Day: July 27, 2008

Thumbs up

One thing we never did, apart from an occasional special show, was depart from the format: Two critics debating the week’s new movies. No “advance looks” at trailers for movies we hadn’t even seen. No celebrity interviews. No red carpet sound bites. Just two guys talking about the movies. At one point, our show and two clones were on the air simultaneously. Then we were left alone again: The only show on TV that would actually tell you if we thought a movie was bad.

Roger Ebert on the end of At the Movies.

I’ve always thought Roger Ebert was a better and smarter critic in print than on screen, and, while likable, Richard Roeper was never a match for the late Gene Siskel. But I’m nonetheless sorry to see the show go. Not because I really watched it — it’s anybody’s guess when it airs — but because it will almost certainly be replaced by something dumber and a lot closer in format to the “advance look” show Ebert describes above.

Just some quotes

Warren Ellis:

I can’t tell you how many new hopeful comics writers I meet who have never finished anything in their lives because their intended first project is a hundred-episode epic that creates a whole new universe or three. And I tell them all the same thing: you’re screwed. No-one will want it. Not until you’ve written something short, capable of being produced on a budget, and finished. Your epic may be worldchanging, but no-one will ever know because no publisher will gamble that kind of money on an unknown. And that’s before you get to the vagaries of the attention economy.

Anthony Bourdain:

And it’s nice being wrong. One of the delights of travel is finding, again and again that all your preconceptions, all the conventional wisdom, everything you thought for sure was right — is, in fact – wrong — or at least, far from a complete picture.

Rossanne Cash:

Sometimes songs are postcards from the future. Often I have found that a song reveals something subtle but important about my own life that I was only vaguely aware of while writing, but that became clear as time went on. I wrote “Black Cadillac” six weeks before a rash of deaths began in my family. The day I finished writing it, I played the completed song to myself, as a kind of last run-through to check for rhyme scheme errors and syllable scanning, and a tidal wave of anxiety started rising in my gut. I knew I had given myself a message.

Yes, he actually said that.

Barrack Obama = Adolf Hitler. At least according to Ben Stein. You know, I was wondering why I never saw them together in photographs!

Is this seriously the only tactic left, to complain that the man is too popular and that “that’s not how we do things in this country?” Because it takes a special kind of brain damage to see a black man addressing a large outdoor crowd as a preamble to some kind of American Third Reich.

Methinks somebody ought to introduce Stein and Glenn Beck to Godwin’s law.

The Great (Re)maker

Movie remakes get announced every day that (fortunately) never get made, but here are a few that struck me as especially pointless:

  • A Nightmare on Elm Street reboot, where “the plan is to have a dark tone.” (Masterful and cunning plan, that.)
  • A Rocky Horror Picture Show remake by MTV, which “may also include music not featured in the original.” You know, the original isn’t actually a good movie (despite some great songs). It’s the cult following and midnight showings that have made it popular. Trying to recapture that isn’t likely to work out for anybody.
  • Has the world really be crying out for Tron 2?

Oh, and do we really need another Alice in Wonderland remake or take-off? Haven’t the darker undertones of Lewis Carroll been examined, well, a lot?