If you want to close this thread, just tear off the little R/W plastic tab on the edge of the cassette. Until then, this thread stays Open.
What goes on? We’ve got Scotty McCreery, winner of Idol’s tenth season; Lady Gaga’s 99-cent version of her new album, Born This Way, crashed Amazon’s servers; Tree of Life, Terrence Malick’s much-buzzed Cannes spectacle, opens this weekend; and the most powerful woman in show business ended the show that put her in business.
And if that’s not enough, how about a Comment of the Week? Well? How about it? How about sharper, with a comment on The State of Schwarzenegger Fandom, Post-Scandal:
I wonder; if Arnold died suddenly and somewhat unexpectedly, would he get the same sort of immediate image rehabilitation Michael Jackson (King of Pop/convicted-in-media child molester) underwent?
I think a part of it is how much of the performance serves to remind the audience of the misdeed. You can listen to Jackson’s tunes and easily forget what he was accused of (or in the case of “Billie Jean”, find it ironically humorous). If Arnold’s older performances come across as misogynist, it’ll probably be harder to forgive him.
Sage insight, sir or ma’am. Although let’s hope we have plenty of years of Schwarzenegger left. Safe, respectful, female-positive years.
What would a Terence Malick concert film of a Lady Gaga tour look like? Or is there something we missed? Sound off in the comments, for this is your … Open Thread.
I just learned some exciting news: today is Vincent Price’s 100th birthday! Everyone listen to Thriller.
Meanwhile, Jeff Conaway from Grease and Babylon 5 passed away.
A few friends of mine went to see The Hangover 2 at midnight Thursday night. And they said it was exactly the same as the first one. And they knew it would be. But they went. Which is why a midnight showing was even available in this dinky little town in the first place. Sigh. I suppose I’m a hypocrite, though, since I still want to see the new PotC movie. :/
I hadn’t watched Idol, but I saw the last couple minutes, and for some reason thought this Scotty fellow looks like he could play Joseph Gordon Lecvitt’s cousin or brother in something. Maybe there should be an Inception–3rd Rock–American Idol crossover.
Also, Dancing with the Stars and Gleehad their finales this week. I wasn’t expecting Kirstie Allie to get that far, but kudos to her and the fans that kept her in the running. As for Glee I was surprised at how nicely everything got wrapped up. It was atypical for the show, and I wonder what the writers have in mind. There were five or so minutes where I couldn’t get over how meta a particular situation was- a main character’s mother in the show is played by the lead in the original cast of Wicked, and said character goes to the stage said show is performed on and sings a song from said musical. I mean… whoa. Seriously. A (wannabe) musical lover’s dream. :)
Has anyone else been keeping up with the various streaming competitions going on, though? Netflix, Amazon, and YouTube are going at it in a three-way brawl like something out of a bad version of Super Smash Brothers, or so it seems. So I’m curious as to where this will take the film and television industries. I can see major studios producing fully budgeted materials intended exclusively for streaming, and who knows? Maybe someday movie theaters won’t exist????? Cue the ominous muzaks.
Yeah I wonder about the future of movie theaters too, because the psychical communal experience is the only thing theaters have over home media and right now the movie theater “experience ceiling” is at paying $12 a ticket to smell some geriatrics’s body odor while being harangued with 20 minutes of awful corporate propaganda before the movie.
Movies lost the monopoly of transporting the viewer to another world to video games- Red Dead Redemption, WoW- which they can also share communally; and great stories to tv, The Wire, Two and a Half Men.
It’s maybe telling that a multiplex in my town closed and everyone was so excited that it was obviously so blatantly obviously and justly going to be a new dollar theater, which our town sorely didn’t have, three months of renovation later… Russian Orthodox Church opens. So what’s going to pull in the audiences enough to support the “studio multiplex on every corner” system forever? Beards. To prove my case, Zack Galifianakis and The Hangover.
The studios were smart enough to shave his head and not his beard. No doubt they checked intuition against a computer mock up of an all bald Galifiankis to see if it would test poorly. It wouldn’t even surprise me if the studio digitally replaced his beard after screening an original all bald version.
I should clarify ,or backpeddle a cynic might say, why this would save cinema against streaming. 1. I now go to daily mass at the Russian Orthodox church just to see the beards. 2. Seeing Galifiankis’ beard 30′ wide in 4k resolution and full film color is a totally different experience than seeing it on your iphone or flatscreen compressed to 200kb and looking like an snes cutscene. Like 2001: A Space Odyssey, seeing it big screen in it’s native 70mm format with other people is exhilarating where on tv it’s only pretty awesome.
I’ve been watching Idol from the beginning and kind of pegged Scotty to win. I don’t think he’ll be hugely successful but I have no ill will towards him. I was kind of rooting for Kirstie to win Dancing with the Stars. And yes, Glee was wrapped up very neatly. I’ve heard chatter that they might have filmed a longer episode and cut things out which is why things seem a little jumpy and plotlines (e.g. Quinn’s revenge) don’t seem to go anywhere. I don’t think it’s meta so much as the writers really like Wicked. Like Rachel meeting Patti Lupone. I think the writers just like Patti Lupone and diva songs…thus the musical numbers from Evita, Gypsy, Sunset Boulevard, etc. What I didn’t get is how Rachel and Kurt are such Wicked fans and they never stop to think, you know my mom looks a lot like Idina, and April looks a lot like Cheno. Given how self-aware the show is, I would think someone would say something.
I’d totally lol irl if they made an actual reference like that. Holy crap.