It’s Saturday morning and something made me think about the meaning of patriotism.  Out of the blue.  I began thinking of an old Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul song, “I Am a Patriot” and a version that he performed back in 1984.  It had a long intro that was simply put by Little Steven ( better known to most  as Steve Van Zandt of the E Street Band and The Sopranos) and speaks as well to these times as it did 25 years ago.

It may be hard to get past the 80’s look of the clothing and the production of the show this is from but I think it’s still a pretty good anthem for doing what is best for the people of your country first, setting aside self-interest.   And that’s what patriots do.

By the way, the painting shown is  The Way of the Brave and is currently hung at the West End Gallery in Corning, NY.  I thought it fit the song…

Entertainment Weekly, you never cease to entertain me.  I love the way you inform me all the pop culture news I ever needed to know.  But my favorite thing about you, EW, is your photo galleries that contain endless lists.  Oh, how you satisfy my list craving.

The latest of the lists has to do with favorite seasons of some classic tv over the last few decades.  They put their list in no particular order – I won’t list every show here, so check out the full list here.

• The Simpsons, season 4 (1992-93) – home to great episodes like Homer the Heretic, Marge and the Monorail and Mr. Plow, it’s no secret that season 4 was a great season.  Because who can’t sing the Mr. Plow song every time they see a plow?
• Alias, season 1 (2001-2002) – I really like when a show’s first season is a favorite.  Mostly because it’s a testament to the writers, show producers and actors that they had something good right off the bat.  But, on the other hand, when the first season is the best, it makes me wonder what went wrong later on.
• Lost, season 1 (2004-2005) – The only season of Lost I could tolerate.  Unfortunately, it was never a show I could really get into.  But, with that said, season 1 was still excellent.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 2 (1997-1998) – A really amazing season, although not my favorite.  During the second season, everyone just locked step, and the Scoobies were never out of character again.  When I reintroduced myself to Buffy, it was the second season that really pulled me through.
• The Sopranos, season 4 (2002) – I just love the Sopranos, from beginning to end.  But what I love even more was the show’s ability to go from being really dark to being really REALLY dark and complicated.  Season 4, in my opinion, is the darkest of all, but no less amazing than the others.
• Sex and the City, season 3 (2000) – Carrie’s infidelity, Miranda’s breakup with Steve, Charlotte’s wedding to Trey, and Samantha and the guy with the “funky spunk.”  Classic.
• Veronica Mars, season 1 (2004-2005) – The beginning of an amazing story about a young, girl detective with a penchant for lost causes and spying.  The first season of Veronica Mars has always been my favorite, as it was the introduction into the life of a teenaged super sleuth.

There’s quite a few more TV shows with great seasons on the EW’s list.  I definitely recommend checking them out, and voicing which seasons of your favorite shows are your favorites.

Michael Imperioli

Michael Imperioli is keen for hit US drama The Sopranos to make its way onto the big screen.

The actor, who played Christopher Moltisanti in the hugely successful Mafia TV series, hopes creator David Chase will give the green light for the movie.

He said: “Everyone wants a Sopranos film to happen but it hasn’t officially come from David, and until it does…”

The 43-year-old’s character was killed by mob boss Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini), but he would still be keen to appear in a movie version of the show.

Asked if he’d like a role, he said: “My character’s dead so I don’t know if I would be, but if there is [a movie], sure!”

Michael will soon be seen in The Lovely Bones, Peter Jackson’s movie adaptation of Alice Sebold’s hit novel.

Me senté anoche a observar qué había en televisión estaba dispuesto a que si no había nada más me dispondría a seguir mi lista y hacer la entrada sobre una de las muchas pelis que tengo pendiente.

Bueno, había un par de series, otro par de pelis y Goodfellas de Scorsese. Sabía que la peli era larga y que estaba un poco cansado pero transcurridos unos diez minutos, ya estaba cautivado por la historia.

Ya había dicho de Scorsese que no es sólo como describe las vidas y costumbres de los italianos mayormente en Nueva York, el hombre es un verdadero cuentero, cada pedacito tiene algo interesante, cada chiste tiene su magia. ¿Cuántos actores son naturales en la peli? ¿Cuántos verdaderamente sabían actuar? Todos se interpretan a si mismos y muchos hoy día se encuentran encasillados en ese primer papel que hicieron para el maestro. La lista es larga y uno se pone a revisarla y casi todos los encuentra uno de nuevo actuando igualito en The Sopranos.

La peli es fascinante, lo que más me agrada y recuerdo haberlo escrito en algún lado por ahí hace quince años es que los italianos si que saben comer y cocinar. Me pasó con The Sopranos, me pasó con Anthony Bordain cuando visitó Nueva Jersey italiana y me pasó con Goodfellas en 1990. Alguna vez con un amigo de universidad grabamos la peli y anotamos cuidadosamente las recetas de Pauly y Jimmy en la cárcel, diligentemente nos acomodamos en alguna de nuestras casas con ingredientes de excelente calidad, repetimos la receta al pie de la letra, recuerdo que la única excepción fue que en vez de latas de tomate en realidad buscamos como hacer la salsa con tomates frescos, lo que nos iba a tomar tres o cuatro horas más. No importó. Rebanamos el ajo con bisturíes X-Actos y delicadamente los sofreímos en acetite de oliva medianamente caliente. Tal cómo Liotta y su personaje lo describían el ajo simplemente se deshacía en el aceite, la carne absorbía esa emulsión y al servirse con una porción de pasta, pan y vino tinto ya no eramos estudiantes de una universidad pública, eramos sicilianos encarcelados, eramos la estrellas de rock que cocinaban y comían con todos los lujos del caso.

