Jane Lynch wins the Emmy for Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy for Glee.
No one else has a chance. She's so good it's ridiculous.
"Finding a hairstyle that doesn't make you look like a lesbian."
Showing posts with label television: the opiate for the masses.. Show all posts
Showing posts with label television: the opiate for the masses.. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 09, 2009
Lock of the Year
Sunday, December 07, 2008
If Lorne Michaels is still alive
MAKE JORMA TACCONE A CAST MEMBER OF SNL.
He's a writer and was hysterical in the classic digital short last night. Dude is a genius. If you haven't already, go rent Hot Rod and focus on Kevin. Hilarious.
Monday, November 17, 2008
Sunday, September 07, 2008
Russell Brand is funny
I always appreciate an emcee who goes a bit further than his audience or producers would like. And his hair looks like a 1985 Jersey skank in a camaro.
Also, his columns on the Premiership in the Guardian are usually extremely interesting and well written.
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Random Thoughts Not About Football Necessarily
Peter King style!
1. I think the pitch for the most recent Old Navy ad campaign was this: It's Christmas at Zoolander's apartment. Too bad a gas fight didn't break out.
2. Radiohead's In Rainbows is their most enjoyable album since OK Computer.
3. I still think there's a sociology thesis to be written on the role of race and the demographics of the audience in the selection of America's Next Top Model. But let that not cloud my congratulations to Poor-Man's Rihanna!
4. This weekend Shannon Sharpe told me the weather in Cleveland was "treach-you-us".
5. Speaking of terrible speaking, on the E! True Hollywood Story for "Hip Hop Wives", an editor for Jet magazine used the word "jury" multiple times when I believe she meant "jewelry". It's good to know that editing a major magazine with a wide circulation doesn't require pronunciation skills.
6. It took me two weekends, several hours, and three trips to Target to complete the job of hanging Christmas lights. It was here that I sensed the following conflicting/in perfect harmony emotions:
(a) dammit, why do these lights break so damn easily with just a single staple through the main line!
(b) great! these lights are on sale for just $2 a box!
I'm an idiot.
7. Cheers to Sam Adams for brewing a mass-produced cranberry lambic. OK, not exactly a true lambic, but it's kind of/sort of close. And at least the attempt gets some points in my book. Thumbs up for their cream stout, too.
8. If there's one thing in this world that is true, it's that it wouldn't be a Lemon party without old Dick.
9. Brett Favre is SI's Sportsman of the Year. Here are better options:
(a) Glenn McGrath. If the choice is an aging statesman, why not choose this guy (who plays in the sport with the largest worldwide audience this year)? In his final international cricket appearance, the 2007 Cricket World Cup, he was named Player of the Tournament, led the tournament in wickets (setting a record for most wickets taken in a single World Cup), topped the record for all-time wickets taken, and just so happened to lead his Australian team to their (another record) third-straight World Cup victory. He was named World Player of the Year at age 37 (quite old for the sport). If Favre is having a great autumn, McGrath was inconceivably great.
(b) Roger Federer. OK, let me just say this: It is absolutely ridiculous what Federer has done in the sport of tennis over the last few years, and this year very well might've been his best. Look at this year what he did in the major tournaments. Australian Open - defended his title, and DIDN'T LOSE A SINGLE SET IN THE ENTIRE TOURNAMENT (let me put that in perspective - the last man to do that in a Grand Slam event was Bjorn Borg in 1980). French Open - on his worst surface, he still made the final, losing in 4 sets to the best clay court player of this generation, Rafael Nadal. Wimbledon - won his 5th straight title (equaling Borg's record for the Open Era) in one of the best single game sporting events of the year, the 5-set beat-the-hell-out-of-each-other classic with Nadal. US Open - won his 4th straight title (a record for the Open Era), dropping only 2 sets the entire way (and beating world ranked 5, 4, and 3 consecutively, all in straight sets). In 2007 Federer set the all-time record (male or female) for consecutive weeks ranked #1 (he's topped the rankings since February 2004!). He's played in 10 consecutive Grand Slam finals, winning 8 of them. He won a second straight (and 4 of the last 5) Masters Series (year-end championship),. He also broke his own record for earnings in a season, becoming the world's first $10,000,000 earner. I think it's utterly ridiculous that Federer has never been named Sportsman of the Year. Nobody (yes, even Tiger Woods) is as good at his sport as Federer. I'm serious.
