All TV is Better If You Don't Understand It

Today I am watching France's Direct8 network via Roku box. This is a channel that I took the trouble to load because my girlfriend is learning French. I myself took a little French in high school, then sensibly abandoned it because, you know, there are no French-speakers in SoCal except for French students.

Still, I've retained just enough to have some idea of what I'm watching, which is why the show that's on now Présumé Innocent, makes some sense to me. It's a realité/news show telling the story of a controversial crime, apparently. They have reenactments, they have interviews. Does it matter what they're actually saying? No. What matters is whether I'm being made to decide if the guy is innocent or not. To their credit, I'm not sure where they're trying to steer me on this one. So far.

This may be a better way to learn French than our previous strategy, which was watching classic French Movies on Hulu. The very predictability of commercial TV makes translation easy. It's one thing to watch Hiroshima Mon Amor and pick out what the hell is going on. Even if you do speak the language, that one is impossible. On the other hand les Beouf-Carottes, a detective series about a grizzled veteran cop and his young impulsive partner, is so predictable that you already know the ending five minutes in. You can work on understanding the words instead.

On the other hand, I don't envy my girlfreind trying to pick out sensible phrases in the commercials. French commericals look exactly like ours, though they lean heavily towards yogurt products. But I know from OUR commercials that you'll get a phrase like "it's health-licious!" once in a while. How can you tell something like that from a real word? It's a minefield.

Over the weekend there was a good, solid TV movie about a horrible truck crash in a Madrid resort town. Based on a true story, it was fascinating to watch. Not because the incident was so telegenic, but because you got perspective on how to tell a story like that. After all the actual crash (it blew a tire and roared onto a crowded beach, where it exploded) only took about a minute of time in real life. So what do you do with the rest of the movie? You make up characters of course, and pretend they were there, and show how the crash changes their lives. It was like a cute little French low-budget Earthquake. I'd see it again if I could remember the name.

Liberal Media Outrage - Hank Williams Jr. Fired!

It's official - apparently appearing in a drunken rambling live television interview and comparing the president to Hitler IS enough to get you knocked off a lucrative royalties-saturated gig in an unrelated field. Hank Williams Jr. is out! 

Tea Party nation demands that you stop watching Monday Night Football. Football has a liberal bias!  Perhaps they will devise their own football, using patriot-styled uniforms and no dusky players. Maybe they can call it the TPFL. 

Good news though! From the Tea Party Nation link:

Hank Williams, Jr. is rumored to be thinking about running for the US Senate in Tennessee. As a Tennessean, all I can say is, “Run Hank Run!”

I see a LOT more money coming in for Mr. W. Jr. Can you say, "HankPac?" Hey it worked for Sarah Palin. If he doesn't run, he can always go the Charlie Sheen route and make his money back in frivolous lawsuits.

Can't We Fix This With CGI?

I don't feel like addressing Steve Jobs yet, but remember if it hadn't have been for the iPhone, all cel phones would look like this. (Of course they wouldn't. I just said...!)

Important Thinking From The Other Blog

Skippy the Bush Kangaroo - what did he MEAN?

Daypart Phenomenon

This weekend SNL put out this very effective takedown of Fox And Friends, the Fox News morning show. And while I buy the premise, which is that the hosts are clueless and the show plays to the lowest common denominator, you can't say this is a thing limited to Fox. I am struggling to find evidence of a morning news show on radio or television that isn't pitched at a 5th grade level.

All Things Considered! Okay, that was easier than I thought. Now try to come up with two.

I am aware of the SNL parody because I heard an excerpt of it on the Stephanie Miller Show, which they will freely admit is as stupid as it comes. If you want less biased stupidy in the Los Angeles Area, there's always KTLA (Tribune) or KTTV (Fox) in addition to the networks. But the factor they all have in common is the viewer is assumed to be an idiot. And don't get me started on Morning Zoo radio programs, which strain to find enough offensive material to fill 3 hours five days a week.

What is it about the morning that makes media people assume we'll be unable to take mature evening-news-type news? It's a serious question. I assume that the ratings are high for these shows, so obviously we're all eating it up, but why? Why only the morning?

Hatching a Weatherman

I'm scooping Harry Shearer! An occasional feature on his Le Show radio program is the reading of especially egregious corrections to newspaper articles, usually from the LA Times. Well, I just sent this one to him. It concerns an article about Mark Kriski, KTLA weatherman who was missing from the airwaves last month due to a prolonged bout with pneumonia. Here are the corrections, one after the other.