Pero a quién engañabamos eso nos había costado semanas y semanas de almuerzos. Pero había valido la pena. Por una vez en la vida estabamos probando los manjares que Scorsese alguna vez nos había confiado.

Hoy más que revisar las cámaras de Michael Ballhaus, la excelente actuación de Robert DeNiro, Joe Pesci, Ray Liotta, Lorraine Bracco, más alla de comentar los títulos de Saul Bass, la edición de Schoonmaker o la música organizada por Christopher Brooks. Hoy más que nada, recomiendo en las clásicas pelis de Scorsese ponerle atención a las recetas de las comidas y tratar de rehacerlas lo más parecido posible. Usar ingredientes frescos y de buena calidad. El resultado cada vez que se repitan las escenas la sensación va a ser erótica, va a ser inigualable. Las descriptivas escenas de Scorsese y una boca cebando esos misteriosos sabores del Mediterráneo.

You’d be forgiven at the moment for thinking we were nearing the end of a decade. The interwebs have been awash of late with more countdowns, best ofs, top tens and general reminiscences of the 2000’s then you could poke a digital stick at. Suddenly everybody is a critic, and while some of the countdowns have been insightful and thought-provoking, others have been….well, like this one. For the nostalgic, these countdowns are practically memory-heaven. But for those who don’t buy into that sort of stuff, it gets a little tiring. So, what better than to list some of the best (and worst) ‘best-of’ lists currently clogging up cyber-space?

Pitchfork: P2K

Over the past months American music site Pitchfork have taken an in-depth look at the decade in music. Way back in the dark ages of 2001 the site barely existed, but since then has grown to be one of the most formidable online music news and reviews sites on the net. Not only does P2K count down the best albums, songs and music videos, it also features a series of essays detailing some of the more interesting developments in music over the past ten years. Of particular note is the ‘Decade in Indie’ and the social history of the mp3.

Highlights
Best Album: Radiohead- Kid A
Best Song: Outkast- B.O.B.

Paste Magazine: The 25 best Album Covers

Slightly more obscure is Paste magazine’s countdown of the best album covers. It has been argued that as digital sales boom and physical CD sales decline, the quality of modern album art is going steadily downhill (as this cover would seem to prove). Regardless, Paste have put together an interesting countdown, which includes the likes of The Flaming Lips, Animal Collective, Arcade Fire and Lil Wayne. Whoever decided to award Neko Case’s Middle Cyclone cover as number 1 though needs to go back and re-take primary school art classes.

Highlights
Number 1: Neko Case- Middle Cyclone
Number 2: Animal Collective- Merriweather Post Pavilion (and rightly so)

The A.V. Club: The 30 best TV Shows

The problem with critics is often that their views on what is ‘good’ differs from the majority of the viewing public. Which is a shame, but it’s also the reason why most of the shows on the A.V. Club’s list of best TV shows of the decade have either ended or been cancelled. Still, it’s a formidable list. The top 3 (The Wire, Arrested Development and the Sopranos) are undoubtedly some of the finest productions since television’s inception, let alone in this decade. Other notable shows include Mad Men, Lost and The West Wing, just scraping in at number 30. The best part of this countdown though is the shitfight in the comments as to what constitutes a ‘decade’. Hilarious.

Highlights
Number 1: The Wire
Number 15: Veronica Mars
Number 22: Six Feet Under

News.com.au: Moment of the Decade

Oh, News.com.au. Purveyor of fine, quality journalism. Not content with simply telling Middle Australia what the best bits of the noughties were, good old Rupert has gone and encouraged everyone to name their own favourites! For anyone that’s ever read the comments to any article on the site, that should be enough to click your way on over. In case you need any more incentive though, today’s category is ‘Killers, Haters, Tools: Choose the Villian of the decade’. Apparently Kyle Sandilands and John Mayer are in the same league as Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Who would have thought? The fun doesn’t stop there. Oh no siree, it doesn’t. For you creative types, you can even have a go at naming what the next decade should be called! An issue of utmost importance, of course. Seriously, the sooner this site becomes paid-only, the better.

Lowlights
Pop Culture
Money
Sex & Life
…actually, just spend a good 15 minutes trawling through the site. It’ll make your day.

Times Online: The 100 Best Movies of the Noughties

Slightly more classy news outlet Times Online went all out and counted down the top 100 cinematic releases of the decade. With everything from political drama Milk to Roman-epic Gladiator to comedy Knocked Up, the list does well to cater for everyone…up until the odd choice of The Bourne Supremacy/Ultimatum at number 2 (So really it should have been the best 101 movies). And Team America World Police in the top 5? You must be joking.

In Brief
Number 1: Hidden
Number 16: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Number 34: Finding Nemo
Number 64: Anchorman

Well that’s about it. Some of the best (and worst) countdowns of the best (and worst) things to happen in the noughties. Of course, a quick google search will reveal thousands more best-ofs then the ones here. But really, is there much point? When it comes down to it, who gets to decide that Franz Ferdinand is better than Hot Chip? Or that Monsters, Inc. deserves to place ahead of Pan’s Labyrinth?

