Category: TV

"Make art…make art."

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BlogTO is single-handedly trying to kill me, listing the best places to buy chocolate in Toronto. Of course, I was already aware of them, especially JS Bonbons and Soma, but those pictures are making me hungry.

.:.

Quick thoughts on the Oscars: for the first time in quite a while I have no problem with any of the winners (or rather, with who didn’t win). Also, it’s a good thing “Falling Slowly” won best original song, ’cause if it’d lost to one of those Disney songs from Enchanted I’d have flown to L.A. and burned the Kodak theatre to the motherfucking ground.

Watch the performance (and acceptance speeches) here at Cinematical.

.:.

I just finished reading Incendiary (indigo) and need a new book. Fortunately I own about 60 that I haven’t read yet.

[tags]blogto, chocolate, soma, js bonbons, oscars, falling slowly, once, incendiary[/tags]

"Brick remains aloof. He is very handsome, and possibly a homosexual."

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

I got home around 8:30 tonight and am rather wiped, so blogging tonight will be terse.

  • I ate two fortune cookies today (Kung Hey Fat Choi!) and the fortunes inside read “A sweet surprise awaits you” and “Goods that are not shared are not goods.” You know what though? Those lines never worked on the girls in my high school, so I don’t know why I should put any faith in them now.
  • I wish I liked The Weakerthans‘ music as much as I liked John Samson’s lyrics.
  • Caitlin: still hot. Stacie Mistysyn: girlfriend du jour.
  • The Onion always make me laugh, but sometimes it’s so brilliantly absurd that I can only marvel and wonder where they buy their wonderful drugs. Today’s article “Ask The Stage Directions To Tennessee Williams’ Cat On A Hot Tin Roof” may set the bar at an all-time high.
  • It’s fully fucking snowtastic out there tonight. It’s been windy and blizzard-y all day, and there was more thundersnow earlier tonight. My walk home tonight, though only a few minutes from subway to lobby, was about seven different kinds of unpleasant. I’m ready for spring now.

[tags]fortune cookies, kung hey fat choi, weakerthans, degrassi, caitlin, the onion, tennessee williams, cat on a hot tin roof, toronto, blizzard, thundersnow[/tags]

"I can't keep doing this on my own with these…people."

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

Nellie and I went to see two movies in a row today:

I had incredibly high expectations for There Will Be Blood (imdb | rotten tomatoes), but it still paid off. I think as the film sinks in over the next few days I’ll get even more from it, but even at first glance it’s huge and chilling and epic and staggering. Daniel Day-Lewis, once again, proves himself a mad genius. At no time in any of his movies do I think of him in any of his other roles. Paul Dano and the other actors kept up, but Day-Lewis was on the screen for virtually every second of the film and swept it along. You may not like this movie, but if you can’t recognize it for the classic piece of filmmaking that it is, maybe you should stick to reality TV.

Cloverfield (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was a completely different animal: a beastie-thriller, but done with a little more flair than we’ve come to expect. The handicam viewpoint was a useful little device, and kept the film from lapsing into the usual cliches (hey look, a spunky scientist finds a way to save the day!), focusing instead on showing the mass confusion of such an event. A pretty decent escapist flick. Oh, and Jessica Lucas: girlfriend du jour.

.:.

Absurdity piled on absurdity: the FCC is going to fine ABC $1.4 million because they showed buttocks on the air. Five years ago.

[tags]there will be blood, cloverfield, jessica lucas, fcc, nypd blue[/tags]

"I want no part of a world that refuses to congratulate itself."

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Exciting news: I’m going to go for a run tomorrow. It’s the first time since my killer cold last week that I’ve felt up to it (and didn’t have an early meeting to get to). Sad that the idea of a 3 mile run is attractive to me at this point.

.:.

While I’ve quite enjoyed the television writer’s strike — network is for shit anyway — I had to laugh at Conan O’Brien’s strike diary.

With little to sustain me, I am forced to subsist entirely on Reality Television. I gorge myself on marathons of The Real Housewives of Orange County and Flavor of Love, then collapse in a wretched heap. If this is living, I welcome death.

It’s short. Go read.

.:.

