Saw the movie this weekend about the guy who turns into a dog and the other guy who bites people. Many thoughts (not the least of which is confirmation of my Vampires=secret absence only message, a correlation so obvious only an English 101 student could miss it), but I’ll focus on this one:
If vampires are immortal and have lived hundreds and thousands of years, why haven’t they ever invented anything?
As many of you know, I’ve spent years trying to crack into Hollywood with my “light” comedy about a Midwestern grain farmer who learns how to increase his production modestly through hard work.
Needless to say, the crass Hollywood machine would rather remake cheesy 80s films than take on something actually original! It’s been frustrating to say the least. Who doesn’t like grains? And what’s better than a “light” comedy–not so much laughing that you overdo it, but just enough to deliver a satisfying, pleasant smile?
Now, I come to find my idea has already been green-lit in North Korea under the lovely title “Echo Mountain.”
It’s not surprising that North Korea is ahead of us in terms of light comedy. They are a people known for their sense of humor, such as when they pulled off that irresistibly witty famine in the 1990s.
Anyways, if you want to know what Echo Mountain is about, here’s your movie poster straight from the PNK news release:
The light comedy encourages the people to turn out in making a fresh upsurge in their work.
I’d cast one of those Twilight kids in the lead. Merchandising pretty-much sells itself…(hello McGrain Meal).
Why these women owe their career to John Cheever.
A pretty comprehensive review of Sex in the City 2 that misses one, important fact: Sex in the City 2 was not an original screenplay, but an adaptation of a short story by John Cheever entitled: “The women who went to the desert and died there.” The film takes a few liberties with the plot (spoiler alert: only one of the women dies in the movie), but is pretty faithful to the story’s central concern, which is not actually about science fiction (as the referenced review brilliantly suggests), but rather a strange thought experiment that plagued Cheever throughout his life: If God is all-powerful, could he create a world so vapid even he couldn’t find meaning in it?
The question led Cheever to reject religion, but grow increasingly obsessed with shoes–it said he had over 725 pairs when he dies.
Could the girl from the Sonic commercials (not pictured) be off to bigger and better things?
It’s upfront season, where the TV Networks roll out their Fall lineups to impress advertisers, only to later renege on every program they presented in favor of cheaply produced reality shows about famous people you’ve never heard of getting drunk and yelling at less famous people you’ve also never heard of.
But for at least a week, there is the promise of new TV shows, each more promising than the next, and mostly combining concepts from previously popular shows. To review, the most tried-and-true TV formats are:
- Procedural dramas
- Criminal investigation shows
- Angsty shows about teenagers who may or may not be vampires but definitely are exasperated at the general state of everything
Having attended the upfronts for years in a former-life as a madvertising maven, I’ve come to understand the formula for a successful pitch, which is why for the last several years I’ve been desperately trying to get traction on this UNBELIEVABLE high-concept, that I imagine starring Rob Lowe and the woman who does the Sonic commercials.
I call it: LEGAL PROCEDURE CRIME LAB VAMPIRE.*
Here’s the premise:
A legal crime investigation procedural vampire drama with a twist. Rob Coneroy (Rob Lowe) was a high-priced prosecutor and also, somehow, a Crime Scene Investigator, who not only investigated the toughest, most unsolved murders in Washington D.C. using his uncanny memory (he can remember everything that has happened to him for the last 32 years), but he also prosecutes these same cases in the highest court in the land (other than the Supreme Court—this is like the next highest court). But when he falls for a super-sexy defense lawyer (Sonic commercial woman) who is also involved with politics and is a vampire, suddenly his world gets turned upside down. Now the two of them are taking Capital Hill by storm because they’ve been employed on opposite sides of a political controversy that threatens to take down the president, but will super-sexy defense lawyer vampire’s secret be safe once her former vampire lover (Tom Cruise) comes to town to advise the president? And what about the crazy gang of misfits at Coneroy’s law/forensic investigation office? They’re sure to be up to hijinks. Especially since one of them is really a robot. And when famous actor Tom Cruise (Hank Azaria) shows up, things start to really get out of control.
*The original title was LEGAL PROCEDUE CRIME LAB ANGEL, but that was before the Vampire bubble.
Why does this man owe Ezra Pound an apology?
