Category: TV

"I have just met you, and I love you."

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Well, I’ve had an enjoyable forty-ish hours. It started Friday night when we walked down to Front Street to see this year’s criterium. I have no real interest in cycling, but it’s fun to watch racing on a downtown street. Plus, it gave me a chance to test out our new camera: a Canon SX10 IS. We used to have an S3 but sold it when Nellie got her Nikon SLR. I still have a little Canon S230, which is fine for carrying around in my pocket if we’re out with friends, but it turns out there was too big a gap between that and the D40. This SX10 feels familiar (it’s basically just the update of the S3 we had before), is a pretty good mix of convenience and quality, and the 20x zoom will come in handy. For example:

These guys were way down Front Street when I took that. Anyway, we couldn’t stay long as we had dinner reservations at Canoe with Nellie’s mom, so home we went to get all gussied up. Canoe was magnificent, as one would expect, and lives so comfortably in their place atop the Toronto restaurant pile (according to Toronto Life, anyway). Nellie and her mom started with the chevre with rosemary brioche, I had the prawn & asparagus chowder with tarragon butter, and we shared a bottle of 2007 Fielding viognier. For our mains I had the caribou (which was amazing), Nellie and her mom had the prime ribeye and we took a 2006 a bottle of Domaine Gardies Mas Les Cabes. No dessert, just dessert wine for Nellie and I and a glass of white for her mom. Oh, and at some point the afore-mentioned mom took off her shoes and went for a stroll through the restaurant. Don’t ask.

The next day, after dropping Nellie’s mom off at the airport we went to see Up (imdb | rotten tomatoes) at Yonge & Dundas. I’m not a big animation fan, and while I did like the last two Pixar releases (Ratatouille and wall-e) I didn’t bother to see them in the theatre. However, a screaming 98% on Rotten Tomatoes and a lot of advance critical praise made this one my top movie theatre priority this weekend. And it was good. Really, really good. It was sweet, funny, entertaining and (of course) spectacularly animated. Fun story, too, like Raiders Of The Lost Ark if Indy were an octagenarian. In the end I think it might have actually been a mistake to see it in the theatre, since the kid and mother behind me who talked often — and loudly — occasionally “pulled me” out of the film. But I’m still glad I saw it yesterday.

The movies weren’t done there. We freed up a little more room on the PVR by watching Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park (imdb | rotten tomatoes), which I kind of liked (bizarre mismatched music notwithstanding) but I felt it would have made a better short film than feature. There were so many repeated scenes and long tracking shots that nine minutes likely would’ve done it.

We also finally got around to watching the pilot of Glee (fox | onion a.v. club), which I found fairly funny, but if the singing keeps up like this I may struggle to keep watching. I can only take so much Amy Winehouse and Journey. While we watched that a killer rainstorm passed over Toronto, followed quickly by a brilliant rainbow (and another faint cousin):

Also, at some point this weekend I finished reading The Blind Side (amazon) by Michael Lewis. Only about a quarter of the book was what I expected it to be — an historic and financial look at the left tackle position in football. Instead it focused on a kid named Michael Oher, and told a very engaging story about his life. There is, in fact, a movie being adapted from it but with Sandra Bullock cast as one of the leads I don’t hold out much hope for it not sucking.

With that book done I’ve taken the advice given to me over the years by several friends, including those who’d just finished with my copy, and begun reading The Long Walk To Freedom.

Unfortunately it’s a bit too chilly out today to enjoy the sun the way we’d like, but that gives us a good excuse to tackle yet another chunk of the PVR’s hard drive.

Garbage in, garbage ou…uh, actually, I guess in this case garbage stays.

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Not long ago, on the way home from work my Zen randomly played “Eat Junk Become Junk” by Six By Seven. While I listened I studied the subway ad in front of me. It was an ad for an MTV reality show. I couldn’t help but make the connection.

“Eat junk become junk” is just another way of saying “you are what you eat”, something we’ve all heard since we were kids. No one really doubts that the badness of what we eat affects our overall health. It’s not the sole determining factor, obviously, but it does matter. Doctors, medical studies, common sense…they all tell us so.

So why doesn’t the adage apply to music? Why not books? Why not movies or television? Aren’t the worst of these just empty calories, the Twinkies and triple-bacon cheeseburgers of culture? Aren’t people just jamming the same crap into a different orifice? I would think we would consider these toxic materials as harmful to the mind as we consider toxic food harmful to the body.

