finale that I just finished watching left me with a small taste of what it must feel like to lose someone very close — a mother or brother or best friend. I am not saying that I know what it will feel like when my parents die or my grandparents. What I am saying is that somewhere in the last quarter of the episode tonight I really considered what life would be like without the people that I love the most and it was a painful realization that they would be gone someday.
When each of the characters died having lived out the lives that HBO fated them I felt a little more empty inside. It was a strangely moving and cathartic experience — not something that we have come to expect from our television. I won’t go so far as to say I feel compelled to make changes in my life, but I am saying that I have thought about parts of life — and death — that I have never considered before today.
Editor’s note: the preceding was written under the influence of powerful television as well as a surprisingly potent nasal decongestant. Give a guy a break.
Everyone said it was going to be better than the first two. Ebert liked it, Spielberg was bawling like a little girl, but the New Yorker is all it’s snobbish glory thinks the next Star Wars is going to be like unto a steaming pile of crap. Witness:
The general opinion of ‘Revenge of the Sith’ seems to be that it marks a distinct improvement on the last two episodes, ‘The Phantom Menace’ and ‘Attack of the Clones’. True, but only in the same way that dying from natural causes is preferable to crucifixion.
And this just made me laugh out load:
Anakin, too, is a divided figure, wrenched between his Jedi devotion to selfless duty and a lurking hunch that, if he bides his time and trashes his best friends, he may eventually get to wear a funky black mask and start breathing like a horse.
Paris Hilton is about to get even more obnoxious, ladies and gentlemen. Word on the street and in the press is that everyone’s least-favorite sex kitten is getting ready to start her business “empire”. The woman who brought you the celebrity sex tape and that irritatingly ugly sidelong pout now brings you Club Paris, with locations in Orlando, Miami, and Las Vegas (almost, anyway).
When I see Hilton, I can’t help but feel a little part of my intelligence being ripped out of my head. Club Paris will no doubt be 100x worse, sort of like a non-invasive frontal lobotomy with sparkles and loud music.
Here’s the Yahoo! News Paris-Gets-Serious roundup
The British government is throwing the book at the BBC today. It announced a new “green paper” that will it hopes will ensure the continuation of the BBC’s mission as a public service broadcaster, by more explicitly outline what exactly qualifies as public service broadcasting. Word is that home makeover shows and other reality TV will be out because they are “derivative” but original comedies and drama are staying.
Maybe this new way for the BBC will prove successful in achieving good ratings and teach other broadcasters (I’m talking to you NBC, ABC, CBS) that quality programming, i.e. not more reality crap, doesn’t mean poor ratings.
Smarter not dumber is the way to go, and maybe the BBC can show us the way (again).
[via ThisisLondon]
This new film from Tim Burton (who is CRAZY) looks really good, although the title, The Corpse Bride, might scare away anyone younger than 12. Maybe that’s the idea.
Burton has a thing for Johnny Depp apparently.
The 40th Anniversary of Mary Poppins is coming up and for the occasion Disney wil be showing a digitally remastered version on TV. In today’s new York Times there is a write-up about the movie but I have not yet been able to figure out what i sth epoint of it.
According to the Times Mary Poppins is not a nanny but a hippie who ignores her charges, meddles with the family, hangs out with her boyfriend during work, and then disappars without a trace, leaving behind a mess of lives. Somehow it seems that the film’s ’60s flair makes it further offensive, as it is “really” supposed to be set in 1910.
A sample:
Mary’s first shortcoming as a nanny, in fact, is that she ignores the lady of the house, Mrs. Winifred Banks (Glynis Johns), with whom she never shares a significant scene. She evidently doesn’t take Mrs. Banks’s political activism seriously. Mrs. Banks is a saucer-eyed, doll-faced “suffragette,” copiously satirized, whose opening number is about the silly thrill of feminine civil disobedience. “She was carried off to prison!” she trills, of a friend. “Singing and scattering pamphlets the whole way!”
The movie does dramatize the unavoidable proximity of middle-class children to the kind of demimonde types - hippies, hobos, loners - who disproportionately get involved in children’s entertainment. But the makeshift populist politics of the movie, in which the working-class figures enlighten the others and then discreetly vanish, come in second to its hallucinatory aesthetic: the combination of live action, music-hall numbers, animation, stop-action, stop-motion, wirework, Disney’s elaborate audio-animatronics, and set design that combined images from Monet and Broadway’s candy colors.
I have never read a move review (if that wat it was intended to be) that so thoroughly removes the imagination and whimsy from the moviegoing experience only to replaces it with analytical trash psychology.
