Exactly what it sounds like.
Also reminds you what an awesome trailer that film had.
Television
20 posts
In my post on torture in 24 – which was really just a link to someone else who wrote something interesting on the topic – I touched on The 1/2 Hour News Hour, the conservative response to Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show. Well, John Rogers’ blog has drawn my attention to a couple of clips from the show. First, Roger’s opinion (as a former stand-up and comedy writer):
It’s as if aliens tried to decipher humor from radiated cable television waves and then constructed a “comedy” show with a poor translation algorithm. It is un-joke. You could put it in a chamber with a knock-knock joke and use the resultant explosion to power a starship.
And now, in case you think that this is just because Rogers is some kind of leftie scrooge like myself, here are the clips Rogers highlighted so that you can judge for yourself.
A while back I wrote a couple of short pieces (such as this one) for the site arguing that Hollywood, for the most part, has showed a surprising reluctance to respond to the events of 9/11 by indulging in paranoid right-wing fantasies. While I stand by most of what I said then, I did forget the obvious counter-example: television’s 24.
As an interesting little side-note to my piece on Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line, Morris’ website has a clip (here) from an interview he did with Donald Trump, focusing on Citizen Kane.
I don’t have much time for Trump, but he is pretty articulate in commenting on the movie, although I don’t know if “get yourself a different woman” is the message I’d take from the film. Nevertheless, it’s interesting to hear the comments of a modern-day William Randolph Hearst on the movie. It’s a shame that Morris’ interview is squirrelled away on the web and largely unseen, but Trump’s “you’re fired” shenanigans are on TV.
(My own main piece on Kane is here.)
Network (Sidney Lumet, 1976)
There is a school of thought that places Network, the 1976 collaboration between writer Paddy Chayefsky and director Sidney Lumet, as the pinnacle of Hollywood media satires. The film is a blistering attack on the culture of television, scathing in its indictment of both the people who make it and the wider population who lap it up uncritically. As Greg Ng put it at Senses of Cinema:*
Lumet’s direction and Paddy Chayefsky’s script lambaste the ills of the modern world (couched within the fast-paced soliloquies delivered by the stellar cast of Peter Finch, Faye Dunaway, Robert Duvall and William Holden) and are oft times prescient, predicting the rise of ‘reality television’, and the subsequent decline of both production and social values… Chayefsky’s script is simply much more ambitious, and verbose, than anything Hollywood offers up for contention these days.
Certainly it is difficult to come up with a recent film quite as bitter and vitriolic: the film’s setup only hints at the bleakness of its vision. It centres on the fallout from the on-air declaration by network anchor Howard Beale (Peter Finch) that he will kill himself on air in a week. At first he is pulled off air, but the network quickly realises it has a ratings bonanza on its hands and reinstates him. Beale becomes a broadcasting phenomenon, even as he becomes increasingly deranged. Meanwhile, his fellow veteran broadcaster Max Schumacher (William Holden) embarks on an affair with Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway), the ambitious executive who thinks she can rise to the top by appealing to the lowest common denominator.
You may have noticed how on current affairs shows, when they cut back to Ray Martin after a story, he often says: “We’ll be following that story and keep you posted on any further developments.” Which means that they’ll immediately forget about the poor victim whose case they were beating up, unless something else sensational happens, or the original story rates its socks off. Well, I’m not like that. So when I broke (okay, repeated) the news of the Bugs Bunny redesign, I followed up the further developments (here).
Life’s small irritations: it always annoys me that the TV show M*A*S*H, starring Alan Alda, is so much better known and more widely seen than Robert Altman’s original 1970 film MASH (with Donald Sutherland as Hawkeye, and without asterisks in the title). Altman’s movie is a classic, really brutal and anarchic in a way that the TV show could never be. And who could really prefer Alan Alda to Sutherland, or Larry Linville to Robert Duvall, or Loretta Swit to Sally Kellerman, or William Christopher to Rene Auberjonois, or Wayne Rogers to Elliot Gould? There shouldn’t be any competition.
As a follow-up to Thursday’s post, here is the full line-up of Loonatics:
I think the line-up is, from left, Wile E. Coyote, The Tasmanian Devil, Bugs, Daffy, Lola Bunny, and The Road Runner. I say “I think” because they have managed to make the characters remarkably indistinguishable. Who thought Wile E. and the Road Runner, in particular, could look so similar?
Both Michael Barrier and Cartoon Brew have covered a bizarre story from the Wall Street Journal that Bugs Bunny is to be, well, “re-imagined” in an upcoming WB TV show. See if you can pick which is the new and which is the old:
DVD Bits 
has alerted me to some good news: more of The Goodies is coming to DVD. The second DVD will contain the following episodes:
- Radio Goodies
- Bunfight at OK Tea Rooms
- Movies
- The End
- Punky Business
- South Africa
- Scoutrageous
- Come Dancing (Wicked Walzing)