This weekend while doing a bit of light reading, I discovered a SHOCKING revelation about a beloved TV show and it’s main character’s catch phrase (see fact 4). This led me to wonder what other strange pieces of TV trivia are out there that I’m unaware of. Such as the following:
-
When Jay Leno’s new primetime experiment began, I expressed my general ambivalence about the whole thing. As I said then, I find Jay Leno rather harmless, not hilarious by any means, but hardly any less un-hilarious than most everyone else in late night. It’s a genre predicated on their being nothing else on, so the bar is low. A few amusing jokes, maybe a good bit here and there, and some celebrity guests. That’s the formula and it has been unchanged since the late night genre began.
Now of course, Leno’s new primetime show has bomb, and he’s returning to late night, kicking his heir apparent Conan out after an inglorious couple month run. Leno’s getting killed in the press for how he’s handled this, with many focusing on a few components of the story:
1. That Leno promised this spot to Conan 5 years ago, then immediately took the spot back (Kimmel hit hard on this on Leno’s show)
2. That Conan is funnier than Leno
On point two, I don’t disagree. I like Conan way better than Leno. But the public, despite the vocal Conan defenders, clearly doesn’t agree. Conan’s ratings for the Late Night Show were way lower than Leno’s. More on that later.
As for the first complaint—I understand it, but it makes no sense. Do people understand that the Late Show is not Leno’s to give? He doesn’t own it. Naming his successor was nothing more than an NBC marketing ploy—at the very least NBC had to approve his choice, if it wasn’t there choice to begin with. It’s just logic—you can’t give what you don’t own. Leno doesn’t own the show, ipso facto etc.
So, if NBC is the bad guy—the ones that promised Conan a spot, than yanked it from him after a few short months, should our anger be directed at them? As the lowest-rated non CW network, they clearly deserve blame for such a sequence of terrible moves. But what move should they have made?
The situation is this. You have the Leno Show bombing in primetime, pissing off affiliates. Canceling it is a no brainer. Now, you have two options: First, let Leno go (his show is the one that bombed, right?), and keep Conan in Late Night. Or, do what they did and force Conan out. As a viewer, I prefer the latter, but it would have been a terrible move for an already struggling network. Because as much as I love Conan, his ratings were lower than Lenos when he was in that time slot. By losing Leno, you are basically downgrading your entire late night lineup. Your bombing in primetime and late night. Move Leno back and you at least salvage late night.
It’s just business. The same reason the best show ever got cancelled.
Maybe they should have been more patient with Conan—maybe he would have started pulling better ratings. But when you’re in last place in the ratings race, patience is a virtue that is hard to justify.
So did Late Night TV just get a lot unfunnier? Yes, unquestionably (though if Conan moves to fox as rumored, maybe not). But blaming Leno or NBC makes no sense. If anyone deserves the blame, it’s 20th century economist Simon Kuznets (he knows what he did).
If nothing else, this whole thing has finally made Jimmy Kimmel funny again.
As a follow-up to my previous review of Avatar, where I criticized the limits of 3D, provided a solution to post-Avatar depression, and praised the film as a model for successful military defense strategy in the future, there is one more item I want to address. That is, the films originality.
In winning multiple golden globes the other night, many praised the film for its daring originality, and how it reinvented what is possible in a movie-going experience. Whether the movie is great or not is one question, but on the issue of originality, more analysis is required. Let’s take a look at the film’s core premise:
A magical world populated with blue people who live in a secret, special place, is threatened by evil humans who want to do them harm for nefarious reasons.
Original? Or did I just perfectly describe the plot to the popular cartoon series, THE SMURFS? Yes, while some are suggesting Cameron lifted inspiration from some old sci-fi books, the truth is much more damaging, and obvious.
It doesn’t take much to see the blatant ways in which Cameron ripped off this classic fairy tale, making only minor cosmetic changes (the Navi are a lot bigger than the Smurfs, and Gargamel rarely flew in a missile launching, fighter jet, except, of course, for in the ill-advised final season where the producers tried to up the ante by giving Gargamel access to nuclear weapons. Incidentally, this paralleled heightened cold war tensions between the US and Soviet Union and many, to this day, read the cartoon as largely anti-Soviet propaganda, with Gargamel only a veiled caricature of former Soviet Premier Alexi Kosygin).
In the end, this is not the first time hit cartoons have been transformed into mega block-busters. In fact, Cameron’s previous mega-hit Titanic is largely understood as a re-imagination of the cartoon, The Snorks, a cartoon Cameron has called “the most important artistic achievement of the last 60 years.”
