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March 2011

65 posts

Deal Is Made for Future Seasons of ‘Mad Men’ artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com

:

…but not till next year.

Does reupping two years at once mean that Matt Weiner’s Season Six whining will just be a DVD extra?

Mar 31, 20115 notes
Up Yours Google, You Turkey

“Today, Google unveiled its latest social innovation, called +1. Now stick with us, here, because after the botched launches of  and, it’s clear that the search giant doesn’t excel at explaining why users should care about its new products.

To put it simply, +1 is designed to help guide you through search results by pointing you toward what your friends and family have found useful. Once the system launches across the country, a +1 button will appear next to every search result. Ideally, users will click +1 on results they find useful. Similar to Facebook’s "like” button, Google will keep track of everyone’s +1 marks and alert their friends when they stumble upon it.“

You know what Google:  For years you sat there and did nothing while people built massive companies like Demand Media and HuffPo, bragging that they could create an empire that could wipe away all media before it based simply on gaming your algorithm.  

Forget about the effect it had on media, but you let your users get crummy, preposterous, factory-produced results, let every kind of media company shell out to search consultants who could game their way to the top, letting the world know producing better content was beside the point. You let an entire generation grow up seeing that "relevance” was just a World of Warcraft-like game of tech prowess and had nothing to do with the quality of the material.  

And now, years later, you’re waking up to the fact that your whole paradigm has become a lot of hooey, and after the flops of Buzz and Wave, this is your solution to it?  A little button that I can go back and press to show my friends I liked my search of used mattress locations near me?  This is your solution? 

Google, my friend, it’s time to wake up.

Mar 31, 20114 notes
#film
Mar 31, 20116 notes
#top chef #tv #richard blais
Come and do some serious Idol chatting with me and the giants of internet Idol punditry at the Daily Beast, 1 pm ESTthedailybeast.com
Mar 31, 2011
Mar 31, 201111 notes
#top chef #richard blais
Mar 30, 20119 notes
#top chef #tv #blais!blais!blais!
Mar 30, 20118 notes
#reviews #tv
Mar 30, 20112 notes
#film #george lucas #james cameron #3d #flim flammery
Brad Womack is the Sisyphus of Fake TV Romance

Life & Style can exclusively reveal that Emily Maynard has decided to make the move from North Carolina to Texas with her 5-year-old daughter, Ricki, to be with her fiancé Brad Womack.

“She feels like the best thing to do is to give this a real shot and put her heart into it by moving to Austin for the summer,” an insider close to Emily tells Life & Style. “She’s going to get her own condo there. She’s not moving in with him.”

…Her own condo…For the summer.

This is not the fairy tale we were promised?

It makes one start to doubt if love is even possible on game shows anymore.

source

Mar 30, 20116 notes
#celeb #womack
Idol Halftime Report: Days Of Glory, Nights of Worry

We’re about midway through the first season of the rest of American Idol’s life, and it seemed a good moment to pause and take stock; a moment to reflect and come to some grandiose semi-defensible conclusions about that state of the most critical season of the most most influential show in the history of the most dominant medium of entertainment in history of the human race.

And basically it’s a moment for Yes, Buts.

Yes, the torch was successfully carried over the river Jordan to the promised land of a post-Cowell destiny.  None said Idol could make it.  Most predicted doom.  Some even ignominy,  or worse.  But they did it and fueled by the Tyler sensation and a better than average line-up of singers, the show survived and ratings are incredibly, amazingly, without precedentally, up in the show’s 10th Season, after the departure of its signature star. 

So huzzahs to them.  And no one likes to throw cold water on a miracle….But….

First of all,  it does seem that at last, after the excitement about the new toy, the absence of Cowell is finally being felt.  What is missing is that key dramatic moment when after singing for their very lives, when the contestant’s fates are pronounced by one who brings the certitude of Jehovah to his every pronouncement.   

There isn’t really any need, structurally, for the show to have judges at all.  After the semi-finals they play no official role.  Their last formal act - using the save - was dispensed with last week and from here on they are just bystanders. But when the show was created, it was felt that without that real time feedback, the audience would have no filter through which to view the performances.   The audiences were free to ignore the judge’s advice, or to rebel against it and they often did.  By the time they got to the top 6 or so, the audience had settled around its favorites and pretty much ignored the judges’ rulings.  Will Young the first winner of Idol’s forerunner, UK’s Pop Idol, was propelled to victory after he stood up to Cowell’s slams against him.

Nonetheless, the judges’ rulings gave the audience something to respond to, for or against.   And in the finality of Cowell’s “That. Was. Terrible.” or “That was absolutely brilliant” the audiences had that dramatic pivot and rallying point. 

