I must not have screwed up my last assignment as a substitute too badly, because I’ve been allowed back into the building for this week’s Open Thread.
Aside from pop culture, it’s been an eventful week for Overthinking It. We celebrated our fourth birthday on January 22, experienced half a day’s worth of downtime the next day (all that partying must have crashed the server), opened up discussion forums, and launched a new design, which has inspired passionate discussion from both admirers and critics.
To both camps, I say: Thanks for caring enough about the site to spend time giving us your feedback. We read every piece of it and take it seriously. This new design is a work in progress, and we’ll be tweaking and improving it as we go. First, though, we’ve gotta solve the problems with Android phones.
OK, that’s enough about us. Onto the pop culture!
The widest release is man vs. wolves survival thriller The Grey. I have to admit, I haven’t heard a single thing about this move. Let’s have a look:
OK, not interested. I’d probably enjoy Man on a Ledge more (I like a good heist film), but there’s nothing too groundbreaking there either, and if you’re interested in a romantic comedy, Lionsgate has helpfully counterprogrammed One for The Money, an adaptation of the first Stephanie Plum novel by Janet Evanovich.
Overthinkers who wish to spend their hard-earned entertainment dollars subjecting movies to a level of scrutiny that they definitely do deserve would probably be better served checking out The Descendants, which opens wide, or especially the fascinatingly weird-seeming Albert Nobbs, which opens a little wider.
On the music front, um, what? There’s a new record from Leonard Cohen called Old Ideas
On the TV front, we haven’t mentioned yet that Justified is back. It’s a great show, though it’s got tough work cut out for it this year in topping Margo Martindale’s Emmy-winning turn as the powerful, terrifying backwoods matriarch Mags Bennett. The first two episodes have been villain-of-the-week deals, though there have been a few moves at setting up larger, serialized storylines. Man, was she ever good.
With the forums open, we were wondering whether these Open Threads are even useful anymore. Maybe we should turn them into more of a pop-culture roundup, but we don’t pay attention that closely, and you can get that stuff from dozens of other websites out there. Should we keep publishing these? Sound off on that or any other topic, for this is your… Open Thread.
I think the Open Thread is still useful- like a documentation/summary of the important pop culture events of the week. But, then again, the idea of an institution such as the Open Thread being dissolved makes me too sad.
WAIT! As for pop culture this week, how abou this teaser for a Super Bowl ad?
http://youtu.be/SuHmEo0Bx7Q
This is ripe for overthinking. First, there are the implications of… well… Since when do we need commercials for our commercials???? Second, obviously it’s supposed to be Ferris Beuller- but is it literally supposed to be him, thirty years later? Or just a spoof, placing an older gentleman in the same kind of situation(s)? If it’s the former, are we to conjecture that the fancy bedroom was something he earned through the wit and cleverness demonstrated in the movie?
Full Disclosure: Never really been a fan of the movie. And the scene where they’re looking down through the window makes me nauseous.
I don’t think you should cancel the Open Thread precisely for the reason of Gab’s second comment. The Open Thread catches up the readers (like me) who don’t pay extreme attention to pop culture, and also a place for people (like Gab) to drop tidbits and discuss things to add to the conversation. And instead of nosing around in the fora, a casual reader can pop onto the Open Thread and drop his or her two cents such as I will right here.
Gab- I watched the video (thanks for posting the link!) and having NOT ever seen Ferris Bueller’s day off (or even any Matthew Broderick film, come to think of it) I can only say that this is a typical Super Bowl ad. It’s being only 10 seconds in length makes me a little suspicious as to how long the actual commercial will be. This film is not going to pay millions upon hundreds of thousands of dollars to air a two-minute preview, when the film is a cult item, (by which I mean it is not insanely popular among people, only those who have seen it), and depending on who or what is in your ad, it can cost up to a billion to air a 30 second, or 45 second advertisement for Fed Ex, not a movie no one will see. As for it’s legitimacy, it seems that YouTube consensus is at best, not all there. I saw a few videos with the same clip that were called “Ferris Bueller 2!”, but beyond that there were only alot of videos about curtains. Way to go YouTube.
All in some, this ad basically has made it harder for me to decide if I will watch the Super Bowl for the ads, or if I’ll just tune in to Animal Planet’s Puppy Bowl.
I agree on keeping the open thread around. Some of us don’t intend to spend much, if any, time in the forums, and so the open thread still has value. The creation of new things need not be a harbinger for the destruction of the old. Just because we have cars doesn’t mean we killed all the horses. Instead, we killed them all to bring a gritty reality to are stagings of Equus.
I’m excited by the return of Justified, too, but I’ve been overthinking the show a little over at Role/Reboot.
Trying to get to the bottom of what the series says about gender roles…
http://www.rolereboot.org/life/details/2012-01-the-marshal-and-his-women-can-tvs-justified-reboot-t