(c) Younis Mahmoud. Read the link.
10. I watched Hot Rod a second time, just to make sure I wasn't crazy about liking it. I think I may have even liked it more the second time (the dance punching in the woods is even funnier than I first thought, and the march/riot killed me). I pose this question to you: why isn't the band Europe held in as high regard as some of the other bands of the era? Do they not totally rule every bit as much?
Thursday, October 04, 2007
The natural pedantry returns
OK, there's that Comcast commercial where the guy has a blackened foot, sitting in what appears to be a mountain lodge with a fire burning. He calls some doctor or poison control and asks if the status of his foot has changed because now he's calling on Comcast digital voice, and the lady asks if he still got bit by a pit viper, he says yes, and she says his foot is still going to fall off.
I have a few questions...
1) Is the actor playing the victim of the pit viper bite Graham Beckel? He's been in a million things, but I remember him best as Dick Stensland, Russell Crowe's partner in LA Confidential. That guy's had a steady career as a character actor. Am I wrong to think he should be above a Comcast commercial?
2) OK, it's clear that the guy's foot is completely black. It appears that he's in a mountain cabin. There's a fire burning, and the men are all wearing flannel. Why did they use as his malady a pit viper bite? Pit Vipers are cold blooded, and hibernate in the winter, and can't really live in mountain climes. Plus, wouldn't frostbite be a more logical malady? Especially when it actually looks like frostbite, not a snakebite.
Yes. I pay far too much attention to things like this.
Friday, May 18, 2007
Let's talk about television for a minute
TV isn't something I frequently blog about, but recently I've seen a more than my fair share due to circumstance. So some cheers and jeers...
CHEERS to Human Giant. It's hit or miss, as all sketch comedy shows are. But when it hits, it's very funny, and when it misses, it's never as cringeworthy as most SNL sketches. Best of all, I just know they've got some classic sketches in them. Escalating Interview is right there.
JEERS to Grey's Anatomy and Desperate Housewives, for the same reason. Both of these shows have spent the last 6 months trying their damnedest to insult the viewers with moronic plot twists, when the soul of the show has completely disappeared. Remember when Desperate Housewives used to have a running mystery? First season, it was "why did Mary Alice kill herself?", second season was the Applewhites and the man in the basement and the disappearance of Zach Young. This season it was the Orson/ex-wife/crazy mother plot, but has anyone noticed that since Marcia Cross left for maternity leave, there isn't a mystery going on at all? There was a single episode where the lady had the body in the freezer. But that was a single episode. For the last 8 episodes, it's been love triangles and sleeping around. All soap opera. There used to be a cheekiness, sneakiness, creepiness about the show. Now, there's none of that. Just self-absorbed, terribly selfish women who care nothing about anyone but themselves. Watch the show through this prism: every motivation of every single character is due to selfish motives - and the plots of particular episodes and story arcs are driven solely by those selfish motivations. Grey's Anatomy is even worse in this regard. That show has never been about anything but selfishness. There isn't a single character on the show without this flaw. In every scene, in every episode, every bit of dialogue includes one or more of the characters acting like spoiled children. Yesterday's season finale was the epitome of this. In a scene that surely will be shown at next year's Emmy's, Sandra Oh's character breaks down after jilting her fiancee with an overwrought "I'm free!" In a season where her character encouraged, aided and abetted her fiancee's reckless endangerment of hundreds of patients' lives, ratted him out, caused him to lose a promotion, engaged in flirting with a former flame in front of said fiancee, and stood him up at the altar, we're supposed to feel any sort of empathy for her character? Really? And stunningly enough, that wasn't even the most selfish act of a character in the episode. The shit-or-get-off-the-pot dialogue between Dr. Shepard and Meredith Grey immediately before a wedding they were both in was a stunning piece of television. On one hand, we had McDreamy's passive aggressiveness (begun with his bragging about flirting in a bar with another woman) about how it's not his fault their relationship isn't working, and on the other hand we have Grey's incoherence - an inability to commit at all against her own shock and horror that McDreamy would look elsewhere - matched with incredulity that she might actually be at fault. Two characters that truly cared about him or herself, and didn't mind intentionally hurting the person they supposedly love in order to make themselves feel better about themselves. It was a shocking, horrifying scene to me. Simply because the selfishness was so palpable, so loathsome. It shocks me that so many people like that show. I find the morality of the characters on this show to be abhorrent.
