Hello, Overthinkers! With Perich gone on an Overthinking sabbatical in the Far East, it falls to me to resume my role as your thread opener for the week. Let’s fire up the “Entertainment” category of Google News and see what’s going on.
Hilarious cancer (but when isn’t cancer hilarious) dramedy 50/50 opens award-movie season with leads Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Seth Rogen and features Tony- and Oscar-nominated actress Anna Kendrick. Kendrick sat down with MTV for an entirely straightforward interview.
But I’m given to understand that the 3D re-release of The Lion King may hold the top spot at the box office. (Headline puns I’ve seen so far in my Googling: “Lion King My Top The Food Chain”; “Lion still King of the Movie Jungle”. I know you can do better. Sound off below.)
Courageous, about the spiritual struggles of four police officers, comes out in limited release (isn’t it amazing that we talk about 1,100 screens as “limited” release?), Dream House looks like—wait for it—a nightmare, and Anna Farris still hasn’t found the right vehicle for her considerable talents as a comedienne.
On the TV front, The New Girl seems to be doing really well, X Factor not so much, and Community is still kicking ass (in my humble opinion) coming back strong with a brilliant opening number in the premiere and this week an understated cameo from Martin Starr.
If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to report that my inner thirteen year old (who listened to nothing but female singer-songwriters all through the nineties) is thrilled that Tori Amos has recently released Night of Hunters, her latest album. (That’s not even an affiliate link; that’s how much I love Tori Amos. You may commence calling me names.)
But you know that, more than anything, I’m the grammar and usage nerd on OTI. So I was thrilled when a witty and instructive drawing about the Oxford comma began making the rounds of Facebook and Tumblr this week. Click through to see it, and sound off about these or any other pop culture artifacts. For this is your… Open Thread.
Could Anna Kendrick play a haughty English teacher in a plot loosely inspired by Hamlet on Community?
Or is there something we missed? Sound off in the comments, for this is your … Open Thread.
Come on, everyone! Time to mobilize the troops for a preemptive SAVE COMMUNITY campaign!
-Ensure you watch it every week
-Tell all your friends to watch it, ad nauseam
-Tell all your friends to leave their TV sets tuned to NBC even if they’re not at home on Thursday nights
-Rewatch episodes multiple times on Hulu
-Write long, impassioned letters to NBC begging them to prioritize enriching human culture over ratings-chasing
Any other ideas?
Only two things can possibly save Community:
1. Continued ineptness from NBC.
2. The fact they are getting fairly close to syndication. As the old adage goes, getting the third season is hard. After that, getting the fourth and fifth seasons are relatively easy.
How much danger is it really in? I mean, I love the show more than the next guy, but do we need to shift from “Look at how amazing this show is” mode to “Look at how in trouble this show is” mode?
For what it’s worth, I think that while Community’s doesn’t do “Two and A Half Men” numbers, it’s surviving because it scores in important demos — 18-34, educated, big spenders — which makes it attractive to advertisers.
I don’t know how much danger it’s really in, but now that I live in the US I’m just stoked to be able to do more for a low-rated favorite show than sending pathetic “please don’t cancel Terriers” emails to the network.
Also, like I said, preemptive.
A handful of non-Nielsen households wasting electricity is not the right way to go here. If I do miss an episode, I watch it the next day on NBC.com, where NBC pockets every penny of the advertising money, instead of Hulu, which takes its own cut (and shows more commercials).
But maybe it’s a good idea to be prepared for the end. As far as I can tell, good television only makes it to air by accident. The networks just love to shoot themselves in the foot.
I saw What’s Your Number today, but I don’t have anything especially insightful to say about it. As you might have guessed, it has plenty of flawed romcom logic, plenty of pro-monogamy propaganda, and plenty of dating fantasy. The film also has plot points that hinge on Twitter, Facebook, camera phones, and text messaging. There are no less than 4 meet-cutes. And for a movie that is exclusively marketed to women, it features an awful lot of shots of Anna Faris in various states of undress.
But if you don’t mind those things in a movie, it’s kinda fun and watchable.
To revisit in a way my very first article for the site, the re-imagining or reboot of “The Thing” has started to be plugged on the networks this week, in advance of its October 14 release date.
The movie will take place at the Norwegian camp that the 1982 film opened with after the fact (fans of the 1982 film, which is itself a remake of the 1951 Howard Hawks classic, will know what I’m talking about). Ergo, you kinda already know how the film will end: everyone dies. They have to, because for the 1982 film to work, everyone in the reboot has to.
This is an interesting concept to me, because you know in advance how the movie will end, but not because you’ve read the book but because you’ve seen the movie from the past which takes place in the immediate aftermath of what happens in the current production. Unlike Hollywood reboots of superhero movies, there’s not a lot of wiggle room for the filmmakers, because it’s not a case of rabid fanboys decrying what you do so much as the logic of the previous film.
Thoughts? Also, “Community” seems to me to be the sort of show that could survive minus a huge audience (unlike “Glee”, which became unwatchable in the midst of its second season and thus is no longer on my list of can’t-miss shows), a sort of “Arrested Development” for the Twitter age. Of course, AD only lasted three seasons, so…
Was that the piece that broke down the textual clues to both whether the 2nd last survivor was infected, and whether Snake Plisken knew it? That was brilliant. It really convincingly resolved a lasting “lady or tiger” ending. And impressed the hell out of me that Carpenter had attended to such detail.
I think mine was more about how disturbing it is to see Wilfred Brimley as the main monster in the film’s conclusion.