[Corrected at 3:15 p.m.: A previous version of this post incorrectly stated that Kriski had been incubated for four days, rather than intubated.]

[Corrected at 3:34 p.m : A previous version of this post incorrected stated that Kriski was intubated for four days, instead of two weeks.}

Bonus points for the curly bracket, rather than square bracket, that ends the second correction!

An Angle On The Sheen Story I'm Comfortable With

I didn't want to go near this story when it was about an actor's meltdown. It's like someone asked me today, "did you see that video where Charlie Sheen...(whatever he did THIS time) and I said no, I don't watch Charlie Sheen videos. I let other people tell me about them. It's quicker. If I though Charlie Sheen was actually melting down, I'd just ignore him. But here's what I think Charlie Sheen IS doing.

In the first move of what could be a long legal battle, Charlie Sheen has sued Warner Bros. and "Two and a Half Men" co-creator Chuck Lorre for $100 million plus punitive damages over his termination on the hit television show.

Mr. Sheen's lawyer, Hollywood firebrand Marty Singer, filed the lawsuit on Thursday in Los Angeles Superior Court.

A spokesman for Warner Bros., a unit of Time Warner Inc., declined to comment.

In the suit, Mr. Sheen alleges that Mr. Lorre decided to fire the actor because he wanted to work on other television shows and before Mr. Sheen's public antics.

Citing his recent behavior, Warner Bros. on Monday terminated Mr. Sheen's contract, which according to people familiar with the matter pays him about $2 million an episode, including his share of "back-end" profit like syndication. But in the suit, Mr. Sheen also alleges that the studio's firing of the actor, even for those circumstances, would be in violation of California law.

The suit also states that Mr. Sheen is pursuing claims "for the benefit of the entire cast and crew to get paid for the balance of the season's 24 episodes."

Yes I know, suing a company for $100 million is entirely constistant with the insane behavior that Sheen has been exhibiting. But go with me on this. Say you're making a huge amount of money on a show, and you want out because you're tired of it, but the last time you tried to leave they just offered you a little more money? Why not burn your bridges this time and get a huge windfall besides?

I'm not saying Sheen isn't on drugs. Of course he is. But this whole public breakdown has the look of strategy in it to me. This is why I whenever I see Sheen (or have his antics described to me) I hear that Alec Baldwin line in my head. To recap, it's from Malice, in which Baldwin plays a surgeon on trial for malpractice and on the witness stand he says "You say I have a God complex? Let me tell you something. I am God." In the movie, the malpractice suit is part of a long con.

Same thing people! And duh - winning!

(h/t Hang A Lantern On It, where I posted this first)

Misjudging the Opposition

I spent a considerable amount of energy yesterday fighting a crazy talking point. Hat tip to Warner Todd Huston!

"Obama Misspells Libya on Twitter Feed "

This is not a major issue, but it got into my craw. Normally I have a voluminous craw but somehow this stuck noticably in it, among the rest of the stuff. I think I was just fed up with what I see as the whisper campaign of half-truths and out and out lies. The thing that bothered me about this is, obviously, Obama doesn't write the twitter feed. I wanted to stop this one before it spread like wild fire and a whole nation of Republicans carried around an image in their heads of a stupid drooling Obama, who can't run the country because he can't even spell Libya.

I tried to get Huston to admit that Obama doesn't write the twitter feed, I argued with his Facebook followers, I made a troll of myself. And for all the wrong reasons.

What they made me realize, withough actually dropping the facade, is that they are all in on the joke. Of course Obama doesn't write his own twitter feed. Of course he wasn't born in Kenya. Of course Democrats aren't just like the Nazis.

The RNC talking points that I so vigorously fight here are, for the most part, a bunch of inside jokes that they won't 'fess up to, because that kills the punchline.

If it was a mystery why all the leading minds in the party seem to be entertainers instead of politicians, there's your answer. They have given up on solving the nation's problems. Sure they think things might be slightly better if conservatives ran everything, but the first six years of Bush taught them that also leads to crashing disappointment.

Conservatives are bitter cynics now, who are so bereft of hope that even the laws they propose are for fun - sometimes a parody of Democrat laws, like the one that would require all South Dakotan's to carry guns the way that they all have to buy health insurance; sometimes self parody, like the one that would allow child labor. But the one thing they aren't bothering with, it appears, is crafting laws to make life better for constituents, because they believe they are powerless to do so.

