We’re burning through the recording pretty quickly. Actually, both Dirty Pretty Things and Dancer In The Dark were recorded improperly, so we just threw them on the Zip list and moved on.

• Network (imdb | rotten tomatoes) is a film I’ve seen several bits and pieces of, but not all together.  Though it drifts badly in the last half hour, it’s still a remarkable piece of satire in that it’s even more accurate than it was 30 years ago when it was made.  The idea of the evening news being run as typical entertainment might’ve been shocking or absurd in 1976, but it’s de rigeur today. Seeing it after watching the premiere of Studio 60 just made me realize what a massive reference Network was for that pilot, even more than the explicit references within the show. For example, the scene where the Studio 60 execs turn on every TV to hear “In a scene reminiscent of Paddy Chayefsky…” was taken directly from Network..so they used a scene from Network to point out the parallel to Network. Now that’s meta.
• Cube (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was a Canadian film made 10 years ago that I hadn’t seen for some reason. Reasonably engaging and interesting, considering it was kind of sci-fi (which I normally don’t like) and Canadian (which usually doesn’t bode well in general). Plus it has Maurice Dean Wint, who’s just cool.
• Ararat (imdb | rotten tomatoes), an Atom Egoyan film that opened the Toronto film festival a few years ago, was pretty good, if a little uneven. This film, too, was meta, as it shows the filming of a movie — called Ararat — about the Armenian genocide, with parallel storylines drawn from the effects of the genocide itself. A good movie, and enlightening if — like me — you don’t know much about such an ugly chapter in history.

[tags]network, studio 60, cube, ararat, armenian genocide[/tags]