Perhaps the best countdown of the decade should go to Hungry Beast. They look at the ten best years of the 2000’s. You can check that out here.

]]> http://countryfried.wordpress.com/2009/11/25/tv-usa/ Wed, 25 Nov 2009 19:57:01 +0000 leharlot http://countryfried.wordpress.com/2009/11/25/tv-usa/

My television is a museum piece, it will no longer work when I get it out of storage in January but I’ll keep it anyway for sentimental reasons.  We had one of those until I was pretty old, then I lived for a long, long time without one at all.  Maybe that’s why I won’t be bothering to buy one when I move into a house next year, it’s not something I need or ever really use when there is one.  Yet, to me there is nothing more amazing entertainment wise than a superbly executed, well acted, 24 episode long season of fine television.   I’m a hardcore escapist and I love movies but aside from the occasional epic, 2 hours isn’t enough to truly love a character, 900 minutes is way better.  5 0r 6 seasons of 900 minutes? Now we’re talking.

The Sopranos.  Without the Sopranos there would be no Mad Men, no True Blood, no Breaking Bad, there would be no TV drama  renaissance full stop.  God only knows what we would all be watching but it would most likely suck.  The bar was raised by about a million and TV became something else.  Not that there weren’t great shows before 1999 but nothing like this, not that level of acting, the sublime scripts, the subtle character arcs, the pace of the story, the soundtrack and the eventual conclusion, which in true style managed to just work where other shows would fail.  Who was your favorite? Mine was always Christopher.

So if you haven’t actually watched the Wire and by that I mean actually watched it not just read about it in every magazine, newspaper, blog going.  You really should.  I hate bandwagons, hate jumping on them and I managed to avoid this until season 4 was airing in the USA but when I finally succumbed it was like descending into TV heaven.  For some reason I ended up watching season 2 first and the going back to watching the first season before carrying on with the rest.  Occasionally people tell me they tried season 1 and got bored (insane) so I tell them to go watch 2 first then come back to it, I call it the ‘Charley Way’.  Actually I don’t but it works because the second season is fairly detached from the rest of the plot and then you’re hooked.  There have been so many eloquent love letters to the Wire written by all kinds of great writers since it ended last year, I don’t need to say anymore.  Google them.  Omar, who might genuinely be my favorite character in the world, is worth it.

Ok.  I don’t even know where to start with this one.  I think about it almost every day, I still look in the mirror and get upset that my eyebrows will never be like Sherilyn Fenn, that I will never be like her at all *sob*.  My entire aesthetic has been distorted and designed by watching this show, I’m STILL desperate to live in the Pacific Northwest.  Hearing the theme tune is like a call to arms for dreaminess, owls are awesome, BOB still terrifies me as much as he did when I was 11 and watched it for the first time on late night TV, Agent Cooper is still my dream man, I don’t even care that it gets ridiculous in season 2.  Essentially it’s my favorite show ever and I was going to write something intelligent about why.  Fail.

Six Feet Under.  There is a point with TV shows, usually around season 3 when they start to get a bit silly (excluding my first 2 selections) and this really happened with SFU.  I’m about to go and re-watch it starting from the pilot and I think it’s been long enough for me to forget exactly why that was.  Obviously it was never bad enough for me to stop watching or for those characters to stop being so special or for me to not cry for about a day when it ended.  Recently I’ve come across a lot of people who have never even seen it, especially since the success of Dexter (I’m afraid Michael C. Hall will always be David in my mind) and True Blood, how is that possible?  I’m always happy as larry when I find people who loved it as much as I did.  Favorite character? Brenda, of course but Ruth a close second.

♥

So I guess that’s a top 4.  I could go on but after that the ordering becomes hazy and I can’t decide whether Northern Exposure comes before or after Arrested Development or if I miss Dead Like Me more than Carnivale.  Or if House is my favorite medical drama or whether I have enough guts to say in public that in all honesty Grey’s Anatomy probably is.  Or if True Blood is going to be more of a classic than Mad Men or if 30 Rock might just be the best thing that ever happened to me.

ADDICT.

(proud)

♥

]]> http://inzert.wordpress.com/2009/11/25/tv-shows-by-gavin-jump/ Wed, 25 Nov 2009 01:07:00 +0000 vzsolt http://inzert.wordpress.com/2009/11/25/tv-shows-by-gavin-jump/

So, in the past couple weeks, there have been a few “top tv shows of the decade” lists released. The most notable lists include The Hollywood Reporter, Paste Magazine, and The A.V. Club. Basically, here’s how the lists top tens shake down:

Hollywood Reporter:           Paste:                                                A.V. Club:

10. Modern Family              10. Mad Men                          10. The Shield

9. Lost                                9. Buffy the Vampire Slayer     9. Deadwood

8. 24                                  8. Battlestar Galactica             8. Lost

7. 30 Rock                            7. Lost                                  7. The Office (U.K.)

6. Mad Men                         6. The Sopranos                     6. Breaking Bad

5. Damages                          5. The Office (U.K. and U.S.)  5. Mad Men

4. The Shield                        4. The Daily Show                 4. Freaks and Geeks

3. Curb Your Enthusiasm    3. The West Wing                   3. Arrested Development

2. The West Wing                2. The Wire                              2. The Sopranos

1. The Sopranos                   1. Arrested Development         1. The Wire

As always, I’m gonna have to side with the ol’ AV Club on this one. Even more than I like their list, though, I hate the Hollywood Reporter’s. No Wire? No Arrested? No Breaking Bad? Modern Family after half a season? Pretty rough. So this got me thinking, and even though I haven’t seen as many shows as these critics (my most notable unwatched items are probably Mad Men and The West Wing), I threw together my list:

10. Lost: ABC

Guilty pleasure doesn’t even begin to describe how I feel about Lost. The writers cheat, trick you, and jerk you around, but damn it’s fun to watch.