So I guess what I learned from this episode yesterday is for a default position, assume that what a conservative is telling you is a joke. Just clap them on the back and say, "Good one!"

(PS, One of Warner's tweet's from today: Drudge hit my Obama misspells Libya story today:... http://fb.me/SXYi3d3p I love it when a joke goes viral! Good one!)

They're Tryin' to Kill Me Jimmy!

Stuart Margolin as Angel, just to shore up the quote in the title

I have had a rough week. Sunday night I noticed the hot water had vanished in my apartment. No hot water! Rescue forces have replaced the heater but it's still only gradually returning to normal. I only have lukewarm water.

Meanwhile I come home last night to discover that the nerve center of my life is also down. My DSL modem has failed! ZOMG ZOMG ZOMG ZOMG ZOMG ZOMG ZOMG ZOMG ZOMG ZOMG ZOMG ZOMG !!

As it happens, I have backup systems - my iPhone, the computer at work, Starbucks. I guess I have access to hot showers too, because of the gym membership, but this internet thing is driving me nuts. It's not just my computer, you know. Though that's a problem (almost everything I do on the computer hooks into the cloud somehow, and what's worse my printer is connected via Wi-Fi so I can't print) the TV and BluRay player are also internet-enabled. For some reason, my TV has decided that it's an hour later than it was a couple days ago, because it's not getting its time from a server online.

And remember, without a constant supply of new material from blogs and internet radio, my source of home amusement is television. And I DON'T HAVE CABLE. Why would I, right? Television is different than the internet. If someone says something stupid on TV, you can't answer back to them. You can't save funny screen grabs and email them to your friends. Ads show up whether you click on them or not. And without cable, it's almost impossible to find porn. I think it's pretty obvious now that Mubarak sealed his own doom when he shut down the internet in Egypt.

Someone report this whole blog to this guy, willya? I can't.

Thank God Trader Joe's is still open so I can still get Organic Kona Whole Bean Coffee. I suppose my grinder will go down next!

Some Catching Up to Do

Egypt: See? You can do regime change without spending 3 trillion dollars or killing Americans!

Chris Lee: Shouldn't have resigned. Obviously his marriage is in trouble. His personal life is messy. If we fired everybody who had that problem, unemployment would be closer to 80%. If he was stealing, or trying to pass laws against Craigslist, maybe I'd be singing a different tune; but this shirtless texting has nothing to do with one's ability to govern.

CPAC: It pains me to say this but I think dissention in the ranks is good for the Republican party. When they agreed on everything all the time they wound up going to some pretty nutty places instead of putting the brakes on. A little booing makes them stronger. And if that's how they become stronger, great. I have no quarrel with the sensible Republicans, just the extremist ones. Protest mitigates extremism.

I used to complain that there was no difference between the two parties; now I see that time as the Golden Age.

LA KARAOKE CAST: You haven't heard of this, because they haven't got it off the ground yet. My favorite Karaoke outfit Seize the Mic Entertainment was experimenting last night with U-Stream, potentially making my performance of Spandau Ballet's True available to Tunisians. I'm still on the fence with this one, even though I totally rocked True. They promised me they will allow shy singers to opt out, because after all anything that goes on the internet is potentially forever trapped in digital amber. Even if no one is watching live, that don't mean they won't later. And if you think a picture of Brent Favre's junk is bad for a career, imagine a wobbly rendition of New York New York. Anyway, it's moot as of right now because they couldn't iron out the kinks by the time I left. Which is a shame because, did I mention? I totally rocked True.

My Five Most Average Films Of 2010

Not in any particular order, these are the least notable movies of last year, not counting the ones I can't think of.

SEX IN THE CITY 2
PRINCE OF PERSIA: THE SANDS OF TIME
DINNER FOR SCHMUCKS
TOOTH FAIRY
GULLIVER'S TRAVELS

Oh No, She's Already Quit THIS Too

Maybe I'm just being paranoid, but it seems to me that this sequence from Sarah Palin's Alaska may not contain any actual Sarah Palin. Back to the camera the whole time, it would be easier to dub her voice in afterwards. Watch and tell me I'm wrong.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Josh Fruhlinger is right - even if this looks like the greatest single panel of Mark Trail that will ever be, how can we be sure that they won't top it somehow next week? Sky's the limit boys!