Just saw Avatar the other night. Everyone is raving about how amazing the 3D looks in this movie. Personally, I wasn’t impressed. What’s so special about 3D? I see it every time I open my eyes. When I go to the movies, I expect something better than what I see in the real world–if the real world was interesting, we wouldn’t even need movies.
That’s why I’ve written a sternly worded letter urging Cameron and other so-called technological innovators in the film industry to finally start delivering movies in 26 dimensions. Superstring theory tells us it’s possible that this many dimensions exist, and if they do, I expect nothing less in my sci-fi blockbusters. Just imagine how awesome those blue aliens will look in jaw-dropping 26 dimensions!
I think when we finally utilize all the available dimensions, 3D movies will look as dated as the hopelessly invisible 1D movies that were so popular in the early 20th century.
One bad thing about Avatar is apparently people are suffering from something called post-Avatar depression after coming out of the movie. Note to sufferers: You need to remember to remove your 3D glasses. Not only do they not work very well in the real world, they are blocking out much needed light, which is probably why you’re feeling so depressed.
As for the movie itself, there was much to like. While many find the love story compelling, for me what makes the movie successful is that it reminds us of an important historical lesson: Namely, that in a battle between a technologically superior military force and a local, primitive, indigenous culture, the indigenous culture will always win, not because their continued guerilla resistance will eventually wear down and tax the resources of the invading force, but because primitive weapons such as bows and arrows and magic are always superior to modern weapons.
That helps explains why the Native Americans were able to successfully thwart European invaders and protect the sovereignty of their casinos, a Gandhi-led India defeated the British empire using elephants and magic, the Ewoks defeated the Imperial Army by rolling logs at them, and the Bengal Tigers were finally able to unite and destroy all those hunters trying to make them extinct.
In history, the superior technological force will always lose the war because they don’t understand the power of angry animals and treacherous forest landscapes. That’s why instead of wasting so much money on these advanced super-bombers, we ought to be rigging our shores and national forests with complicated, elaborate booby traps, just like the kid in Home Alone did. Only then will we be able to defeat the race of super aliens and robot butlers currently plotting our destruction.
If Avatar teaches us nothing, I hope it’s that.
In part 17 of our series “Ranking Random Things I Think About While Trying to Fall Asleep,” WIF proudly presents an authoritative ranking of the SNL Weekend Update hosts. I realize there might be debate on some of these, but I assure you the rankings are not subjective and instead are based on objective (but at this time largely secret) criteria.
-
1. Kevin Nealon. Just solidly funny without any gimmicks . Perfect deadpan needed to pull of the job. So damn consistent, and I guess it probably helps that he held the job during one of SNLs most talent-rich period, with Dana Carvey, Sandler, Farley, Spade, Rock and the like surrounding him. My favorite line: According to researchers, the leading cause of pregnancy is still sex. The second leading cause? Sex twenty minutes later.
2. Chevy Chase. In truth, you watch the old shows and he wasn’t always that good. Or maybe even he wasn’t often that good. But he did it first and humor doesn’t age so well, but his best bits are still funny. And really, he did it first. And he’s Chevy Chase and you’re not, so there you go.
3. Tina Fey/Amy Poehler. A lot of people think that most woman aren’t very funny and they are totally right. What they forget is that most men aren’t very funny either. In any case, these two were better than anyone would have expected given how mediocre the cast was when they were holding down the job. This was a huge step forward for what had been a pretty bad run of Weekend Update hosts following the post-MacDonald meltdown.
4. Norm MacDonald. On any given night, he could be really, really good, or not so good. He had some good staffs working with him, and some bad, but when he would get on a roll, he might have been as funny as they get. And he reminded us that German’s love David Hasslehoff.
5. Dennis Miller. Before he was an unfunny MNF commentator, and an even unfunnier right wing dingbat, he was actually good at this.
6. Seth Meyers/Amy Poehler. Maybe this team should be higher. I think Seth Meyers is funny, even if others disagree. They had some classic moments like when Palin was on, but they also had some annoying bits like their “Seriously?” thing which was only a little funny at first and went down from there.
7. Tina Fey/Jimmy Falllon. Good news/bad news. Good news, this was our introduction to Tina Fey on-air, which lead to many great things like 30 Rock and the VP candidacy of Palin (few realize that Fey created the Palin character before Palin became the VP candidate and that really, Palin has forever since been trying to imitate the character Fey created, with mixed results). And then there is Jimmy, who sure found himself funny at least, laughing over every punchline. He’s better on his own show.
