Bushy: The wind sits fair for news to go to Ireland,
But none returns. For us to levy power
Proportionable to the enemy
Is all unpossible.
After slogging through King John I wasn’t looking forward to another history play, but Richard II was surprisingly good, Simpsons references and all. Apart from all the bits with nobles yelling at one another and throwing down their gages, which made me feel like the floor must have been covered in plums.
Categories: shakespeare · tv
So did anyone else notice that Christian Bale’s ultra-butch Batman voice sounds almost exactly like GOB Bluth from Arrested Development?
Romania sorry, I don’t remember you
UK a serious entry! Still bombed
Albania I don’t remember Albania either
Germany “redhead”, get a better wig
Armenia nice tassels on the dress
Bosnia-Herzegovina knitters, dork and apple tart
Israel nice arms, high-pitched voice
Finland we Rock! better than Lordi
Croatia gosh that dancer is limber
Poland a string quartet: bad sign
Iceland what’s with the pink shoes?
Turkey but we Rock better still!
Portugal the wind-machine is cruel
Latvia were there really Baltic pirates?
Sweden man or plastic surgery disaster?
Denmark Like Racey, except not racey
Georgia the singer is blind, perhaps
Ukraine Shady Lady’s box-o’-boys
France your beards won’t save you
Azerbaijian angels versus devils! Good falsetto
Greece seems like a nice girl
Spain from a kids’ show, right?
Serbia 2007’s mannish girl was better
Russia charisma! A fiddle! Ice-dancing!
Norway nice blondes in midnight blue
So The IT Crowd second series seems to have settled into variations on almost gay panic jokes, you know, the one where the straight guys are acting like they’re a married couple, either that or there’s a gay guy who doesn’t realise he’s gay even though he’s every gay stereotype, which makes it OK to laugh at the stereotypes, apparently.
But. The one with the German cannibal who plays the cello reminded me of the old trope (I first noticed it in Silence of the Lambs but I suspect it dates back to Dracula or something) that a love for classical music denotes a particularly hyperintelligent form of Evil. Remember those ABC Classical collections called Swoon which are aimed at people who want to be all pre-Raphaelite and rapt etc? Well, what about a series of pop-classics for people who aspire to being an evil genius? Some Mozart, the fourth Bartok string quartet, bit of Shostakovich, Also Sprach Zarathustra. I think I’m onto something here.
C got me the new Twin Peaks box set for Christmas: I watched the last episode last night. When it was first on air my attendance was patchy, although less so than I thought, because I remembered bits from most of the first series. It was the sort of thing I would watch if it happened to be on at another person’s house, and I will admit that I pretended to like it a little more than I actually did in order to impress girls. Which is pretty funny since one of the things that made me uneasy about the show was the way its cameras adore its cast of improbably gorgeous women. It only goes to show how good I used to be at thinking up stupid reasons for not enjoying things which are excellent.
It’s trite but still fun to think of the debts which later shows owe to Twin Peaks:
Northern Exposure = Twin Peaks – Silence of the Lambs
The X-Files = Twin Peaks + The Twilight Zone – (artistry + David Duchovny’s dress)
Buffy = (Twin Peaks + vampires) * fanfic
Lost = Survivor + Twin Peaks / 4
Earth’s Moon floating in the sky of an alien planet, the shapes as familiar and as remote as those of one’s own face in a mirror.
It’s the most beautiful sf image I can remember seeing on tv as a kid. It justifies everything about this show. Yes, everything, even the outfits that make most of the guys look paunchy, and that one episode which terrified the living crap out of me when I was about eight, the one with the wiggly alien thing that ate people and left their corpses all smouldering and covered with cobweb stuff.
Also, the theme song is a total funky freakout.
I only watched the pilot on the DVD I rented, so I don’t know if the image of the Moon in the sky actually looked any good; I don’t think it could live up to my expectations.
I don’t know if it actually is one of the reasons why American’s didn’t watch the Oscars – I actually think it’s more that people guessed, correctly as it turned out, that the gags would be lacklustre on account of the writers’ strike not giving them enough time in which to write twenty and then throw the least funny nineteen away – but Joseph Kugelmass’ blog post contains a pretty good critique of the somewhat hysterical masculinity of both There Will Be Blood and No Country For Old Men.
Admittedly, the Coen Bros. did better than Anderson: we have Llewelyn’s wife and her hilariously grumpy mother, as well as a miscellaneous woman who manages the trailer park where Llewelyn lives. These women are the only characters who refuse to play Anton’s games of death—the trailer park woman won’t give Anton information, and Carla Jean won’t flip a coin for her life.
I really liked No Country For Old Men but Anton’s existential coin-tossing broke my suspension of disbelief, more than his hairstyle; where did this guy get his Psychopath Certificate, at the Jorge Luis Borges campus of the School of the Americas or something, I found myself thinking.
A lot patchier than I remembered, but the good bits are still good. What I really want to know is this: did anyone – and I didn’t, even at the time, when I was fourteen, and pretty good, if I may say so, at convincing myself that things were hilarious, even if they weren’t – ever think Mike the Cool Person was funny?
APEC “rubbish blog politics” special edition, part IV
Or maybe it’s me that doesn’t have a sense of humour anymore, because I don’t find much of The Chaser’s War on Everything to be very funny. I can’t tell the cast members apart – they don’t really have different on-screen personas, and there’s very little acting or performance on the show, not even the elementary revue-level acting found in its predecessors at the ABC like The Late Show – so it feels to me like it’s never really getting off the ground. And there are no girls, which makes it seem a bit old-fashioned.
That thing they did where they delivered a Trojan horse to various places around Sydney made me giggle, though. Perhaps I need more silliness and fantasy in my satire.
I didn’t get into Æon Flux (the animated series, not the live-action movie) when it was new, partly because it was on too late on SBS and I kept forgetting to watch it, but mostly because I dismissed it as fanboy porn.
I was wrong; it’s a beautiful, dreamlike, creepy, literate work of animation, and the most enjoyable piece of metafictional riffing on action, plot and character since Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius stories. In other words, it’s high-quality, intelligent fanboy porn.