Now that we’ve gotten used to Tyler’s zanyness and being reminded that Jlo is pretty, now that we are onto the high stakes big stage, that moment simply isn’t there.  It’s not that they are all being too positive, Jlo and Randy at least are trying to be critical. But neither of them have the dramatic heft to deliver the verdicts like the hammer of God.    

The bet in this season was that America had had enough of meanness, that they were ready for judges to be constructive, supportive, positive.  And I think there’s something to that as far as it goes.  The meanness was becoming a shtick and America’s in a slightly less nasty mood than it was ten years ago, or at least it pretends it is.    But the thing about constructive is, as helpful as that may be, this is still a TV show not a knitting bee.  It’s great to know that they have singing coaches working with them, but is that really what the show should be?  When a battle for career life or death lies on the line?

Worse still, what we seem to be missing is that vital BS detector role that Cowell played.  One of the things that was so revolutionary about Idol when it launched was this presence of a judge willing to say that acts on his own show, entire nights of his own show were abominable.  In an entertainment world where everything felt packaged and controlled by corporate overlords, this was breathtaking and stunning. 

Now it feels there is no one playing that role.  And in its absence…the other side of mean is hype.  And it has felt, I hate to say it, on some of these nights, that the show is actively trying to sell us a bill of goods on some of these singers, something I’ve never felt before on Idol.  

And that brings us to the contestants.  Definitely better than last year in that they are more energetic, bigger personalities.  But the fact that there is no frontrunner, or even cluster of front runners is worrying.  On the one hand, this can mean that there are a bunch of people the audience is excited about.  On the other it can mean there is no one, or no ones, that they are really excited about. 

The big super, sine qua non of this year was to produce a winner that went on the become a major mega seller. It’s been five years since Idol has done that, and the promise of stardom conferred is becoming extremely wobbly.  

The only one of these I see with that sort of potential frankly is Pia Toscano, who can ride this weird Glee wave in some way. 

The biggest question I have is why Jimmy Iovine and his producers are not being more aggressive thus far in shaping the arrangements.  The thought, coming into this was that we were going to be forcing them to be contemporary.  But few of these nights sound like anything I hear on the radio today.  And the girls in particular are still getting away with just playing the safe preposterous Celine Dion card.    So step it up Iovine!  We don’t need one more person just hanging around to tell these kids, and tell us about these kids, how fantastic they are.  

Thus concludes my halftime report.   Overall, obviously, the news is far far more good than bad.  But clouds a'gather quick in entertainment and I urge Idol to take heed.

Mar 30, 20111 note
#phew #american idol #tv #pia toscano #simon cowell
Mar 29, 20111 note
#TV
Mar 29, 201113 notes
#film #dreck
God, Jezebel is the fucking worst. http://jezebel.com/#!5786656/mad-men-talks-fall-apart-over-networks-crappy-demands

The cultural elite has been brainwashed and footwashed to believe Matthew Weiner is God and should be handed the world on a platter, objections be damned!   You can’t blame them, its built into their iPods, they can’t escape it.

And I say this as one who still LIKES Mad Men. 

Mar 29, 20114 notes
Mar 29, 20118 notes
#mad men #tv #Matthew Weiner
Mar 29, 20117 notes
Mar 29, 20119 notes
#film #hesher #joseph gordon levitt #rainn wilson #natalie portman
“All I want to do is continue to make my show, and make it in the way I want to, with the people I want to make it with.”—

The words of sociopath Matthew Weiner and why he should get everything he wants all the time no matter who has to write the checks for it.  Because…it’s all he wants.

Source

Mar 29, 20114 notes
Mad Men Has Become the Nellie Olsen of the Airwaves

So Mad Men didn’t take it’s ball and go home after all.  After another endless haggle, Matthew Weiner has reluctantly agreed to grace the world with a fifth season of the well dressed office drama.  But not until sometime next year.  And maybe not if they cant straighten out all kinds of other issues still on the table.

Still one has to believe this will be the very last season, our farewell to Sterling Cooper Draper Price and their band of merry men. The price is just going to be out of line for a show that despite being celebrated by everyone you know, still only gets ratings akin to Full House reruns.

MM remains one of my five - seven favorite shows on TV. I’m all for it and wish it would run forever.  

But then there are quotes like these in The Daily’s piece on the negotiations.  

“‘Weiner is being completely screwed by AMC.’ said one source on the creative side. 'Nobody would have heard of AMC if it were not for Matthew Weiner and Mad Men. But they will not renew the show unless he accedes to all their demands.”“

The demands are said, by the piece to be make each episode three minutes shorter to squeeze in another couple ads and lighten the payroll by a couple actors.