9. 30 Rock: NBC

The show wasn’t really on my radar for a while, until I started seeing episodes after watching The Office. Now I’m lucky to cast the end of Jim and Pam’s happy adventures before turning into NBC’s funniest show since Seinfeld.

8. Curb Your Enthusiasm: HBO

Just saw the end of the most recent season. It was pretty funny, but still a bit disappointing after last season’s ending. Having said that, seasons 3 and 6 were about as funny as TV gets.

7. South Park: Comedy Central

This show was always funny, and at times downright brilliant for so many years. It’s a shame that Parker seems to be phoning it in over the past two or three seasons.

6. It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia: FX

All the aforementioned lists love Damages and The Shield, but I’ve picked another FX show. Two years ago, Sunny would have been in the top 3, but a couple of lackluster seasons have lowered it in my eyes.

5. The Sopranos: HBO

The show was groundbreaking and provided some truly great drama, but I still have a lot of bad things to say about this “masterpiece.” It is certainly the best acting and cinematography I have ever seen on the tube, but the writing miffed me at times, and the ending was terrible in my eyes (not specifically the infamous final scene, but the entire second leg of the final season).

4. Frisky Dingo: Cartoon Network

Stop the Presses! What?!? Most of you have probably never heard of the short-lived, serialized superhero spoof from Adult Swim, but find someone who has, and they’ll probably quote your ear off.

3. Breaking Bad: AMC

While the rest of the world watches Mad Men, I’m eagerly awaiting the next sneak peek of BB. Bryan Cranston’s acting is more than deserving of his two Emmys, and the character arcs over two seasons have left fans drooling for more.

2. Arrested Development: Fox

What more is there to say? This was the funniest, most clever comedy I have ever seen. I’m still finding jokes I’ve never noticed on fourth and fifth viewings. AD was the perfect combo of subtle humor and slapstick. It was brilliantly written, acted, directed, and damn near everything else (marketing comes to mind as a flaw). Quite frankly, this is the show that made me realize TV could be as funny as the movies…

1. The Wire: HBO

… still, I didn’t have much faith in dramas. Then I saw the Wire.

Nuff said.

Keila Jimenez

A máfia vai invadir a TV. Não, Poder Paralelo não vai beber da mesma água de Mutantes e sair se reproduzindo na Record. The Sopranos, série famosa da HBO, poderá ir ao ar, simultaneamente, em dois canais abertos por aqui: Band e SBT.

A Band acaba de fechar um contrato com a HBO, que inclui a compra de 20 telefilmes, duas minisséries e a série Sopranos, que deve estrear sua primeira temporada no canal em março. Acontece que o SBT, que exibia até ontem Sopranos, ou melhor, Família Soprano – tradução à Silvio Santos -, tem ainda, por contrato, direito de exibir a sexta temporada da série.

É a velha história do cachorro de dois donos. As séries da HBO também são distribuídas pela Warner, que, por sua vez, possui um contrato de fornecimento de conteúdo com o SBT. Da primeira a quinta temporada de Sopranos, que já foram exibidas no SBT, estão liberadas para a Band. Já a última fornada da saga do mafioso Tony Soprano deve ser exibida em 2010 na rede de Silvio Santos.

Procuradas pela coluna, as duas emissoras, via assessoria de imprensa, não sabiam que compartilhariam a mesma série.

Ok, I usually have some kind of sassy image to go with my post, but I’m still at a loss as to what would be appropriate.

I wasn’t sure what I’d tell you about until yesterday afternoon at about 6 when Francy came home from the grocery store he says, “My brother called.”

Ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Technically this noise of dread is only going on in my head as I try to work up the best tone possible to ask why.

Quick recap on my brother-in-law.  We see my b-i-l maybe 2 (max 3) times a year.  Partially because he (and maybe somewhat naturally) spends more time with his wife’s family and partly because they have not had a solid relationship in decades.  One of the reasons is that in my b-i-l’s (and his wife’s) mind is that we are poor.  We are poor people and hanging out with poor people is embarrassing.  Another reason is that Francesco has been the victim of his mother’s get what I want by using the sad ‘oh your brother is so mean to me act’.  Year after year of phone calls to cry on Francy’s shoulder with some weird half-true story of something my b-i-l did or said.  This has also been made worse by mamma’s inability to know when to auto-censor the stupid crap she says.

“I talked to your brother yesterday.  He says he doesn’t understand why you continue to live in a rat trap when he knows people who rent huge apartments for 400 euro/mo.”

Really?  I can never decide which is dumber.  That my b-i-l would say this knowing he was saying it to the town crier or that mamma is shocked and concerned as to why her sons don’t get along.

So to answer the previous question, my b-i-l called to invite us to his son’s 1st birthday.  This of course leads to another why.  We don’t spend time together , your daughters have no relationship with Francy and well, WHY???

