I have been looking for 'Fernwood 2-Nite' episodes for YEARS. I only vaguely remembered this from my childhood days, glued to Nick-at-Nite. At the time, I hated it; I didn't really understand it and the 70's look really irritated me. But I watched it a ton cause it was on TV and I watched TV religiously then.
I finally sourced the first season (minus one episode that was never re-run so it may never surface) and watched the first episode last night. It's not the Holy Grail of comedy, but it's pretty awesome. Mull and Willard are totally great, Dabney Coleman makes a cameo appearance, and the show never steps beyond the reality of it's supposed small-town budget. Happy Kine and the Mirthmakers deliver a rocking soundtrack too. It's gonna be fun watching the rest of these. I care less about the second season, 'America 2-Nite', but if it turns up I'll surely check it out as well...
DVD images are on Myspleen; if that's too big for you I'll rip them to DivX once I get them all.
I believe that the documentaries presented by Louis Theroux contain some of the finest moments of television ever. So I was overjoyed to discover that he has a new series. It was on tonight on BBC2, titled 'The Most Hated Family in America' (aka the Phelps clan of Topeka, KS and "god hates fags" infamy).
It did not disappoint - I was so engrossed in watching that I forgot about the pot of chickpeas boiling on the stove. My house is now full of smoke (and I probably ruined the pot), but I didn't miss a second of the show. It was perhaps even better than Louis and the Nazis, and the Phelps' are even more disturbing than I imagined.
This gets my highest possible recommendation for television. Find a torrent, Americans!
Though I had planned to start 2007 by investigating Godard, Altman's death last month has made me nostalgic to review his career, especially some of the minor films I had never seen. This is often considered to be Altman's worst film, but I actually enjoyed it. It's deeply flawed, and perhaps the biggest flaw is that it's actually very funny - the type of stage comedy that doesn't work with his anarchic style. Julie Hagerty is completely annoying outside of Airplane, but the film is saved by Christopher Guest's gay character. The Altman style of overlapping dialogue works well for a script where every character is completely insane, and while I wouldn't recommend this film or even watch it again, it certainly wasn't a waste of 91 minutes.
In a low energy New Years Day mood, I decided to re-watch Kicking and Screaming (which I hadn't seen since college, where an enthusiastic guy at the radio station recommended it). Maybe I remembered it fondly because I watched it during college, when I was prepared to wind up working in a library for a few years afterwards with a life as aimless as these characters. Over a decade after it was made, it already feels extremely dated, but entertaining; the stuck-in-a-rut post-collegiate thing obviously clicked with me much more a few years ago, but it's saved by not trying to be too ambitious. Some of the humour feels very forced, but it never wears out its welcome. As a snapshot into the mid-90's, it maybe serves a historical purpose in a weird way. The internet has no presence in this film, and being in college just a few years after this it was like a whole different world. I know it's developed a bit of a cult following, especially as Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale was a huge hit - at least with certain types of people. Yet while tS&tW is a genuinely painful (yet funny) film, K&S is just funny. But - Elliott Gould is in this.
Tomorrow 'Little Murders' shows at the Edinburgh Film Festival. My friends already know of my passion for this film, and though I have seen it 15 times, seeing it on film in a theatre will be a thrilling experience. Alan Arkin was supposed to do a Q&A afterwards which had me EXTREMELY excited, but unfortunately he canceled and was replaced by John Hurt.
In anticipation we watched 'Catch-22' again last night via the projector. My enthusiasm for this film was already discussed in a blog entry last year but it was even more enjoyable after finally reading the novel.
My dissertation is due in 25 days. I look forward to the freedom to use my 'spare time' to watch films. I am planning to study the works of Godard, starting soon after I graduate - by watching all of his films, or as many as I can find, in chronological order (if possible). Somehow I will manage this around tour booking, passing my driving test, buying a car and all of the other things that I must do.
Really really dug Caché (Hidden); on the surface it felt a lot like The Vanishing, but slowly revealed itself to be much more tricky. The title haunts the whole film, though there's no easy explanation. This film's major theme, I think, is racism - but without saying so. It takes a local example and uses it as a global metaphor, not for overt hate crimes but the systematic racism that's inside everyone (shown by the scene where Georges almost gets hit by a black bicyclist). There's no music in the film at all, and the tricks with confusing the viewer as to whether they are seeing "reality" or something on tape suggest the inherent deception in all cinema, ie: Welles F for Fake. Compared to the only other Haneke film I've seen, the juvenile yet darkly comic Funny Games, this is a world apart. Maybe I should go through and dig up the films he's made in-between?