And yet, we hear people describe the benefit of vanilla TV (Two and a Half Men, anyone?) being that they don’t have to think, they can just have a laugh. They describe “beach books” the same way…something you just read but don’t have to think about. Worse yet, “reality tv” deliberately misleads viewers, making them think these shows are actually happening unscripted, trying to warp the viewer’s idea of reality rather than try to find entertaining reality to film. Music so banal and oversampled there’s no shred of musical innovation or feeling left at the heart of it. Movies slapped together to lampoon scene after 30-second scene of fleeting pop-cultural references funny mainly, and especially, to those whose news-gathering begins and ends with TMZ. At best these are vapid space-fillers; at worst, mind-numbing distortions. Alone they do not make you stupid. But they certainly lean that way.

Let me preempt the usual cry: that I’m arguing against fun. That’s a weak case, unless you would suggest “fun” can only equal “stupid”. Millions of things are fun, and funny without being weakly, patronizingly so.

Let’s maybe try showing this graphically. FlowingData recently posted a chart titled “Music that makes you dumb” courtesy of a CalTech grad student. It doesn’t show that listening to crap music makes you dumber. It just shows that people who listen to music like Lil’ Wayne, Carrie Underwood and Taking Back Sunday do worse on their SATs than those who listen to stuff like Radiohead, Bob Dylan and Beethoven.

Look, I’m not saying people should stop watching American Idol or listening to Nickelback any more than I’m saying they should avoid eating at Carl’s Jr. three times a day. I’m just saying that everyone knows they shouldn’t eat at Carl’s Jr. three times a day. For some reason they just haven’t figured out that it’s harmful to put other kinds of junk in their bodies too.

"Then Serenity Ends."

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According to the Onion AV Club, NBC has moved Kings to the dreaded Saturday night time slot. While timeslots matter less than they used to in the Tivo era, I would have to think this signals the end of the series. At least the rest of the season will air, or so says TOAVC.

I didn’t think Kings was a great show, but I think it had great ingredients (Ian McShane foremost among them, but also the politics, Brian Cox in a secret trapdoor room, the sheer awesomeness of Dylan Baker and Eamonn Walker, and the Shakesperean comic relief duo) and it was certainly better than most network TV shows.

Too bad, though, I enjoyed having Swearengen-lite on TV. Somebody needs to get McShane in a room with David Mamet. I don’t care if it’s about copper mining or oral hygiene, just make it happen.

In which Dan (officially) starts to lose it

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Habs won woo. Duke and Memphis lost, so my bracket’s dead, long live Nellie’s bracket.

Slaughterhouse-Five is done. Next up: Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, since it’s been on my shelf for, oh, nine years.

Life my be a carnival, but work is a circus. (Workus!) Exercise and proper nutrition have taken a back seat (for example: I would punch a nun right now for a Wendy’s spicy chicken sandwich), as has coherent thought and interestingness.

BSG is over, but Kings has started. Not a fair trade, but it has King Swearengen, so that’s something.

This day’s gone on too long. This’d better be the best 5 hours of sleep ever.

There must be some kind of way out of here

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Spoiler alert: I shall herein be talking about last night’s series finale of Battlestar Galactica. Look upon me, ye laggards, and despair.

Oh, don’t worry, I won’t give away details. I’ll just say that I didn’t think much of it. The big mystical destiny bits seemed forced, if they were resolved at all. The action was ok, but…did we even see five seconds of Viper dogfights? C’mon. The ending…meh.

I don’t know, maybe I’ve just been spoiled by the near-perfect finale of The Shield, but this epic ending left me feeling pretty underwhelmed, especially considering some of the fantastic seasons finales the show managed over the years.

I think I’ll go watch the miniseries again.

"The German Claw, Mister McCluckCluck!!"

Dan Dickinson4 Comments

Last night I dreamed about something…unexpected. I very, very rarely remember my dreams at all, maybe once or twice a year, so it was odd that what I would remember dreaming about was Grand Prix Wrestling.

If you didn’t grow up in the Maritimes you’re unlikely to know what that is. I’m pretty sure it only aired on local stations. Imagine the early days of the WWF, but with much lower budgets and hilarious nicknames. Even my own memories of it are quite fuzzy. But last night I could remember, as clear as day, names like Bulldog Bob Brown, Sweet Daddy Siki, Killer Karl Krupp, Big Stephen Pettipas, No-Class Bobby Bass, The Cuban Assassin and Leo Burke, and apparently my dream last night was the revival tour. It’s a bit hazy now but I’m pretty sure I remember someone grabbing the Cuban Assassin by his beard and throwing him, and Killer Karl’s signature line (in the subject line) definitely came up.