I can only assume it’s just to torture us.  Any occasion at my b-i-l’s house is like watching a fusion of The Beverly Hillbillies and The Sopranos.  His wife’s family is an insane combination of gold chains, guys with greasy hair and unbuttoned shirts, tacky women all competing to see who is the bigger baller.  I think there’s a reason someone coined the term nouveau riche.  They lack the class, culture and blue blood of true society people, but they drive around in a Mercedes and have a cement pond:)

Since we don’t compete in their eternal pissing contest, his wife will go out of her way to say something hoping to embarass me.

“I heard that in America no one says ‘Your Welcome’ “-May 2009 at Francy’s cousin’s confirmation.

There’s also the story of American coffee, when her brother went to San Francisco and how bad the food was (yeah, you get my drift).

It’s unfortunate.  Francy does not think on his toes the way I do.  Bless his heart.  When b-i-l called, had I been there and since he was inviting us less than 24 hours before the event, we wouldn’t have been free.  I’d have made up anything.

As Francy pointed out yesterday, we’re already the black sheep of the family so we have to go for an hour and then say we have a previous engagement. That’s fine.  We’ll go.  Francy will come home in a tizzy and if we’re lucky maybe we’ll get into a fight with someone.

Next time (which could be tonight if I have the energy): Part II

On Sunday I’ll be making my third trip up to Giants Stadium this season to see a Giants-Falcons game that at the beginning of the season looked like it would be a late-November battle for NFC supremacy. After all, both the Giants and Atlanta were coming off playoff berths last season and looked poised to get even better. Now this game, while still important, is important for an entirely different reason. Both the Giants and Falcons are 5-4 and locked in a downward spiral. On Sunday, one team will win and improve to 6-4, possibly providing the momentum necessary to save the season and turn things around. On Sunday, one team will lose and drop to 5-5, making it very difficult to make a late-season playoff push. You can call it a do-or-die game, or a building block to bigger things or a hundred other euphemisms, the fact still remains: the Giants absolutely need to win this game. There’s no way around it. Coughlin called the Giants’ last game against San Diego a “one-game playoff”;  if that were true, the Giants have been knocked out already. But then something happened last week. With the Giants resting up on their bye week, both the Eagles and Cowboys, the two teams ahead of Big Blue in the NFC East, both lost. And suddenly this thing is far from over.

Sunday’s game also has me thinking about something else. It has me thinking about the last time the Falcons visited the Meadowlands, 5 years ago tomorrow. On November 21, 2004, I sat in Section 121 and watched Eli Manning, our prized number one draft pick make the first start of his NFL career. Even though I had absolutely no part in Eli Manning’s conception or subsequent birth, part of me felt like I was watching my son take the field for his first pop warner game, or something along those lines. I was still in high school at the time though, and these were still the days where Michael Vick was only 45% hype and 55% talent, as opposed to 95% hype and 5% talent like he has been post-prison stint. Unfortunately, the 55% of talent prevailed on that day and Vick rushed for something like 900 yards against us, in route to a 14-10 win. We did have a chance to win the game, but our last gasp drive was stalled when Eli was picked off by Keith Brooking. On that day in 2004, Eli was hesitant, he was a little unsure, and the impossibly high expectations that he carried with him from Oxford, Mississippi for the rest of that season, and the season after that and the season after that, made it extremely difficult for anyone to see past his shortcomings.

Did that all change when his playoff heroics helped us win the Super Bowl two years ago? I wish I could say it did, but in New York, there is no such thing as a championship grace period, as relentless and unforgiving as that may sound. Now, 5 years after that game against Atlanta, there is no question that Eli has emerged as one of the top quarterbacks in the league. On Sunday, I’d like to see that Eli. The Eli that’s a leader and a cool assassin in the clutch, and not the Eli from 2004 who looked like his lunch was on the way up after every bad pass he threw. I would like to win another Super Bowl (honestly, who wouldn’t?) and I think this team has about as good a shot as any other Giants team I’ve ever watched, even last year’s team. So it starts on Sunday, at home against Atlanta. Back to where it all began.

On to this week’s quick picks, sponsored by nobody. Home teams in all caps.

DETROIT (-3.5) over Cleveland

Mangini wasn’t the first coach to be fired this season? I guess cameos in The Sopranos do go a long way. You should have thought about that before you turned down the part, Dick Jauron.

Buffalo (+9) over JACKSONVILLE

And the countdown to T.O.’s first sideline temper tantrum begins….(checking watch)….NOW!

Pittsburgh (-10) over KANSAS CITY

Nothing allows you to heal the wounds of getting swept by the Bengals quite like a game against the Chiefs.

Indianapolis (-1) over BALTIMORE

This game has “37-3 Colts” written all over it.

NY GIANTS (-6.5) over Atlanta

I don’t know why I’m doing this. Please, someone tell me why I’m doing this. Oops, too late.

GREEN BAY (-6.5) over San Francisco

Brett Favre against Steve Young, should be a great game (2000).

MINNESOTA (-11) over Seattle

Brett Favre against Matt Hasselbeck, should be a boring game (2009).

Washington (+11) over DALLAS

Only because I know there’s no way that three different teams are going to cover 11+ point spreads this week.

New Orleans (-11.5) over TAMPA BAY

10-0 is when the people start talking. Can you handle that, Saints? Although the Pats 16-0 regular season a few years ago has taken some of that edge off.

