Before James Franco and Anne Hathaway give away golden statuettes this weekend, Overthinking It has some awards of its own to give out:
Best Performance in a Foreign Language Documentary: Mark Lee, I’ll Be Back: La Saga Terminator
Podcast listeners may recall that back in September 2010, our resident Terminator fanboy, Mark Lee, was called upon by the French TV channel Canal Plus to film a segment for a documentary on Terminator they were putting together to accompany the French TV debut of Terminator: Abomination Salvation. Apparently they found the Terminator monster ballad, “I’ll Be Back,” and selected Lee as a representative of the hard-core Terminator fanbase. We never followed up or attempted to find the footage…until now:
http://il.youtube.com/watch?v=S24f3SisaBc&start=147
And in case you’re wondering, Lee did go on to trash Terminator: Suckvation during the interview, but the documentary producers inexplicably chose not to use that footage.
Next envelope please…
This week’s award for Best Reader Comment goes to OCsurfeR for his remarks on “The North American Star League and eSports.” He’s in a better position than most to comment on NASL–he’s one of the managers behind the operation. It’s not often that we get to hear from the creators of the pop culture that we scrutinize on this site, so OCsurfeR, thanks for stopping by to comment, and best of luck with getting NASL off the ground!
We’re in our baby steps of the NASL. We have a very experienced management team. Personally I’ve managed projects much larger than NASL is or even bigger than GSL is today. I’ve done media and press relations for 20 years. The CEO of NASL has managed multi-million dollar construction projects and is a natural leader that is also amazingly creative. We have good casters, devoted investors and a good team of paid and volunteer staff that will certainly grow with time.
So relax. See what we’re about, give us five seconds to put up or shut up before you accuse, arrest, try, judge and sentence us for something that in your hearts we know you believe in, before it even fracking happens.
Next envelope please…
The award for Best Award Show This Weekend goes to the 83rd Academy Awards. This wasn’t much of a surprise win for the Academy Awards, though. They were the favorites going into this Open Thread, and they did wage an extensive publicity campaign to sway the voters. And by “wage an extensive publicity campaign” I mean “buy a lot of coke and hookers.” And by “voters” I mean “me.”
But that’s neither here nor there! (Well, actually, coke and hookers will probably be there…) I know why you’re here: make your Oscar predictions in the comments below. Brag about how you’re the only person in North America to have seen Javier Bardem in Biutiful. Make a 6th grade joke about Winter’s Bone (we did on the podcast). Complain about how Clash of the Titans got snubbed for Best Picture. We’ll all mock you, but don’t let that stop you. For this is your … Open Thread.
Well, if this is my open thread (and so far, I’m the only one posting here), I choose to ignore all given suggestions and talk about Glee. I just cought up on the past few episodes. Matt, you need to convince Lee to watch, at the very least, the Beiber episode and join you for the TFT podcast when you cover it. (Whenever that happens)
Ditto. I was actually thinking Lee should see it as I was watching it as well.
The “I’ll Be Back” video is the thing that first got me visiting Overthinking It on a regular basis. So, for that, I say thank you(?)
Oscar Predictions:
Best Picture: The King’s Speech
Best Actor: Colin Firth
Best Actress: Natalie Portman
Best Supporting Actor: Christian Bale
Best Supporting Actress: Melissa Leo
Best Director: David Fincher
Best Original Screenplay: Inception
Best Adapted Screenplay: The Social Network
Best Animated Feature: Toy Story 3
I could go on, but I doubt anybody wanted to go that far, so why go further? I’ve only seen four of the Best Picture nominees (well four and five minutes of Black Swan which was enough for me) and of those I thought True Grit was the best film of the year. The other three were The Fighter, The Social Network, and Winter’s Bone, for the record. Hopefully the Coen Brothers can take home something for their film.
So, I subscribed to the OTI RSS feed through Google Reader – does that take away from the site’s hits?
Don’t worry about it — we’re glad to have you read however you do it!
I did not keep up with the film world this past year, the loss of my job and subsequent fevered hunt for another explains me missing most of the summer’s big winners (Piranha, anyone?) but I did see “The Social Network” and (ahem) “Hot Tub Time Machine” this past year in the theaters. I found the Social Network to be much, much better than it was originally pitched as (“That guy from West Wing is making a movie about Facebook”, for instance). Sorkin does a lot with a story that is much more compelling than it should be and illustrates that, with what connectivity we’ve achieved in the Facebook age, we’ve also lost the basic human connections that function so well in the real world. I was hesitant to praise the movie too much on my Facebook page, for fear that Zuckerberg might be monitoring.
Did I mention that I can be paranoid?
Re: Glee, as the first poster alluded to, I feel like this season has turned into a rollercoaster, or perhaps a Ferris wheel, of storytelling and character development. For every step the show takes forward, the very next episode it seems to take three or five back. The writer who covers the show for the AV Club makes an interesting point: the show is really three different shows competing with one another to be heard (the Ryan Murphy version, the Ian Brennen(er?) version, and whoever the third guy is). While this can sometimes lead to great epsiodes such as the one where Finn sees Jesus in a cheese sandwich, it can also lead to the Rocky Horror episode. As someone who appreciates the original film, I felt like that episode got it wrong on so many notes that it was almost a relief when the episode finished. Glee might be suffering from too much, too soon, in that when it began it was maybe hyped but not really on the radar so much, but now it’s so omnipresent that perhaps, just perhaps, it’s too popular for its own good, and the pressure is starting to affect how the show is written. Instead of focusing on how the kids actually behave in the context of their world (outcasts in a hierarchal society that values conformity), it’s become stunts piled on one another so that even the best part of the show (Sue Sylvester) falls back into yet another “get Will Schuster” scheme when she shows signs of actually becoming a human being instead of a stock villain.
Not that I care that much about Glee, mind you ;-)
Compare that with what I think is the best show on TV right now (Parks and Recs is close): Community. Character development is the name of the game, and apart from the occasional slips it’s really done a lot of work in advancing the main players from a random group to a real community of people who care about one another even as they occasionally try to tear one another down.
Perhaps there’s an article in the whole “Glee versus Community” thing there…
The AV Club just had an article about how similar Glee and Community are: http://www.avclub.com/articles/community-and-glee-are-pretty-much-the-same-show,52311/
I saw that after I’d posted my original comment, there was much gnashing of teeth at my slowness