tv

Any given Sunday

Have I mentioned how glad I am that don’t have to go to work tomorrow?

I spent today not doing a whole lot, though in my defense it was cold and rainy most of the time. I watched an episode of Community and two of Chuck, glad to have both of those shows back after lengthy hiatuses, and also the latest episode of QI, which never fails to entertain.

But it wasn’t all just vegging out and watching TV. I went to my Sunday writing group and I finished the Sunday New York Times crossword (with a small assist from Heather on Twitter). Okay, so it was mostly just vegging out and watching TV, but did I mention that it was cold and rainy all day?

Or how glad I am that I don’t have to go to work tomorrow?

And then there was Saturday

Where did the day go? For a day I spent doing almost nothing, beyond going to the bank and the post office and then later for a long walk, the hours just seemed to fly past.

I watched this week’s episode of Dollhouse, which, despite a few good moments, ultimately just disappointed me. The whole season has kind of been like that. I think the show contains a lot of Joss Whedon’s best and most mature ideas, some truly scary and thoughtful examinations of identity and power, and yet it’s ultimately his worst show. I think there are a lot of reasons for that, not least of all network interference, but it’s difficult to look at it as anything except a noble failure. I’ll wait to see how the series finale in two weeks wraps everything up (or doesn’t), but it just didn’t work for me as a cohesive whole.

Enver Gjokaj definitely needs to get a lot more work, though.

I also watched District 9 this evening. I was worried that, after all the hype and endless discussion about the film, that I might not enjoy it. But I thought it was terrific, visually unique and truly intelligent, exciting science fiction. I’m sure it would have been somewhere on my “best of 2009” list if I’d managed to see it last year.

And that’s about it. I leave you with this important question I discovered on my afternoon walk:

So that was Thursday

I helped out at our company’s exhibit booth at a local conference this morning (hence the tie in the above photo), which was a nice way to break up the work day and spend some time out of the office. And hey, I don’t usually get a chance to ride the subway to work. An author had very generously left a box of fresh pastries for us, and the conference organizers (or the hotel staff), in order to apologize that there wasn’t any of the usual free coffee, had given every booth a hefty Starbucks gift card the day before. So no complaints there. (Although the free water they did make available tasted a little like bitter coffee grounds, so clearly they were determined to use the same dispenser no matter what.)

After all that, it was back to the office with one of my coworkers, a quick lunch, and a little light editing on some PowerPoint slides. I know, the life of a developmental editor is a thrill a minute. Then it was time for home, a couple episodes of The Mighty Boosh — man, that’s an odd show — dinner, playing with the dog, and finishing reading Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, which I really liked — and about which, I suspect, more later.

All in all, a pretty decent day.

Thursday various

  • If it was up to me, Christopher Walken would read everything, not just Lady Gaga lyrics. [via]

  • Is there a good Roger Ebert and a bad Roger Ebert? Roger Ebert examines the question.

    I think I fall somewhere in between Ebert and Schneider on this, though I’m much less analytic about film than the latter. I do think Ebert sometimes lets emotion sway him too far in a movie’s favor (Congo comes to mind, for example.) But I almost understand why he likes something I think is awful, and I can’t disagree with his assertion that “film itself is primarily an emotional, not a cerebral, medium.”

  • Dave Kehr on Blu-Ray and DVD:

    For Blu-ray to look its best it requires picture and sound images of the finest, most pristine quality. That’s not difficult to come by in a contemporary release like “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” (the best-selling Blu-ray of 2009), but is somewhat more problematic for a film made in Germany in 1926. Blu-ray exaggerates the faults in older material: the dust specks and scratches caused by decades of wear and tear, the softness of detail or harshness of contrast caused by duplication from sources several generations removed from the film that actually passed through the camera.

    He also shares this interesting statistic: “Turner Classic Movies online says that of the 162,984 films listed in its database (based on the authoritative AFI Catalog), only 5,980 (3.67 percent) are available on home video.”

    We will probably never achieve the utopian vision of having every film ever made available at the click of a mouse, but we are certain to move a little bit further in that direction in the decade ahead — with the cooperation of the studios or without them. (Copyrights will soon be expiring on the first wave of talkies.) In the meantime let us praise diversity. As confusing as the format wars may be, they keep hope alive.

  • Philip K. Dick on dreams and/or the universe’s practical jokes.

  • And finally, a famous Twilight Zone episode reimagined for a modern age. [via]

Wednesday various

  • I don’t know…when the bank seizes the wrong house, changes the locks, tacks a foreclosure notice to the door, and leaves 75 pounds of fish to rot for a week, do you really think the homeowner’s suit has no merit? If nothing else, he should press charges for breaking and entering. [via]
  • I’m just a little late to this, but: the Guardian considers the worst books of the last decade:

    To remember only achievement and worth is to ignore the vast majority of our cultural experience. It helps create that strange cultural telescoping that makes us think that the past was always better; that odd warping of collective memory that enables us to recall even the 1970s fondly.

    There’s some truth to this, I think. Of course, I do like at least a couple of the books he mentions as worst of the decade. (Oracle Night does approach self-parody, but it’s the last time I truly enjoyed Auster, and I found it a genuinely haunting book. His Man in the Dark, ostensibly about the past decade, was much, much worse.) [via]

  • Jonathan Lethem: “Ian McEwan has a great line where he says, ‘Book touring is like being an employee of your former self.'”

  • NPR looks at The Big Bang Theory and the male gaze:

    But the changes in this particular show make for a great example of the fact that you don’t just avoid empty, cliched versions of women (or men, and I am looking at you, Sex And The City) because they’re offensive or infuriating or anything like that. The best creative reason to avoid them is that they make your show bad. Making Penny real has opened up all kinds of comedic possibilities that haven’t transformed it into life-changing art, but have made it into a very good half-hour sitcom… [via]

    I started watching the show over my holiday break for the first time, and I’ve very quickly caught up. (I watched this week’s episode last night.) I liked the first season (and even the pilot) considerably more than Linda Holmes did, but she’s not at all wrong about Penny. What makes the show work is that these are very real, well developed characters, and it suffered when she alone wasn’t.

  • And finally, for the couple of Doctor Who fans in the audience, John Seavey offers a reconsideration of the Fifth Doctor.