Arizona (-9) over ST. LOUIS

Just a few more wins for the Cardinals before they go back to looking like they don’t really care. Just in time for the playoffs! Hey, it worked for them last year.

NY Jets (+10.5) over NEW ENGLAND

No I will not take the Patriots! Rex Ryan cried during a team meeting this week. HE CRIED. Do you know what that means?

Cincinnati (-9.5) over OAKLAND

Part of me is hoping for this game to be close so that a few people will vacate the Bengals bandwagon. I’m in Standing Room Only right now. My legs are getting tired and I’d like to have a seat.

San Diego (-3) over DENVER

Broncos should have stuck with wearing their mustard and brown Denver Omelettes uniforms. Ugly uniforms help teams win, just ask the Jets and Bucs.

Philadelphia (-3) over CHICAGO

-3 is the spread, and also what Jay Cutler fantasy owners see every time he throws another INT. I’m just kidding, I know that there aren’t any Jay Cutler fantasy owners….right?

Tennessee (+4.5) over HOUSTON

VINCE YOUNG WINS FOOTBALL GAMES.

Last Week: 7-8

Season Total: 81-63

'Syndromes and a Century'

It’s ten years now since Tony Soprano first waddled onto small screens around the world. In the decade since we’ve seen something of a revolution in the way that television shows are made and watched, with programmes like The Wire, Mad Men and Six Feet Under representing a new, smarter kind of television drama. Here in the UK, DVD box sets of HBO shows are phenomenally popular, in a way that could barely have been imagined fifteen years ago.

The HBO revolution is generally seen as having been a good thing for television, encouraging good writing, experimentation and ‘dumbing-up’ in what can be a pretty dumbed-down medium.

What’s less often explored is the impact that HBO has had on cinema. On the face of it, things don’t look good. There’s a widespread feeling among people of my generation that the cable channel has beaten cinema at its own game. Having stolen cinema’s clothes by incorporating cinematic techniques into small-screen storytelling, it has proceeded to create narratives of a length and complexity that cinema simply can’t rival. Most films have two or, at a push, three hours to tell a story. HBO dramas have at least ten, spread out across a season. You only have to dip into Mad Men to see how much pleasure its writers take in delaying, deferring and waylaying the kind of narrative developments that in a two hour film would have to come thick and fast every ten minutes. 

I’d like to suggest though, that things aren’t as bad as they might seem. Some prominent film directors (cough! – Martin Scorsese) have certainly had their fingers burned, but cinema continues to grow and develop in directions that are not easy for TV shows to follow.     

On a basic level, there are still plenty of genres that TV can’t really convincingly do. The action-adventure film is an obvious example. You can put a brutal fight or a chase through the streets into an episode of The Wire or 24, and you can even throw a Hollwood-style budget into filming it, but you’ll always be outgunned by what Hollywood can do on a bigger canvas, with big Dolby speakers. Can it be a co-incidence that in the last ten years the action film has re-invented itself, with the Bourne trilogy, a re-tooled James Bond, The Matrix, Christopher Nolan’s Batman etc.? Well, yes it could be, but you see my point.

Alongside this big noisy transformation, there’s also been the kind of quiet growth that you’ll always find going on in cinema if you look hard enough, with new directors searching for new cinematic directions.

Film-makers like Alexander Sokurov, Claire Denis, Carlos Reygadas and David Lynch, to name but a few, have spent the last ten years staking out their own unique cinematic territory, producing work that wouldn’t fit easily onto the small screen. And then there are those like Paul Thomas Anderson who, having had the multi-layered, ensemble style of his early work (Boogie Nights, Magnolia) so convincingly appropriated by TV drama, has set off to plough new, equally exciting cinematic furrows. There Will Be Blood is a character study, sure, but a character study of such all-encompassing, deranged energy that it clearly belongs up on the big screen.

'There Will Be Blood'

Perhaps most strikingly different from anything HBO has to offer is the work of the Thai film-maker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, a man whose name, if nothing else, would put you well ahead in a game of Scrabble. David Thomson once described his first viewing of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet as ‘the last moment of transcendence I had felt at the movies’, and I have to say I felt much the same after my first viewing of Apichatpong’s 2006 film Syndromes and a Century.

In it, the director tells two mirrored stories of love, one set in a rural and one in an urban hospital. We, the audience, drift languidly, dreamlike through the film, overhearing gentle conversations and witnessing private, unguarded moments. What at first seems like a collection of trivial, unimportant moments gains weight through repetition and the change of perspective and, slowly, steadily, becomes compelling. It is a ‘difficult’ film, I suppose, but an easy one to watch, and infused with a uniquely Buddhist sensibility (in case you’ve ever wondered what Buddhist cinema might look like).    

Apichatpong’s earlier work contains the same intriguing mix of languor and mystery. His 2004 film Tropical Malady begins with an intense friendship between a soldier stationed in the countryside and a young local man. The relationship is possibly homosexual or possibly not – in the context of the film it doesn’t really matter – but it does contain from the start something primal and non-human: in one distinctly odd scene the young man is seen sniffing the hand of the soldier. Like Lynch’s Lost Highway, the film fractures in the middle, and we find that the young man has now become a ‘beast’ who the soldier must pursue through the jungle and kill in order to protect villagers’ cattle. As the two characters retreat further into the jungle they encounter talking glow-worms and the ghost of a cow, and the director draws on old Thai myths about shape-shifters and shamen. 

