January 2012
19 posts
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“There has never been a time in entertainment history when TV has been this much...”
– Dave Pell
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“Don’t yell and scream about how you’re losing business to piracy when your stuff...”
– Jonathan Coulton
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Did you ever notice that most of the bad guys on “The Rockford Files” where a suit and tie?
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“SOPA and PIPA will die but they’ll be replaced with something just as bad because lawmakers are stupid and producers are afraid of the future — a future that’s coming no matter what the entertainment industry does. For the money they are spending on lobbying, a design team could develop a new system that would make more money by exposing more content, not less, enabling new business...
“Time-Warner has called, and they want us all back on the couch.”
– Clay Shirky explains the history of media duplication, up to today.
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“I have a subterranean charm. Most aren’t able to see it right away.”
– La Femme Nikita
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A real time rumpus, with common heroes and uncommonly realistic heroics, in the “Nick of Time”.
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“House of Cards” mirrors its heartless protagonists too well: sorta interesting, but we just don’t give a shit.
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WatchThe Intergalactic Nemesis appeals to our love of old time radio drama, and mixed media. Ready for a 15 minute coffee break?
(excerpt from live at Dell Hall, Austin TX; via NPR.)
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The Scale of the Universe →
Conveying the cosmic scale of Everything is a challenge, when limited to a screen that humans can see. Here’s one interactive attempt, inviting you to ”zoom from the edge of the universe to the quantum foam of spacetime” on a single web page, by Cary & Michael Huang.
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“TV is chewing gum for the eyes.”
– Frank Lloyd Wright
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We’d be more interested to see “Stephen Fry in America” devote a full episode to every one of the 50 states, rather than breezing through each (huge) region in 59 minutes, devoting just a few minutes to one or two well worn stereotypes about each state. Alas, the breadth of geography and scarcity of running time guaranteed this travelogue’s shortcomings.
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Bob Mondello's Top 10 →
Making sure these are in our Netflix queue.
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Starting 2012 watching some documentaries we overlooked in recent years.
December 2011
15 posts
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“Dead Like Me” (2003) reaps your attention with an exemplary pilot episode.
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“Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows” is a middle school boy playing Texas Holdem with a Chess set.
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WatchRoman Coppola’s “CQ ” (2002) is a house of mirrors.
(“Dragonfly” is one of the period films within the film.)
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Spielberg’s “War Horse” is a child’s 19th century pastoral, a color postcard, muted by the 20th century.
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Watching this movie set in a Great Depression era circus only leaves us wanting to re-watch Carnivale.
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“Make More Cartoons”
– Kim Jong Il
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Who knew you could jam so many capable actors into a 135 minute Hallmark card?
“Love Actually” (2003)
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MythBusters may be our favorite edutainment series. Wishing more programs on the Discovery Channel included (at least) this much science.
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In “The Constant Gardener” (2005), Fernando Meirelles remixes time, like chemicals under a microscope.
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Watch“No DRM, no regional restrictions, no crap.” - Louis C.K.
download Live at the Beacon Theater, for $5 bucks.
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Godzilla Haiku →
“Loving Godzilla with seventeen syllables” a Tumblr weblog
#haiku #humor
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Stiff faces animated like mean androids, a plot like waiting in line: ”The Polar Express” (2004).
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WatchThe Bicycle Animation by Katy Beveridge
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November 2011
11 posts
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“The Birth of a Nation demands to be seen and discussed — you can’t understand...”
– Dave Kehr
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WatchArlo Guthrie performing Alice’s Restaurant (2005), with clips from the movie (1969)
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Did timely films, like Alfred Hitchcock’s “Foreign Correspondent” (1940), prepare Americans for war?
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“The Tree of Life” (2011) is like a essay on biology photographed by a poet.
Watch it in high-definition, if you watch it at all.
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WatchA delightful example why you cannot shoot too much footage: ”Bust Your Knee Caps” by Pomplamoose
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Is Kevin Smith’s “Red State” (2011) fundamentally an action movie, horror flick, or parable?
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supercut →
noun \ˈsü-pər-kət\ — A fast-paced montage of short video clips that obsessively isolates a single element from its source, usually a word, phrase, or cliche from film and TV.
Supercut.org collects every known example of the video remix meme.
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“montage is the nerve of cinema…. to determine the nature of montage is to...”
– Sergei Eisenstein
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David Lynch’s ”Blue Velvet“(1986) is a small town windswept with the seeds of “Twin Peaks” (1990).
October 2011
12 posts
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