Monday, April 7, 2008

On your mark!

Allright, so I've gone and started a blog to share with whoever cares to read it my thoughts on the things I love. This could be reviews or thoughts on movies, television shows, Boston, photography, art of all kinds and the random things I look up on Wikipedia.
Did you know all of the sweaters Mr. Rogers wore on his show were hand-knitted by his mother?
Did you know that pubic lice (crabs) can also live on your eyelashes?
Did you know the ancestors of chihuahuas might have lived in trees?
Did you know that the pomegranate has significance in several religions?

So, after a whole month of not having television, I spent yesterday watching lots of it. I am now caught up on my "Venture Brothers", and although the new episodes are funny, they lack a little bit of the snap of the first season. In the first season every line was gold, now it's a good joke every two or three lines. But I shall remain faithful, if only because the entire show is drawn by hand, old animation style. That's why we all have to wait so long between seasons, they're doing things the tried and true way. I wonder how long a show about failure can chug along before it loses too much steam... "Invader Zim" (another one of my faves) was about failure, but it was cancelled and never got the chance to get tired.

Speaking of tired... Dan, like always, watched "Law & Order" and I, like always, knew the guilty party within the first five minutes. I swear to God, there is no show on television as tired and done to death than "Law & Order". All of its incarnations all follow the same formula, and really the only thing they can do to keep it exciting is to either make the fictional crime mirror a high-profile real crime in the news, or (in the Special Victims Unit) make the fictional crimes ever more horrifying. A child gets raped? No, they've done that. A child raped and killed? Nope, done. A child raped, killed, mutilated and fed to a dog? Great! Write it! Their writers get paid to think of the most awful way to kill someone, or the most screwed up sexual abuse possible, or both. Makes me sick! Prime-time torture porn.

For a movie I watched Blades of Glory on HBO on demand. I saw it in the theaters, but it was funny enough to give it a second viewing. It's the kind of movie that intoxication goes well with, but Amy Poheler (representing Massachusetts) and her husband, Will Arnett, are just spectacular. All around great comedic performances, and the way the movie ends really drives home the fact that they were going for absurd. Any movie whose soundtrack includes "Stroke Me" is a winner in my book!
Comedy must be story-driven. You can't get too fancy with the cinematography or it's just distracting. There are probably exceptions, but I can't think of any right now. I will note to myself to post some if I think of any.

I then chanced on a t.v. show when I jumped out of the on-demand screen called "Busted On the Job" that shows security or personal camera footage of someone doing something they should not on the job. They also interview either witnesses or the guilty party. A man is seen on a surveillance camera, he is inspecting the pinatas at the pinata factory he works at. He 's feeling them all over, then he picks up a dalmation shaped pinata, cuts a hole in it and has sex with it.
I'm not kidding. His explanation?

"It's partly their (the pinata manufacturer) fault. I'm there from 12:00am to 6:00am, baseball season's over, so you can't listen to the game. I'm all by myself, I mean, what am I supposed to do?"

He's clearly a victim of circumstance. Any of us in a similar situation would have had sex with a pinata too. It's just human nature, like in Hollow Man when Kevin Bacon became invisible, and taught us all that if you become invisible, you're going to stalk and rape someone. I mean, come on, I know people are weak, we're all just animals and blah blah blah, but you can't say we'd all end up having sex with a pinata if left alone in a warehouse full of pinatas for six hours. Six hours isn't a long time, not even the length of the average work day. It took a lot longer for the Donner party to start eating the dead, for the kids in Lord of the flies to start killing each other, for Harry to finally fuck Sally, it only took a few six hour shifts before this guy decided sex with a pinata was the best way to pass the time. Someone give him a Sodoku book, please! Before any other paper-mache creatures get violated!
BTW- there were several person-shaped pinatas, he chose one shaped like a dog. What does that say about him? He also said:

"Who would put a security camera in a pinata warehouse? Those things are so ugly they should pay people to take them out of there!"

Well, you clearly didn't think they were too ugly to have SEX WITH! Geez, what else can I say?
To quote the old knight from The Last Crusade: He chose... Poorly.

I'm excited that Food Network will be showing some episodes of Julia Child's "The French Chef". For those of you who were not raised on a t.v. diet of PBS, Julia Child was on before "Sesame Street", which was followed by "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood" and then "The Frugal Gourmet".
"The Joy of Painting" was on much earlier in the day.

If you have a chance, look up some of your old favorite Sesame Street bits on YouTube. I reccommend Captain Vegetable, Teeny Little Super Guy, and the "I'd like to visit the moon" is an excellent vintage.
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1 comment:

Sam said...

it's true I always thought that if turned invisible I'd still be an upstanding citizen, maybe I'd walk unnoticed onto a flight to Maui or something and enjoy a few days on the beach. That was until 'Hollow Man' showed me that even Kevin Bacon, I mean Dr. So and So would turn cruel rapist once the opportunity arises. Well I learned my lesson, that's for sure.