'Tropical Malady'

If these two films sound a bit trippy then, erm, that’s because they are. But they’re also powerful and moving in a way that is uniquely cinematic, and that helps to distinguish the cinematic experience from the televisual one.

Narratively then, with its ten hour plus running times, HBO may well have backed cinema into a corner. But to speak of an exhausted, half-dead art form is to assume that cinema is about nothing but narrative storytelling. Storytelling is important in cinema, obviously, but it’s always been capable of much more than that. At its best it can achieve something that cannot be found on TV, something spiritual and transformative (and I don’t mean Transformers – The Movie).     

So, while I love The Sopranos and Deadwood as much as the next box-set owning 31- year-old, I’d suggest that if you’re looking for the future of cinema, you should probably look elsewhere.

Primitive, a video installation by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, can be seen at the FACT Gallery in Liverpool until 29th November.

Wow, I can’t believe I forgot TVontheDVD yesterday.  Here it is a day late and a dollar short.

• 7th Heaven: The Ninth Season- I’m pretty sure Jessica Biel had already left the show by this season, so what’s the point?
• Andy Barker, P.I.: The Complete Series- BUY THIS RIGHT NOW.  You can thank me later.
• Drawn Together – The Complete Series- Very, very, very funny.  Did I mention that it was very funny?
• It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia: Its A Very Sunny Christmas
  It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia: A Very Sunny Christmas [Blu-ray]- I just posted a review of this awesome title.  Check it out now, and if you are a fan of this show then buy it right now!
• Rome: The Complete Series
  Rome: The Complete Series [Blu-ray]- I could have watched this show season after season, too bad there were only two of them.  This was a wonderful show.
• Scrubs: The Complete Eighth Season [Blu-ray]- Season 8 of Scrubs came out a few months ago.  I’m not real sure why they are releasing it on Blu-Ray, but I’m glad to have it.  Watch for my review of it later this week.
• The Sopranos: The Complete Series- HBO did the same thing s few weeks ago with Six Feet Under.  Same set as before, just a smaller package.  I really like my big box of The Soprano’s.

“According to testimony by Mrs. Soprano, in the presence of her daughter-in-law, the blame for the fire rests with her son, who called her t the wrong time, and a passing African-American postal worker, who she felt was “stealing something across the street.’”~~The Sopranos: A Family History by Allen Rucker

My favorite tv show of all times. There’s just something about this group….

Expanding on what Alyssa has written about plotlines and The Sopranos, in Everything Bad Is Good For You, Johnson first argues for the existence of what he calls “the Sleeper Curve.” The Sleeper Curve maps average changes across the pop culture landscape, it explains how media exists and is becoming more intelligent and complex than it has been before, and that this is good for us. We can see the existence of the Sleeper curve through video games. Johnson takes the reader through how even this ‘bad’ is ‘good’ for human kind. “The clearest measure of the cognitive challenges posed by modern games is the sheer size of the cottage industry devoted to publishing game guides, sometimes called walk-throughs, that give you detailed, step-by-step explanations of how to get through the game that is currently torturing you” (28). Johnson gives numerous examples of these game guides, from early mock-ups of what Pac-Man guides would look like (simple and directional) to present day novels of objective maps that bring the gamer through extensive series’ of tasks in order to complete a larger goal.

The Sleeper Curve is also shown in television, despite popular beliefs that television is, like video games, dumbing us down. “If we’re going to start tracking swear words and wardrobe malfunctions, we ought to at least include another line in the graph: one that charts the cognitive demands that televised narratives place on their viewers” (63). Johnson applies the Sleeper curve to television programming; he tracks the viewer through charts of the linear narrative paths and plots of Dragnet, Starsky and Hutch, Hill Street Blues, and The Sopranos in attempt to show the complexity of plot ‘threads’. “Put these four charts together and you have a portrait of the Sleeper Curve rising over the past thirty years of popular television” (70). The need for more complex threading and social networking in television programming is proving that this medium is enhancing cognitive development and therefore influencing the Sleeper Curve.

Johnson also applies this theory to the internet and films. “It’s one thing to adapt to your lifestyle to include time for sitting around watching a moving image on a screen; it’s quite another to learn a whole new language of communication and a small army of software tools along with it” (117). Because the internet is providing new extremes of communication (social networking, video chatting, blogging), it is forcing humans to jump in and understand. Google has become the new encyclopedia—we consult the internet first. And modern films, like television, have proved that the Sleeper Curve is affecting our ability to comprehend complex threading of plot lines. “By each crucial measure of complexity—how many narrative threads you’re forced to follow, how much background information you need to interpret on the fly—Lord of the Rings is several times more challenging than Star Wars. What Johnson is inferring is that sometime between the release dates of these films (Star Wars: A New Hope 1977, Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring 2001), human cognition for extensive complexity has increased. Like the tracing of television plots from Dragnet to The Sopranos, film plots have become more intense and intricate, even in children’s movies. Johnson’s argument for the existence of the Sleeper Curve is proven correct in relation to video games, television, the internet, and films. Technology over the last half-century has revolutionized human daily activities, from how we read the news to what television shows we enjoy on Sunday nights.

It’s often easier to understand those dream characters who are not part of my waking life.

When a friend or a family member appears in a dream, I may have too many associations with that person to get a clear idea of what he/she represents.

However, if it’s a celebrity or a character from television or the movies, I often have a better grasp.  For example, if a member of The Sopranos appears, I’ll likely associate the aspect with greed and selfishness.