I hear a lot of complaints about Starbucks & music…exclusive sales agreements and such. This week, as I walked by the Starbucks every day on my walk to work (actually I walk by three, but there’s one I pay particular attention to) I heard Sia, James Brown and Radiohead. I don’t recall Monday, so either I wasn’t paying attention or it was bad/generic enough not to grab me. In any case, if a Starbucks wants to push decent music to coffee junkies, I’m not going to criticize them. Maybe it’ll counter the Wal-Mart influence.

Speaking of music…what in the sweaty hell happened to Bob Mould? I have no problem if someone mellows out in their old age, I don’t. That’s not my problem. My problem is that the music is (to steal a line from High Fidelity) generic pappy crap, and the man’s used more voice modulation  on his last few albums than Cher. This morning “Jesus Cradle” from the Sugar album Beaster came up on my Zen, and I was momentarily stunned by how good it was. Compared to what I’m listening to right now — a leaked copy of Mould’s latest, District Line — it’s just tragic. Genre differences or not, they’re still worlds apart.

.:.

My brother sent me this link yesterday in an email titled “There goes your day.” He wasn’t lying.

[tags]conan o’brien, starbucks, bob mould, cher, tony-b[/tags]

Banality, thy name is blog

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I have absolutely nothing interesting to say. Haven’t looked up from work long enough to do anything, let alone read anything. Last night I did work while I watched the hockey game, and stopped long enough to watch the latest episode of The Wire (which, by the way, holy crapmonkey!) and then go to sleep. Gonna be the same tomorrow.

Heeeeeeeere Friday Friday Friday…C’mere boy.

[tags]the wire[/tags]

In which my sinuses resume negotiations with my brain

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

I’m starting to feel ever-so-slightly better. I went to work today but I was still in pretty bad shape and my boss sent me home. I was about to enter a meeting room full of executives and had I gotten them all sick I would’ve been personally responsible for at least $0.50 off our stock price. Nobody wants that.

Tonight rather than doing work (did that already), doing schoolwork (nothing to do until the 27th) or watching a movie (Nellie’s not in the mood) I think I’m just going to…wait for it…read a book. Like, a book book. Not a textbook. I’ve been reading Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine since September but [overshare] the only time I really have in which to read it is when I’m on the can [/overshare] so it’ll be nice to just sit quietly and read a book…on a couch.

.:.

We watched episode 3 of The Wire last night. Every episode is producing classic moments (e.g., the look Bunk gave Fremon last night) and the tension took a big jump last night at the end of the episode, so I just can’t wait for what’s coming. Seven more episodes just doesn’t seem like enough to pack it all in.

[tags]the shock doctrine, the wire[/tags]

"I left my thimbles and socialist reading material at home."

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

.:.

Wow, three days without blogging. That’s probably a record. I can explain: busy Friday, busy Saturday and today I feel like ass.

Friday I was at work until about 7:30, and by the time I got home all I really had the energy to do was eat and watch Friday Night Lights and The Wire.

Yesterday we intended to see There Will Be Blood but when we got to the theatre we found that the new Eye Weekly film listings had lied to us. No wonder Torontoist hates them. No other showtimes worked so we had one last meal at the Biryani House in Roy’s Square. It’s closing in two weeks (moving just around the corner onto Hayden Street) to make room for 1Bloor. Mmmmm…samosas and pakoras and shrimp masala…tasty. After lunch we walked back down Church street, cleaned up a little and waited for CBGB to arrive. They joined us for dinner and a couple of tasty drinks at Smokeless Joe (hence the picture above), then back at ours for a bit.

All was going well until I woke up this morning stuffed up, with a sore throat and a pounding sinus headache. Last night I had nothing; by this morning I was deep in the throes of a cold. Shitty. I feel very unpleasant right now. As such we did next to nothing all day; I have no energy. My day has been limited to lots of basketball, football and movies.

.:.

The first movie we watched today was Stranger Than Fiction (imdb | rotten tomatoes) which, based on the ads, I’d all but dismissed as typical Will Ferrell clowning. It was, in fact, very funny, clever and sweet. Ferrell is so good at the subtle humour he showed here and in Winter Passing that it kills me to see the ads for crap like Semi-Pro. A few times in this movie I laughed out loud, and I rarely laugh at Will Ferrell movies.