See, quotes like this really make me almost hate the show.  

I have done the math and never in entertainment history, since Aeschylus, has the disparity between the entertainment of the elite and the entertainment of the masses been greater.  Mad Men has been on the cover of every magazine in the Universe from Vanity Fair to Cat Fancy and still remains a program for the nichest of niche audiences. Just because the niche is you and your friends doesn’t mean you’re not a niche.  And a niche of the over-educated, over-paid, over-unbanized no less, so smoke that for a while.

But when you hear the biennial round of Weiner demands and grievances, you would think that AMC was about to sell the Statue of Liberty back to the French for a vat of truffle oil.    And behind all this, since every time AMC executives go to a dinner party they must have to listen to all their friends kvell about Roger Sterling, they must be terrified that if they don’t renew the show and give Weiner his three minutes their homes will be burned to the ground and their children will become pariah at their fancy schools. It’s negotiating at gunpoint!

As for the "put AMC on the map” complaint, well, Father Junipero Serra put my home state of California on the map and you don’t see me writing him checks.   Especially when Walking Dead draws vastly more viewers than Mad Men ever will.

 So, to sum up, I’m all for Matthew Weiner getting as much money for himself and his crew as he possibly can.  Between that advertising money being in the hands of a network or being in the hands of a producer, I’m delighted for them to sort that out for themselves and good luck to them both I say!  But when one side starts kvetching like he’s being abused by this network that continues to subsidize his no doubt money losing show, I say send him to his room without supper and maybe we’ll see how indispensable to our democracy Mad Men really is.

Mar 29, 20118 notes
#tv #mad men #amc #matthew weiner
Mar 29, 201128 notes
#film #celeb #theoutsiders
Mar 29, 20117 notes
#film #celeb #rob lowe

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This post is a response to my friend Jacques Brautbar, who claims to love Superman– Superman 1 from 1970-whatever, and to my friend Richard Rushfield, who it as one of the top three super hero movies of all time(!).

Now, I’m no fan of comic books, or super heros, or anything…

Hillel makes some important points in response to my rankings.  I guess I would classify Superman more as important than “Great”…Or great if not always good.  In its outline and particulars, its tone and portrayals, it was both a huge break with what had come before and shockingly influential. For 20 years to come almost every superhero film that was made was all but a cookie cutter copy of Superman, and its influence is still felt.  Campiness became the official way to do superhero movies for decades to follow and its an influence we’ve never entirely shaken.  Heath Ledger’s Joker would not find himself completely a stranger in a strange land if he woke up on the set of Superman ‘78.

So campy though it is and flawed though it has, we can’t walk away from Christopher Reeves and Alexander Salkind.

Mar 29, 20113 notes
#film #historicals
Mar 28, 20113 notes
#film #celeb #natalie portman #demanding answers
Mar 28, 20115 notes
#film #capes #historicals
Superhero Movies By the Numbers

Average Number of Superhero Films By Year/Decade: 

1950’s: 1 per Decade

1960’s: 1 per Decade

1970’s: 1 per Decade

1980’s: .7 per year

1990’s" 2.2 per year

00’s: 3.8 per year

HISTORIC AVERAGE*:

Percent of Superhero Movies The Are Good or Better - 31 percent

Percent of Superhero Movies That are Forgettable or Worse 69 percent

SINCE 2005*: 

Percent of Superhero Movies That Are Good or Better - 18 percent

Percent of Superhero Movies That are Forgettable or Worse - 82 percent

*(Scientifically calculated based on the films I liked)

Mar 28, 20113 notes
#film #capes
Mar 28, 20116 notes
#film #historicals
Mar 28, 20113 notes
#film #celeb #amy adams #zack snyder
“But now, after the box-office reaction to Sucker Punch (never mind the critical drubbing), I think a couple of Hollywood secrets have been exposed: Number one, the term “fanboys” is actually studio code for those kids who’ll spend money on anything if it looks like it can be played with thumbs. And number two, the studio guys who give the go-ahead to seizure-school stylists like Snyder don’t even really like or understand the footage they see, but hope that whatever it is is what the kids these days want. I think those guys are scared of fanboys.”—

And cue the next wave of stories about how Sucker Punch’s failure - compared to King’s Speech and Inception’s successes means Hollywood is open to making more “smart” movies; stocked with quotes from executives who will say, yes, they’ve always loved smart movies.  They are just glad as heck that their time has come.