I actually really enjoyed the latest Hal Hartley film. Maybe it's cause nothing could be worse than the one about the monster. This was a pretty fun sci-fi film. I still don't understand why he is so obsessed with bad digital video effects - it feels like he is just playing with the preset effects built into the camera. The younger brother from Simple Men stars in it and he gives a good performance, given the weird wooden Hartleyesque dialog. His Godard obession seems to be in full force, though there's also a lot liften from La Jeteé and The Man Who Fell to Earth. Actually the slowed-down frame rate made it seem very Markeresque. The political commentary is more overt than in his other films, and it may not be the most sophisticated critique of consumer culture but it works better than the satire on celebrity that the monster film was built aroound. But, yeah, it was fun. I'd even recommend it. I still need to watch Henry Fool again though.
I was really impressed with Nathan Barley - I think it was one of the best TV series' I've seen in recent years (not that I've seen too many) and a nice addition to the Chris Morris career. As satire, the humour was savage and pointed like all of his work, but I felt the narrative showed a new sort of balance that isn't present in Brass Eye or The Day Today. Visually it was as excessive as Brass Eye, which was a good way to mirror the fucked up superficiality of it's characters. I laughed a LOT - making fun of vapid hipster artfucks is pretty easy, sure, but there were some really amazing jokes, like the character named 15 Peter 20, and the Labour Party Conference videogame. Chris Morris is a first-rate prankster, and the Barley character represented the dark side of prankdom - the Jackass-style pranks that descend into vulgarity, without anything provocative or challlenging about them. Morris seems to have reinvented himself artistically here, which is an idea that I am often drawn to, and I think this series was very, very successful.
It's rare that I really hate a film. And I actually can't say I 100% hated this, because I did sit through the whole thing, mildy entertained. A few parts I even laughed at. But I mostly hated it. This film was my least favorite type of independent film - the quirky indie romance, where offbeat characters fall in love through goofy games and weird interactions. It's not the unrealistic nature of these encounters, or the obvious romanticism that irks me - I think it's just the ultimate shallowness of it, pretending to be deep. The visuals of this film were very calculated and organized, but I'm not sure to what effect. The whole thing sorta felt like Napoleon Dynamite for people a decade older. I don't believe the all films have to be gritty or realistic, and I'm certainly fond of romantic escapism, offbeat humour and absurdism. I think this film was hinting at some sort of depth that wasn't there - or at least I didn't understand what she was trying to say. The basic narrative about the characters was alright, but nothing more than a light romantic comedy that was dressed up as something more serious. To some extent, my negativity about the film probably stems from it's contemporary setting - if this was some lost Harold and Maude ripoff from 1971 I would have probably been a lot more forgiving of it. Do I hold today's films to a higher standard than I do for films from the 60's/70s? Or maybe I just look at those older films as lost oddities that are fun because of the way they slipped through the cracks (not Harold and Maude of course, but any of the more obscure things from that period that I enjoy). There's something about the way this film totally came out of contemporary underground art-culture from my age group, representing a lot of the trends through the fashion and behavior of the characters (and their interests - I mean a video installation artist? Come on.) that irritated me too. I think this film really pushed my buttons in exactly what I don't like about film - there is nothing innovative, nothing groundbreaking enough, content-wise, to warrant this film defining itself for such a niche audience (which it does, despite whatever success it might have with mainstream audiences, through it's marketing, music, July's background, etc.). Why does it matter that the film was made with so many gestures to its niche audience? Because the selling point of the film - the reason I would have enjoyed this film 5 years ago, even maybe loved it - is this niche, because people who come from the same sort of subcultures (as I myself do, at least somewhat) will instantly relate to it and support it because it's sort of "about" them. I've fallen into that trap before, and while July is wise to not just drop specific references, it still clearly knows its audience. I think this rant is really me just trying to articulate about why this stuff irks me - because I think it can get in the way of a critical analysis. As it clearly is here. But the subcultural stuff is only a small part of why I hated this. Really it's that quirkyness... ugh...and I really liked "I Heart Huckabees," so I don't know how the fuck to even understand my own opinions. I apologize to Miranda July if you are reading this, and to anyone else if you've actually made it this far!
