deep thought (re TV versus movies)
The best television today is better than the best television used to be. But the best movies today are not better than the best movies used to be.
tv buzz
‘Doctor Who’ thing of the day: Elisabeth Sladen doesn’t understand the popularity of Sarah Jane Smith
Personally, I think the Sarah of late is a bit obsessed with the Doctor, in a way that’s not so appealing (or maybe I’m just jealous that he does actually show up once in a while). Though I suppose that’s easy to do when your neighborhood is getting invaded by alien nasties every week.
question of the day: What recent crappy movies would work better as TV shows?
Buffy the Vampire Slayer the movie sucked. But some folks seem to feel that Buffy the TV series was pretty darn okay. I’m really desperately trying to keep that in mind when I think about how the American network Fox is going into production with a series based on the deeply terrible 2005 Will Smith film Hitch.
question of the day: Can ‘The Taking of Prince Harry’ have any purpose beyond sheer titillation?
Later this month, the U.K.’s Channel 4 will air a ‘dramatized documentary’ about a fictional kidnapping of Prince Harry by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Can this film have any purpose beyond lurid sensationalism? And if that’s the only purpose it serves, is that okay?
‘Doctor Who’ thing of the day: Season Six teasers
We all know what a mean ol’ tease Steven Moffat is, so it’s entirely possible that at least some of these hints — not spoilers — from the upcoming Brilliant Book of Doctor Who are deliberately misleading, and others are outright bullshit. But we’ll still have fun discussing them anyway.
a few thoughts on ‘Mad Men’: “Chinese Wall”
There really is no middle ground for Don when it comes to women, is there? Either they’re invisible to him, functional furniture — like poor Miss Blankenship was — or he’s on top of them because they smiled sweetly at him. Sheesh.
question of the day: What is the longstanding appeal of British costume dramas, like the new ‘Downton Abbey’?
For me, it’s the bottling up of emotion required by the (stereotypical) British stiff upper lip, until it just won’t stay bottled up anymore, which results in exquisitely drawn out encounters full of subtext and seething with feeling, and eventually explosive outbursts. You?
deep thought (re Tyler Clementi and Anderson Cooper)
Imagine the power of Anderson Cooper opening his nightly CNN newscast like this: ‘I’m proud to say that I am a gay man, and so I have a personal appreciation of the hell that Rutgers University student Tyler Clementi went through before he committed suicide.’
a few thoughts on ‘Mad Men’: “Hands and Knees”
Is SDCP teetering on the edge of dissolution? It sure seems that way after Roger’s lie about Lucky Strike and after Pete’s lie about North American Aviation… oh, and all of Don’s lies about everything.
‘Doctor Who’ thing of the day: Neil Gaiman with a Weeping Angel
Cool thing about getting to hang out on the Doctor Who set: faux attacks by famous monsters.