Except I’d bet anything that five years from now, when we are watching the big screen adaptations of serial torture trading cards, we’ll look back on Sucker Punch as a golden age when people still cared about telling stories…

Mar 28, 20115 notes
#film #sucker punch
Mar 27, 20116 notes
#food
Did you see my post about the "Top Chef scandal" (http://misterhippity.tumblr.com/post/4070067256/)? What's your opinion on this? Why do you think this TV Guide reporter's revelation hasn't gotten more attention? It seems pretty shocking to me. Of course, maybe that's just because I watch to much TV, and need to go outside and take a walk in the fresh air more often ...?

This is astounding.  Top Chef is the last corner of our democracy that we as a nation can still believe in.  What shocks me the most is that they could be so stupid as to undermine our faith in them by letting a reporter on the set to reveal how misplaced our faith is.  Allow us our fantasies Top Chef!

On the one hand, Collicco’s anti-Antonia bias is horrifying, and looked at from 30,000 feet seems of a piece with the He Man Women Hating Boys Club that the Top Chef dorm can often be, this season in particular.

On the other hand,  putting Mike through is probably a counterinutitively inspired piece of showmanship. He has set up the finale as a real good vs. evil match-up.  If it were Blais vs. Antonia it would have been Great vs. Nice, which is not nearly as fun.  And if Nice somehow won, (which is what generally seems to happen on TC: The prodigy always chokes)  while we would have all felt, “Awww…how…nice for her…” It would have just left us feeling weird.

Important reporting and thank you for bringing it to my attention Monsieur Hippity!

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Book Report: As You Like It by William Alan Shakespeare

This marks the third installment of my attempt to read the complete Shakespeare plays in a year or so.  Note to readers: After this installment we will switch from reading in alphabetical order to a more traditional chronological sceme.

THOUGHTS: So who am I to throw stones William Shakespeare?  I haven’t written dozens of plays that have been beloved for hundreds of years. I haven’t coined so many phrases and words that have become standard usage that people don’t even remember they were my inventions.  My name is not synonymous with the theater. My books have been read by hundreds of people, not hundreds of millions over centuries.   And until that changes, many would say, where do you get off, mister?

And I can’t really argue.

But be that as it may, I could’ve written a better play than As You Like It in my sleep.

In my defense, I will say, I do not stand alone.  Wikipedia informs me that “Critics from Samuel Johnson to George Bernard Shaw have complained thatAs You Like It is lacking in the high artistry of which Shakespeare was capable.”  So normally I wouldn’t want to be on a team against the bard, but if I can have Johnson and Shaw backing me up, I’ll take those odds.

Basically the problems with AYLI are these:

• Clowns.  You feel like the fools are the thing you have to put up with in Shakespeare to get to the good stuff. Well you’re in for a heckuva treat with this play then which comes close at points to being an ALL CLOWN drama.  The Clown, Touchstone is everywhere…Swallowing whole acts in one merry breath.    

So I’m not really a believer in progress. I don’t think the world improves over time. I think it ebbs and flows. I don’t think people get smarter, we just accumulate more information that gets swept away when the next dark age or OCD plague comes.  Yes, we have sciences that have doubled our lifespan and all, but those same sciences and industry no doubt are at work now on things that will kill us all, so that kinda cancels that out.

But with comedy, it’s hard not to feel like the world has taken a few big steps forward since Shakespeare’s time.  Especially when one spends page after page with that irrepressible card Touchstone.  

• Cross Dressing.  There have been two funny uses of cross dressing in art, and this isn’t one of them. They are Some Like It Hot and Victor, Victoria.  As You Like It on the other hand stands with Big Momma’s House, Sorority Boys and Mrs. Doubtfire in the pantheon of works that thought it was so hilarious to see a man dressed as a woman or vice-verse, they just couldn’t get over themselves.

• Creaky plot devices.  Oh the places you can go when the man you’re in love with to believes you are a young boy and you can gain his confidence, and convince him to use you as a substitute to practice wooing you!  What hi-jinx ensue. And then when a shepardess believes you are a lad and falls for you….oh you can just imagine.   Meanwhile the whole thing about the Duke being overthrown by his scheming brother gets brushed under the rug until the final moments when a Fool or a lady dressed as a lad can step in to make it all right.

I won’t go to hard on the Bard for this one.  After all, he went on to some not bad stuff before he hung it up. But he and I and George Bernard Shaw all know, he’s had better days than one when he turned in this script.

THE RUSHFIELD BABYLON RECOMMENDATION: Don’t

Mar 17, 20113 notes
#asyoulikeit #books #lit
Mar 16, 20117 notes
#tv #celeb #bachelor #brad womack #emily maynard
Mar 16, 20119 notes
#film #lists
Mar 16, 20114 notes
#film #monsters
Mar 13, 20112 notes
Mar 13, 201134 notes
#film
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