on the other hand... CHEERS to Entourage, for the exact opposite reasons. Entourage's short season hasn't been spectacular, but it's been adequate, and when I compare Entourage to other shows that get buzz for people in my age group, I think it's very good. Compare Entourage to Grey's Anatomy or Sex & the City, as many are wont to. There's the natural tendency to look at the primary casts and think Entourage is a male show while the others are female, but I think the sensibilities of the various shows go far beyond that. As said above in regard to Grey's Anatomy and Desperate Housewives, and Sex & the City was, without a doubt, the single worst offender of the selfishness as plot device, the individual characters in all of those shows are interested only in themselves. Entourage is precisely the opposite. Not an episode goes by where one of the 4 main characters doesn't sacrifice or go out of his way to help out one of the others. Whether it's fixing up Drama's old Lincoln, or helping Turtle get a rare pair of shoes, or putting up every cent E has to help Vince buy the Medellin script, or Ari causing tremendous trouble with his wife by helping out Vince (who isn't his client) on Yom Kippur, everyone on the show is constantly doing things for others. It's a completely different sensibility. In the supposed "female" shows, the main characters drive the story by asking "what's in it for me", but in the "male" show, everyone is on the same team, and the plot is driven by how they work together in order to make all of their lives better (no matter how shallow their group desires might be, the key is that their "group" desires). And you know what, the characters on Entourage lead incredibly happy lives, while the characters in all the others lead miserable, self-involved, nothing's ever good enough lives. Working with others, and putting others' needs ahead of one's own, leads to good things for everyone. That's a theme I can get behind.
which brings me to... CHEERS to Lost. If I haven't written it before, I'll say it unequivocally here. Lost is the best show on television, by far. No other show has the depth, the detail, and the production quality of Lost. But more than any of that, the morality of Lost makes it the best on television. Lost, unlike other shows, rewards selfless, moral and ethical behavior, and severely punishes selfish, immoral and unethical behavior. Lost is a fantasy, but the societal laws that operate in reality apply on the crazy island far more realistically than on dozens of television shows that are set in supposedly realistic settings. Throughout the series, the one theme (among dozens) that continues to resonate the most with me is the idea of community vs. individual information as a resource. When characters keep information from one another, nobody benefits (and indeed, it costs them all). When characters share information with one another, solutions appear (even if new problems arise, the existing ones are solved). I used to look at the series as an allegory to technological advancement. Open source technologies available to many provide countless more opportunities for advancement (because multiple users bring specialized expertise and experiences that offer new uses for such technologies). Closely held technologies limit potential uses and advancements. On Lost, the show presents to us a world where we're all connected somehow - we just don't know it. If we'd communicate and work with one another, our connections might help us solve the problems we face. It's this idea that makes the show so powerful, yet so frustrating to many. It's intentionally frustrating. When particular characters conceal information from other characters, and the effect is that something bad happens, it is maddening to watch at times. But that's the point! When a particular character's insecurities or fears or shame causes him or her to hide something, that's selfishness, or at least weakness - and the show punishes the character for it. It's frustrating to watch someone punished for selfish behavior because on television we're so used to selfishness getting rewarded - Meredith Grey gets McDreamy, Carrie Bradshaw ends up with Big. But the point of Lost is that the punishment is appropriate - our frustration isn't with the punishment, it's the selfishness that is the underlying cause that we're frustrated with. The fearlessness of Lost to discipline its characters, when so many other shows let the characters act like spoiled brats, is what makes it morally and ethically powerful television.
And finally, CHEERS to Homer Simpson for his recent charity work, but JEERS to this rusty tailgate.
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