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Lots of movies coming out! Maybe you’re excited about Moneyball, the smart Brad Pitt baseball drama about making baseball smarter. Or maybe your standards aren’t as high and you’d rather see Killer Elite, a throwback 80s action movie, set in the 80s, starring an 80s star – Robert deNiro – and Jason Statham and Clive Owen. Or maybe your standards are lower still and you just want to see Taylor Lautner shirtless in Abduction. In which case, let me save you the $9.50:
Didn't even have to search for 'Taylor Lautner shirtless.' Just his name will do.
If you stayed in to watch TV this week, you had your choice of fare. There was the season premiere of Community, fresh off their Emmy snub. Also, the networks seem to have agreed that Mad Men isn’t going anywhere, as we have two vampy Sixties throwbacks: Pan Am and The Playboy Club. And 2 Broke Girls, and The New Girl, and Whitney, and, and, and.
In music news, REM announced their breakup, thirty-one years after their debut and eleven years after people stopped listening to them. Here’s one from deep in the catalog, “Don’t Go Back to Rockville”:
Comment of the Week goes to Marc on Laughing Our Way to the Altar:
Romantic Comedies are probably my favorite genre and i’ve got free time, so i’m taking the opportunity to mouth off.
I enjoyed this article, but I think you’re missing an opportunity to go deeper with it. Specifically, I’m talking about the way that romantic comedies can use the audience’s knowledge of the end result ( monogamous relationship) to explore what forms the basis of those relationships.
Followed by what’s at least another 250 words. That’s some good Overthink, which we always like to see in our comment threads.
Has Michael Stipe discovered a way of uncovering hotter female waitresses than any other club in America, using spreadsheets and statistics? Or is there something we missed? Sound off in the comments!
your “altar” link doesn’t go to the essay you want it to…it’s a link to the open thread.
Three of my top ten bands (Delirious?, Pure Reason Revolution and R.E.M.) have broken up in the last year. All I’m saying is look out 65daysofstatic, Radiohead, Muse, Manic Street Preachers, U2, Iona and Daft Punk. http://www.last.fm/user/yalphaath/charts
And Sigur Ros better hope I don’t listen to more of them than usual even when they release Inni.
So how did UK mega-hit The X-Factor translate over the pond? I’ve heard it was a bit of a damp squib.
I looked over Bard Pitt’s Imdb page, and I noticed he has recently been almost exclusively in “prestige” films for the past couple of years. Has he become an elder statesman of Hollywood yet?
And this may not be the place, but after seeing the pictures of the NYC meet up, I’ve been wondering if any of the UK based Overthinkers might be interested in something similar?
I didn’t watch it, but I heard that X-factor came it at number 2 in the Wednesday night ratings, behind Emmy-hoarding superhit Modern Family.
I heard that it came in 3rd, but either way you look at it (IMO) people are getting tired of singing contests; the market is simply oversaturated with them and they’re all the same…
Community was good, Parks and Recreation was very good. 2 Broke Girls and Whitney and New Girl were not very good. I was only able to get through 10 minutes of Playboy Club before I became disgusted. The worst thing about this week, though, was being a slave to the network schedule. I can’t imagine life in the age before the internet and the VC/DVR. It must have been maddening.
I actually watched most of Whitney, and it was highly lame. And everytime the boyfriend was onscreen, I really wanted to shave that hipster caveman scruff off his unfunny face.
I thought New Girl was good, if awkwardly paced, but I don’t know if it was good enough I’ll watch it again. I agree on Community and Parks and Rec, and I also think The Office, in its brave new era, was good.
Yes – good, but not good enough to watch again. Whitney and 2BrokeGirls and New Girl were all 3 better than anything Jim Belushi has ever been in, but that’s not where I set the bar for network TV.
I actually thought that Playboy Club was pretty good. Yes I didn’t like the blatent sexualization and exploitation of the female body but at the same time that’s how they viewed women during the ’60s (the female lib not coming until the next decade) and the company that Hugh started was aimed at men, how else is he going to get them to his club without girls prancing around half-naked?
Also it introduced the sub-plot of the homosexual club, sort of the gay Playboy Club, and how it really was against the law to be gay but those who felt that way needed some place among like minded people where they didn’t have to watch what they did/said for fear of being “outed” (one could also see the Playboy Club as a safe place where men could indulge in their fanticies in a more “tastefull” atmosphere rather than a regular strip club).
I’m conflicted on seeing Moneyball. I’m a huge baseball fan and a big sabermetrics guy, and the movie has gotten generally good reviews. However, a couple of the baseball people out there, namely ESPN’s Keith Law, did not like it, and did not like the at portrayed baseball. Plus, I don’t like going to the movies and am only contemplating it because I have two free movie tickets, which is not a strong push to go see it really either.
Also, I’ve seen a bit of the trailer for Abduction, and man does it look like Taylor Lautner can’t act. Granted, he’s evidently only 19, so he definitely has a lot of time to improve, but the idea of him leading a film with his current abilities is laughable.
I just saw it, and I liked it a lot. It’s a movie about baseball, and yet it’s not a movie about baseball. I guess I would call myself 20-30% of a fan. If a game is on at a bar, I can enjoy it, and understand exactly what’s going on – and I love a day at the ballpark. But I don’t watch at home, and I don’t follow teams or players. Anyway, I thought it was pretty cool. And there’s very few scenes that take place on the field during a game.
Here’s what’s interesting about Playboy: When the magazine debuted in 1953, most men were encouraged to be the “Organization Man” best depicted by Gregory Peck in “The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit.” Get married young, have kids, work for the same company, conform, etc. For a man to listen to jazz, to have female friends, to have minority friends, to do and have what young men take for granted nowadays was considered different and perhaps dangerous. Playboy celebrated the bohemian lifestyle of young men, but to be sold as a bohemian magazine would have opened it up to all kinds of attacks, whether it be from homophobes, or conformists, etc. Having beautiful naked women in the magazine protected it from those kind of attacks. Because, really, in the end, who had a problem with that?