...And They're Not Talkin'

All right, now it's getting hilarious.

HOST: Do Republicans need to articulate what you would do in power, as opposed to simply campaigning against what the President’s done?

MCCONNELL: I think we clearly do need to make sure Americans know what we would do and we’re gonna make that announcement in late September so the voters will have an opp…

HOST: But you have an opportunity right here to spell it out.

MCCONNELL: Yeah but I think I won’t scoop myself. We’ll be making that announcement in late September.

"We have great ideas to get America out of the mess it's in! And you'll love them! And THAT'S WHY WE'RE HIDING THEM UNTIL A MONTH BEFORE THE ELECTIONS!" It's exactly the same strategy that movie studios use when they have a movie that they just know you'll love - refuse to screen it for critics before it opens.

Pinched Nerve Viewing Diary

I suffered all last week with a pinched sciatic nerve. It's kind of like having a perpetual leg cramp. Anyhow, part of the strategy for dealing with this injury was to keep off my feet as much as possible when I could, during the weekend. I ordered groceries online and had them delivered, for example. But also I took advantage of my monster television in a big way. Below, a look at what I used to distract myself from the horrible, debilitating pain.

Saturday

HEROES, Season 4 episode 1- Having lost track of Heroes shortly after season 3 started, I was pleased to see that a: series creator Tim Kring seems to have backed off the strategy of a major premise-shift per episode and b: this season involved creepy Carney folk. Of course as I watch I know that the show is already doomed (it was canceled last month) but that makes it better as far as I'm concerned. This stuff is just easier to take if there's a light at the end of the tunnel.

OMNIBUS: JAQUES TATI - Earlier in the week I took another crack at PLAYTIME, the world's most difficult comedy; the BD release of it includes an episode of a BBC documentary series when Tati is interviewed about his body of work. With the accent, that man was incomprehensible.

BAD BIOLOGY (2009, Frank Henenlotter, Dir) Kind of the best way to describe this movie, if there IS a way to describe it, is that it's a grind house take on the erotic thriller. Henenlotter has been out of action for a while but is known for BASKET CASE and FRANKENHOOKER, two worthy additions to the exploitation genre. In this case, it's the story of a sex-obsessed woman born with 7 clitorises (is there even a plural for that?) and an accelerated reproductive system who is desperate to find a man to keep up with her unusual needs. Meanwhile across town, a boy has somehow developed his penis into an over-sized drug-craving monster that literally has a mind of its own. Like any good romantic comedy, they don't meet until the last act, and by then a considerable number of the people they know are dead or insane. The acting and dialogue are pretty good, much better than they need to be for a movie of this calibre.

MON ONCLE (1958, Jaques Tati, Dir) More Tati. As I had assumed, the director's work just prior to PLAYTIME is a lot more assessable and covers the same theme - it's about the way we construct gadgets and environments for ourselves that circumvent human nature, then fight with them. The central character is not M. Hulot (Tati himself) but an ultra-modern house of the future in which he is staying. Amusing, though it helps to be a silent movie fan. Especially Keaton.

GHOST WHISPERER - Stupid show, but it looks gorgeous in hi-def 240hz.

THE THIRD MAN -(1949, Carol Reed, Dir) Great film, needs more Welles.

Sunday

ALTERED STATES (1980 Ken Russell, Dir) I had bought this movie as a package deal from a going-out-of-business video store and finally had the time to watch. It was exactly as I remembered it, a weird combination of dazzling and stupid. Good to see William Hurt playing at the top of his intelligence, the polar opposite of his part in BROADCAST NEWS. Chiefly this movie gets its energy from rubbing two sticks together: Paddy Cheyefsky, the extremely wordy writer of NETWORK and MARTY, and Ken Russell, the anything-for-an-image director of TOMMY and LIZTOMANIA. Every single frame you can feel them wrestling for control of the project. Wrestling nude in the tall grass, a la WOMEN IN LOVE.

HEROES SEASON 4 EPISODES 2-3 - Why not? Had time to kill.