We also watched Marie Antoinette (imdb | rotten tomatoes) this evening. The first half was interesting, but it completely lost steam in the second half. It was like watching a dessert cart being paraded around…it looks lovely and inspired at first, but after you stare at the same sweets for two hours it loses something. I didn’t think I’d enjoy it that much to begin with; Sofia Coppola had me in the first half, but lost me again in the second.

I forgot to blog last week about Italianetz (imdb | rotten tomatoes), yet another foreign entry at a past film festival that I wanted to see. The story was about a Russian boy set to be adopted from an orphanage by an Italian couple (hence the title) but who worries that he has a mother somewhere that, should he go to live with another couple, he’ll never see again. The plot takes him on his search for her, but the real star was Russia itself: a dirty, drunken, stormy, barren, corrupt plain of despair…that one little boy refuses to give up on. Worth watching, if you can tolerate the dodgy subtitle translations.

[tags]friday night lights, the wire, there will be blood, eye weekly, torontoist, biryani house, 1bloor, smokeless joe, stranger than fiction, marie antoinette, italianetz[/tags]

"No one wins. One side just loses more slowly."

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

There was a great article about the upcoming final season of The Wire in last Saturday’s Wall Street Journal. It talks about th…wait, where?

In the post-“Sopranos” world, “The Wire” is more central to HBO’s strategy than in years past. The network’s looking to the series to retain subscribers at a time when many in the industry say it’s on shaky ground. In many ways “The Wire” is HBO’s closest cousin to “The Sopranos” — they’re both gritty dramas and they’re loved by critics. (Slate’s Jacob Weisberg has called “The Wire” “the best TV ever broadcast in America.”) It doesn’t hurt that the season will be premiering in early January, against other lineups weakened by the writers’ strike — much of what’s being scheduled is reality television and reruns. “The stakes are higher this time,” says Brad Adgate, a media analyst with ad-buying agency Horizon Media. “The golden age of HBO is over, back when they had ‘Sex and the City,’ ‘Six Feet Under’ and ‘The Sopranos.’ ”

Named for the wiretap that a special police unit uses to listen in on members of a Baltimore drug ring, the show’s title doubles as a metaphor for viewers’ experience of listening in on worlds they’re not usually privy to. When the show first aired in 2002, it focused on a police investigation. In the four subsequent seasons, the program’s scope has spiraled out to include the stevedores’ union, local politics, the school system and the media — in short, it’s a portrait of a struggling American city.

I can’t say it often enough: if you’re not watching this show, start. What with the writer’s strike right now, there’s no better time to pick up the best show on TV today.

[tags]the wire, wall street journal[/tags]

What, drag them down to neanderthal level?

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From the Globe and Mail:

Bruckheimer, producer of Walt Disney Co’s wildly successful Pirates of the Caribbean film franchise among a long list of film and TV hits like CSI, said he plans to do for video games what he has done for other well-defined genres of content.

The Jerry Bruckheimer oeuvre: a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

[with apologies to the Bard]

[tags]jerry bruckheimer, pirates of the caribbean, csi[/tags]

UnZipped

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

Here I thought taking some time away from the MBA would be nice and relaxing, but with work being what it is and with Christmas just around the corner, it’s still loopy. Still, anything’s better than reading about the effect of tax shields on corporate financing decisions.

.:.

Do you love yourself? Do you love good music?

If you answered yes to both of those, then ask yourself this: have you listened to Spoon‘s Kill The Moonlight? If you haven’t, then you were probably mistaken about the first two questions. Really, it’s one of the best collections of music I’ve ever heard. If you haven’t heard it, I can’t really give you a good reference point for comparison, even if you’ve heard other Spoon albums. Just do yourself a favour: go download it. At first you’ll only like one or two songs, but soon they’ll all grow on you.

.:.

I have signed up for The Movie Network and am planning to cancel my Zip account. It’s just not cost effective; I’m paying $15/month and not watching any movies. TMN, on the other hand, gives me a lot more immediate variety (as opposed to variety that I have to order) and access to TV shows that we want to see in real-time like The Wire and Dexter. Some day — like when the MBA is finished — we may go back to Zip, but for now it’s going bye-bye.

[tags]spoon, kill the moonlight, tmn, zip.ca, the wire, dexter[/tags]