Weird. I don’t imagine I’ve thought about Grand Prix Wrestling in 25 years. Any bets on what I’ll dream about tonight? Littlest Hobo episode? Greatest American Hero theme song? My brother’s old yellow bike with the banana seat?

Even the death rattle has a boppy J.J. Abrams score

Dan Dickinson

A week or so ago in Salon Heather Havrilesky ripped TV a new one:

The golden age of television may be over just a few short years after it began. 2008 not only marked one of the worst years of TV in the last decade, but all of the momentum and promise of the past few years seemed to vanish in a haze of crappy, unoriginal new programming, lackluster sophomore shows, flaccid sitcoms and pointless cable comedies.

Deservedly so, too. Just months and years removed from the likes of The Wire, Six Feet Under and The Shield, we’re now faced with this harbinger of doom:

And has there ever been a more depressing sign of TV’s demise than the move by NBC to give Jay Leno, the epitome of a guy who’s flatly bad at his job but continues to be promoted for reasons utterly mysterious to mortal man, a whopping five hours of prime-time real estate, thereby saving themselves from the unpleasant work of finding worthwhile programming to fill their nightly 10 p.m. slot?

The Star also weighed in with a recap (less with the doomsday, more with the funny) of the past year’s horror show:

Herbie Hancock wins Album of the Year at the “Granny” Awards as music pundits slap their foreheads and check their calendars. Nope, it’s not 1983. Ratings plummet.

…

Cloris Leachman dresses like a rapper and asks, “What’s up, homeys?” in an old school hip-hop number on Dancing With the Stars. Viewers, horrified at the spectre of the 82-year-old Emmy winner in short shorts and rapper’s cap, vote her off the following week.

The concept of TV as art seems to be just about dead. Apart from the seven shows I actually care about — 30 Rock, Battlestar Galactica, The Daily Show, Friday Night Lights, Life, The Office and The Unit — I’m increasingly seeing the TV as nothing more than a sports & movie delivery device.

Just declare the 4 big American networks 24-hour reality TV channels and be done with it. HBO can buy Netflix and we’ll all be happy.

"It feels like I'm shitting a knife!"

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Our aspirational target this weekend was profound laziness. While we didn’t quite hit that (damn stretch goals) we did manage to watch two movies:

Baby Mama (imdb | rotten tomatoes) started off badly — not that the jokes weren’t funny, it’s just that we’d seen them all in the trailer — but got funnier as it went on. This post’s title, a line from the film, made me laugh out loud. I’m still giggling just typing it. Let’s face it, though, Tina Fey could do the New York Times crossword on camera for 90 minutes and I’d still pay to see it.

I think we waited too long to see Tropic Thunder (imdb | rotten tomatoes) ’cause I just didn’t like it. I liked how it skewered movie-making in general, and action movies in particular, but I’m not sure I really laughed at single line not uttered by Danny McBride. And Tom Cruise’s tiny part, the one that’s earned him a fricking Golden Globe nomination? Not so much with the funny.

Here, I’ll give you an example of funny, and it just happens to involve Tina Fey. It’s from last Thursday’s episode of 30 Rock:

Liz: “Jack, do you know the Postmaster General?”

Jack: “I do, but we had a falling out over the Jerry Garcia stamp. If I wanted to lick a hippie I’d just return Joan Baez’s phone calls.”

Bam.

"How much memory does that thing have?"

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I can’t stop thinking about Tuesday night’s episode of The Shield, the series finale. It was a perfect and nervewracking conclusion to a gripping season, which was itself the culmination of an amazingly consistent series. I still think the season with Forest Whitaker was the best, and among the best seasons of television I’ve ever seen, but this final season came close. There was a scene in the penultimate episode that was so perfect it almost hurt.

I’ve said many times before that it was one of the best shows on TV, and Salon recently named it the most underappreciated show on TV (alongside past winners like Battlestar Galactica and The Wire). If you’re looking for a good series to watch, or if you think you’ll have some free time over the holidays, or if you’re just annoyed at having missed out on one of the best shows on TV, go rent the first season and dig in to the twisted world of Vic Mackey.