8. Jane Curtin. This is probably way too low, but she had to deal with being on the tale-end of the shows first good years, and she followed Chase which is tough. Really, it’s the bias of time that puts her down here, because looking back, she was pretty funny.
9. 1981-1985. God knows what happened in these dark, dark years. There were various foregettable anchors and sometimes no anchors and it was pretty bad all and all, but it can’t be last place. Oh no, that place is already taken.
10. Colin Quinn. The bottom of any Weekend Update list starts and ends with Quinn, who was really the only host to actually achieve not being funny on a regular basis. Everyone else on this list had moments of brilliance. Not so with Quin, who yelled his punchlines nervously and just reminded everyone how Norm MacDonald’s firing was a really, really bad sign for the show. These were some dark years, saved only by Mr. Will Ferrell.
The conventional wisdom goes something like this: At first, there was standard TV, largely dominated by formulaic sitcoms and hour-long dramas. Then, Reality TV started taking over around the turn of the century, and from that point on, it’s been “bye-bye” traditional sitcom, hello people you’ve never heard of eating bugs.
Reality TV (or as its producers prefer to call it—Unscripted TV—though both labels are equally misleading), offers an opportunity to indulge our voyeuristic impulses, while adding a dimension of unpredictability—without scripts, who knows what will happen.
In a traditional TV sitcom, it is unlikely that, for no good reason, the two co-stars will just sleep with each other, unless this is an integral plot point that’s been developed over many weeks. But in Reality TV, one night boozing and suddenly there’s a three-way in the shower. One of the things that makes “real life” drama so satisfying is the knowledge that it’s unscripted, which means there is no limit to what salacious things can happen. And just knowing they are (sort-of) real, gives it all an extra kick of intrigue.
And Reality TV is a lot cheaper to produce. Making it, so very attractive to networks.
All of which seemed to imply the days of the two act sitcom were at an end. And good riddance right, because if you’ve seen one episode of Family Ties, you basically can predict how any future episode will end (with the possible exception of when Alex gets hooked on diet pills-even Jesse Spanos didn’t see that coming).
But now, a funny thing has happened. As producers have discovered some of the limits of reality (i.e. it’s boring), they’ve become more and more, shall we say, “hands on” in shaping/editing/(scripting) storylines for so-called reality TV shows, so that now, watching an episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians (see previous blog post for explanation of why I would ever dream of doing this), I realized that it wasn’t reality TV that is displacing traditional sitcoms—it’s actually the other way around.
In other words, Reality TV is now more scripted, more formulaic, more predictable, than so-called “scripted” programming, employing the kind of conventional plot resolutions that make Leave it to Beaver look unpredictable and edgy.
Case in point, in the Kardashians episode I watched, Kris (the mother), gets her hand on some herbal male-enhancement pills from a friend. She decides to sneak them into her husband’s coffee to “spark” their love life. Having done this, she starts coming on to him and they engage in a lot of extremely long, love making sessions (all implied because we only see the closed door with the kids one by one knocking on it, asking when they’ll come out, until in a comic scene-ender, the dad slides his credit card under the door and tells them to go shopping).
Then, of course, comes the twist. One morning, Kris’s son accidentally gets the coffee meant for the dad with the herbal pill slipped into it. A few hours later, he has an erection that won’t go away (tee-hee). He has to be rushed to the doctor’s office. The doctor asks him if he’s taken and ED medication, which he has but he doesn’t realize it, so he says no. So they plan on sending him to the hospital for more tests, confused about why this could be happening.
This forces Kris to finally admit what she’s done in front of the whole family in the waiting room of the hospital. The husband and son are furious at the deception, but Kris explains that she only did it to rekindle their love life, and the husband explains that it wasn’t the pills that rekindled their love life, it was the fact that Kris was more amorous because she thought the pills would make him more interested in sex.
The misunderstanding is buried at a family dinner with some light humor and the episode wraps (there was a B story line too, equally formulaic, but that’s for another time).
I’m thinking if this storyline were proposed for a show like, Two and a Half Men, a show that is fairly formulaic (see my amazing spec of the show for an example of how formulaic works), it would have been dismissed as preposterous. But because it’s “reality” TV, they can get away with it. Kind of.
Which all leads to the conclusion that it’s only a matter of time before we get laugh tracks on reality TV shows and disclosures indicating that “Keeping Up with the Kardashians was filmed before a live, studio audience.”
And patient readers, I promise, no more Kardashians in this blog from here on out. Unless I get a job writing for the show…