EYES WIDE SHUT (1999 Stanley Kubrick, Dir) This gets better with every viewing; its a pity that every viewing takes 2 and a half hours. Still, always keep in mind that it is a comedy and you'll find stuff to enjoy in it. I'm also pleased to discover that my copy is the unrated international version, which did NOT have extra people matted into the orgy scene to block the sex. Somebody (Roger Ebert, probably) pointed out that doing this to change the rating from NC-17 ironically made it easier for children to see this movie; and simulated sex notwithstanding NONE OF IT should be seen by children. Above all else, this is a movie about a guy who gets so angry that his wife considered extramarital sex that he spends a night not having extramarital sex. Haha!

Saint Elsewhere

I just finished watching the Betty White episode of Saturday Night Live here at work. iPhones are a modern miracle! Anyway, kudos to SNL and our lady of TVLand for pulling off the first 90 minutes of that show where everything worked. Not a clunker in the bunch. And with typical paradoxicality for a host who is a venerable institutuion, they pushed more envelopes than the USPS. Bada-bing, bada boom!

SNL is of course a live show, which makes it as current as is possible. But seeing Betty work her salty magic on it only reminded me that most of the media that I consume is very, very old. I don't know how I fell into this pattern, but look at what I've been listening to/watching in the last couple of days, and these are very typical days for me.

Netflix: Danger Man AKA: Secret Agent, Patrick McGoohan's spy show from the early 60s, in glorious black and white. Or should I say, shades of grey. Also atop the BD player, the complete Prisoner series. I bought that one! Oh and In A Lonely Place, the Bogart movie.

Internet radio: Dragnet, Suspense, Broadway Is My Beat, The Jack Benny Program, Lights Out et al; I may be the only person alive right now who idolizes Elliot Lewis. Also Intoxica (pre-british invasion garage rock) The Kitsch Niche (pre-star-wars novelty records) The Beyondophonic Action Hour (defies description but it's olllllld) and Technicolor Web of Sound, which plays psychedelia.

Televsion: two things: Life With Elizabeth, a failed sitcom from the fifties starring Betty White (man was she hot) and Dr Who, the episode which aired just a few days ago in England. Our time lord friend here breaks the pattern, but suggests another one.

The one thing all this material has in common is that it's everywhere that I'm not. While everyone else watches American Idol or Lost, which is "escapist" fare, I'm so escapist that I can't even stand this century. Cause for pride, or therapy? Beats me.

Meanwhile

Since I'm pretty depressed about the way the Senate version of the health care bill is shaping up, I'm going to write about something else. I will say that normally, I consider congress the idiots and senate the smart ones, so this is doubly depressing. Because now, it's clear Obama IS the one - the only man in Washington with brains.

Meanwhile:

Guy robs a bank, then mails the money back. Now that's a little passive-aggressive, dontcha think?

Roy Disney dies. I am almost prepared to forgive him for The Black Hole. Get back to me in a few years.

I have been cast as "Smith" in the West Valley Playhouse's production of Agatha Christie's Murder On The Nile. Any day spent above ground is a good day; but if I'm using my British accent it's even better. We go on at the end of January.

Dog without hind legs walks erect! Can human/animal hybrids be far behind?

Costco removes tomatoes from the shelves for Sara Palin visit. Considering recent spikes in the sales of rock salt and teabags, I think Costco missed a splendid marketing opportunity.

When There Are No More Stats In Hell, The Dead Will Walk The Earth

Ever wonder why zombies want to eat brains? So they can prevent strategizing like this.

Working with a professor and two other graduate students, Munz built a mathematical model of a city of one million residents, in which an outbreak occurs when a single zombie arrives in town. He based the speed of zombie infection on the general rules you see in George Romero movies: after getting bitten, people turn into zombies in 24 hours and sometimes don't realize what's happening to them until they change.

When he ran the model on a computer, the results were bleak. "After 7 to 10 days, everyone was dead or undead," he says. He tried several counterattacks. Quarantining the zombies didn't work; it only bought a few extra days of survival for humanity. Even creating a "cure" for zombification led to a grim result. It was possible to save 10 to 15 percent of the population, but everyone else was a zombie. (The cure in his model wasn't permanent; the cured could be rebitten and rezombified.)

Turns out the only thing that worked was smacking the zombies down quickly and early. Word to the wise, people!

(h/t Boing Boing)

Polical Souvenir Curiosity of the Day

Sweet Jesus, what IS this?

The gargoyle McCain doesn't make things any better.

It's Jonathan Coulton's Birthday!

In honor of it, this piano medley of most of his best songs.