Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Saturday, March 24, 2012
Friday, March 23, 2012
Thursday, March 22, 2012
Not sure exactly what this means
Alternate hard R and PG cuts on the DVD?
People who hate onscreen sex can rejoice in the release of "Games of Thrones"' first season on DVD. They no longer have to endure all that nudity to learn about the Lannister family tree, the Targaryen history with dragons or why Joffrey is an illegitimate heir to the throne. Released earlier this month, it methodically explains aspects of Westeros that the show breezes through en route to its next decapitation.
Sunday, March 18, 2012
Clive still likes movies
"During the week, I joined my little granddaughter for one of her regular viewings of the first Toy Story movie and I was reminded all over again that some of the programmes which television people would like to think wonderful are not so wonderful compared with the movies."More here.
Thursday, March 15, 2012
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
High praise from a geek:
Wil Wheaton, judging between two novels in the first bracket of the annual on-line "Tournament of Books", on "The Sisters Brothers":
The Sisters Brothers made me feel like I was sitting in a movie house in Red Dead Redemption, watching an episode of Deadwood that was written by Quentin Tarantino and directed by the Coen Brothers.
Monday, March 12, 2012
Friday, March 9, 2012
Maximalism in Pop Music
I love this. Leonard Cohen was mentioned reverently here a while back, and this is billed as his own favorite version of one of his signature tunes. It's also everything that makes crawl the skin of people who revere restraint and elegance above all other musical (if not literary) values. Lang seems never to have met a melodramatic impulse she didn't like. (Her version of Neil Young's "Helpless" is Wagnerian.) Plus, at this stage of her life and career she clearly doesn't give a shit; comes out on stage barefoot, in a bathrobe, looking like Zatoichi. A liberating spectacle.
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Monday, March 5, 2012
Pick your bracket
From the lit/sport website Grantland:
Asked to name the greatest Wire character of all time (let it never be said that Grantland does not ask the tough questions!), the Commander in Chief didn't hesitate: "It's gotta be Omar, right? I mean, that guy is unbelievable, right?"
.......
This gave us an idea. What if we actually did subject the key players of the Wire-verse to rigorous bracketological inquiry? If we played corner boys against dock workers, murder-polices against hoppers, and craven politicos against enigmatic not-actually-Greek human traffickers, in matchups as arbitrary and occasionally unjust as life and death on the mean streets of West Baltimore, would the king stay the king? This week, we're going to find out. And we're probably also going to make David Simon mad, again. Behold: Grantland's first-ever TV bracket. Thirty-two characters. Six days.
Too big to reproduce here.....
Sunday, March 4, 2012
John Munch and I agreed...
Words of wisdom from the early '90s cop show "Homicide," which I've been re-watching recently. A crucial evolutionary step from some of the guys who went on to create "The Wire."
Friday, March 2, 2012
The death of the episode
A long, sometimes obvious, sometimes subtle, analysis of current trends in television narrative centering on the move away from series episodes toward installments of longer works.
This change, which has been sneaking up on us for a long time now, suddenly seems more important than anything else that's been going on in movies and television this decade. Maybe we should start being more analytical about it....
Some quotes I liked:
It’s easy to blur the line between “episode” and “installment” if you’re blowing through an entire season of Breaking Bad over a single weekend. When doing this, thinking about how a certain episode works on its own becomes less relevant. Simply getting through the virtual stack of content becomes paramount, with the next episode literally moments away from appearing on your screen. Plowing through a single season in two or three sittings may feel thrilling, but it’s also shifted the importance of a single episode in terms of the overall experience.....
A television show is a living, breathing entity that represents a synergy of creative, cultural, and social forces that simply can’t be predicted five weeks out, never mind five years out. It’s not a book that can be rewritten before anyone can read it, or a film that can be reshot/re-edited before it screens in theaters. The cat’s out of the bag, for better or worse. Laying in groundwork for a massive payoff down the line is a terrible risk, one that comes with so little control as to be almost laughable.What can be controlled is a reaffirmation of the structural and narrative importance of a single episode. You don’t even have to construct a theoretical example of how to balance the needs of an episode with the needs of a season or series. FX’s Justified offers a master class in how to achieve both. Graham Yost and his writing staff have found the sweet spot where an episode has a shape unto itself while informing the larger 13-episode season and the ever-growing series, while at the same time focusing on world-building, something television is fantastic at doing. With a theoretically unlimited amount of episodes to fill, it’s smart to look at the environments in which shows operate and look under rocks and behind corners to see what might exist. Harlan feels three-dimensional, and though it’s self-contained, it also feels limitless in terms of story potential.
Thursday, March 1, 2012
Monday, February 27, 2012
School of Elmore
"Babe Ruth: Tremendous ballplayer. But he doesn't step to the plate. Because he's dead. You and I, on the other hand. We step to the plate."-- Gus Demitriou (Dennis Farina) in Luck Episode 1.5, written by David Milch and Scott Willson. 02/26/12, HBO.
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Tarkovsky, Dyer, Stalker....
The most exciting and instructive project of the last six months.... And you can do it, too.
Watch "Stalker" by Andrei Tarkovsky. Pay attention. Read Geoff Dyer's discursive, funny, charming, profound, scene by scene description of "Stalker", called "Zona: A Book About a Film about a Journey to a Room". Go back to watching movies completely refreshed and reinvigorated. (By the way, even if you don't read Dyer, "Stalker" is so deeply in the realm of the "weird", that it should have been included in Jeff VanderMeer's anthology. This is Tarkovsky's "At the Mountains of Madness".)
I could end up quoting the whole book here, since it touches so many of my own reactions to art and the world..... Too much typing, though. Try this:
Soon people will not be able to watch films like Theo Angelopoulos's "Ulysses' Gaze" or to read Henry James because they will not have the concentration to get from one interminable scene or sentence to the next. The time when I might have been able to read late-period Henry James has passed and because I have not read late-period Henry James I am in no position to say what harm has been done to my sensibility by not having done so. But I do know if I had not seen "Stalker" in my early twenties my responsiveness to the world would have been radically diminished.
"Ulysses' Gaze" was another nail in the coffin of the European art cinema (a coffin, cynics would say, made up entirely of nails) opening the floodgates to everything that was not art because anything seemed preferable to having to sit through a film like that..
Saturday, February 25, 2012
Martin Scorsese's great books list
Friday, February 24, 2012
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Friday, February 17, 2012
"Saul Bellow and I agreed..."
When the Women Come Out to Dance (Elmore Leonard)
- Highlight Loc. 3445-50 | Added on Friday, February 17, 2012, 06:51 PM
[Martin Amis:] I was recently in Boston visiting Saul Bellow, and on the shelves of the Nobel laureate, I spied several Elmore Leonards. Saul Bellow has a high, even exalted view of what literature is and does. For him, it creates the “quiet zone” where certain essences can nourish what he calls “our fair souls.” This kind of literature of the Prousto-Nabokovian variety has recently been assigned the label “minority interest.” There is patently nothing “minority interest” about Elmore Leonard. He is a popular writer in several senses. But Saul Bellow and I agreed that for an absolutely reliable and unstinting infusion of narrative pleasure in a prose miraculously purged of all false qualities, there was no one quite like Elmore Leonard.
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