I urge the readers of this blog (Luther and Avec_ships and maybe my brother) to post their thoughts on the films of John Cassavetes. My amazement at "Husbands" was posted before; I've now watched "A Woman Under the Influence" and "Minnie and Moskowitz" - and while extremely different, they were both fantastic. I checked out "Cassavetes on Cassavetes" from the library and read the chapter on "Husbands" and I'm amazed at his working methods and at what an extreme personality he had.
I finally saw "Popeye," and now I am SURE that Robert Altman is the greatest American film director ever. What a mess! What a glorious mess, and the same can be said about every other film he ever made. I love the way Altman deconstructs genre films - the western in "McCabe and Mrs. Miller," the musical in "Nashville," the war film in "Mash", the cripe caper in "Thieves Like Us," the teen movie in "OC and Stiggs" - and "Popeye" is absolutely his take on the family film. I love that this was actually greenlighted and intended to be a movie for children on some level. The sets are raw, the dialogue overlaps like in all of his other films, and there's very little that I think a young child would enjoy. Robin Williams is actually pretty great at apeing the Popeye vibe, and Shelley Duvall is the most perfect Olive Oyl imagineable. It feels like everyone involved in the production was on different drugs; the set designer was on some sort of downers, Altman was probably just smoking pot like always and the actors seem to be on various psychedelics. It doesn't feel out of place against any of his other films, and it's actually pretty funny at times. I am now determined to see the rest of the Altman catalogue I haven't already seen - which is most of his 1980's and 90's work.
I joined netflix a few months ago, figuring that it would be a good way to stock up on films. I live in a town that doesn't have an even half-decent video rental place, so I figured it would be a way to find things. Unfortunately, a lot of the things I want to see are not yet on DVD, so i am S.O.L. Anyway, my basic Netflix policy is to rip the disc as soon as it arrives to a DivX avi, then mail it back as quickly as possible. This generally works well, especially since i started ripping on the Windows platform. Once I rip the VIDEO_TS folder to my hard drive with DVDDecrypter, I can basically mail the disc back 20 minutes after I got it. The discs come from Louisville so they almost always get back the next day. This means I can easily go through five or six films in a week.
Of course, I don't actually watch films very often. Instead I rip them to avis, burn these avis to a dvd+r, and put them in a binder. I now have 72 discs in the binder, with 4-6 fims on each disc (split between netflix stuff and things I download). I maybe watch 2-3 films a month lately. I know this is sick, obsessive behavior, but it's also nice to know that when I quit Netflix (which is imminent), I can probably go two years on the backlog.
I have been watching a few things lately, whether they came from Netflix or bittorrent. I was excited to see that SCTV was now on DVD, so I rented the first season. Unfortunately, this wasn't the weird Canadian series I remembered so fondly but the second season, when they went to American TV. It's not nearly as weird as I remembered it being, though there are some moments - and seeing John Candy and Eugene Levy so young is rather nice. I ripped all 5 discs; will I ever watch more than the first few episodes? I doubt it.
I finally saw Napoleon Dynamite. Boo. Who cares? Does the world really need a cross between "Welcome to the Dollhouse" and Wes Anderson? The only part I laughed at was where his brother tries to back over a tupperware container in a van, and smashes it, and then drives away embarassed. It reminded me of a Neil Hamburger moment for some reason.
I was also disappointed by Chris Morris' "JAM" which I downloaded (and also only made it through one episode). I guess if you view it as the adaptation of a radio series, then it works a little bit more, but otherwise it's just weak sketch comedy that tries to be dark/extreme/scary. I guess he will never equal the brilliance of "Brass Eye" (which I just showed to two very stoned roommates the other night - the pedophilia special, which I think I could watch over and over without getting tired of).
I did enjoy the documentary on the Yes Men. It didn't make them look like these big heroes, but rather like a few humble pranksters who lucked into some good opportunities. I found the participants very likeable, and the film never tried to make it look like they were really doing something brilliant (except for at the end when it implied that the collapse of WTO talks may have had something to do with the Yes Men, but that's only if you read into it).