So, of course, I’m disappointed when I find Tony Soprano in a dream.  In such cases, I’ll also try to see the positive side to the aspect.

When the dream character is completely unknown to me, the message may still be fairly clear—even if the figure is shadowy or alien.  I’ll ask myself what feeling I get from the character.  How is he acting in the dream?  What does he want?

A few months ago, a polar bear followed me about my apartment in a dream.  I went here and there, doing this and that, trying to ignore the polar bear.

Finally the bear took my hand—gently—in its mouth and I had to stop.

That’s a big powerful natural force that demands my attention—but won’t hurt me.  Part of my animal nature.  Part of my strength.  Something that scares me; something that I try to avoid through activity.  Something unstoppable, but also, in the dream, surprisingly gentle.

On the other hand, whenever I see a certain long-time friend in my dreams, it’s nearly impossible for me to interpret her presence—this person just brings up too many associations.

But fortunately, I don’t need to know everything about a dream in order to glean some understanding from it.  And since this friend is no longer close geographically, it’s like having an old comrade drop in.

© 2009, Michael R. Patton
sky rope (subterranean rappel): http://skyrope.wordpress.com
taking new steps: http://mythsteps.wordpress.com

With the Paley Center’s “Dawson’s Creek: A Look Back” panel and the release of “Dawson’s Creek: The Complete Series,” I’ve been on a DC high the past week and a half.  Imagine my delight in finding someone who was not only just as enthusiastic but also chock full of insider stories only true fans like TDW readers could appreciate. And when you combine that with the fact that this guy is also partly responsible for introducing Beverly Hills 90210 to the world, well, that pretty much makes him a teen drama god.

After reading all the DC and 90210 goodness executive producer Paul Stupin shared with me, you’ll never want TDW’s stroll down memory creek to end!

TeenDramaWhore: How was the Paley Center panel?  How did it come about?

Paul Stupin: It came about for two sets of reasons. The first was that there are a  lot of die-hard Dawson’s supporters and fans out there that could support such a event. And the second key element is Sony is planning to issue this monumental all-seasons of Dawson’s DVD collection.

TDW: Yeah! It came out yesterday and I went to three different stores and finally found it!

Stupin: I just think it’s the coolest thing ever. So it was a good opportunity to call some attention to the DVD collection while at the same time having an event for the fans. It was really fun for me because when I did Dawson’s, I look back on it as a very special and rewarding time in my life and to be able to talk about it and see some cast members and see Kevin [Williamson, creator] again was just a blast.

TDW: I’m sure. I wish I could’ve been there!

Stupin: Yeah, you would’ve liked it!

TDW: Oh, I’m sure. Well let’s go back even further, to 1997-1998, and Kevin Williamson comes to you with this idea to make this semi-autobiographical show. What made you come on board?

Stupin: Well, that’s not exactly how it happened but I can tell you. I had read an early draft of this film that he wrote. At the time, it was called Scary Movie but that was going to turn into Scream and they used the original title for something else. I had read a draft of that and I had really responded to the writing. One of the things I loved about it is not only did it have some smart thrills and chills but it also had this great sort of teenage/20-something dialogue. I just loved his voice and I loved the different perspectives that he had brought to the horror genre so I pushed really hard to his agent for Kevin and I to sit down. Originally, I wanted to run two areas by him. The first area was sort of a younger X-Files-esque kind of show and the second one was just a really smart, young ensemble sort of show that could tap into younger characters’ voices. I had ran programming at Fox, so the idea of doing a family show was kind of not on the board because Fox had Party of Five. So we started to talk about potentially doing a show about a number of younger characters who live on the same street. Then Kevin sort of went away and came back and sort of pitched to me a bunch of characters living on the same creek, which, of course, was semi-autobiographical. What made that so interesting is that it specified the idea and made it something unique and took us to a place I had never seen before. And the other thing that made that original pitch so exciting was the characters. He pitched to me the characters of Dawson [James Van Der Beek] and Joey [Katie Holmes] and Jen [Michelle Williams] and how that triangle would work. And then as we were talking about that, we came up with the idea of incorporating another character into the mix who could be a confidante for Dawson and that’s how the character of Pacey [Joshua Jackson] originated.

TDW: I think you really hit it when you said the show was unique. There are a couple of specific things that people are still talking about today and they really want the inside details of how it happened. I know you guys went over a bit of this at the panel but I’d love to hear it from you yourself.  So if we can just go over a couple of different storylines, I’d love to hear what you guys were thinking and the genesis of those. So the first one is in season 2 when we have Jack [Kerr Smith] announce that he’s gay [Episodes 2.14 & 2.15, To Be Or Not To Be... & ...That Is The Question].

Stupin: I think there were two reasons for that. The first reason is it was a great way to integrate in a gay character on our series and to do it from the perspective of the kids we’d come to know and love on the show from the get-go. So the thought of involving Joey in a relationship with Jack and seeing that relationship take a completely unexpected turn and then understanding the emotional impact it would have on Joey’s character, and what it would do to Dawson and Pacey–all that seemed really interesting. And at the time, the thought of integrating a gay character and following that journey seemed really powerful and a way to tap into a whole set of emotions that would make our show even more memorable. One of the things that I love about Dawson’s is that it sort of wore its heart on its sleeve. Not only did it capture the voices and that sense of teenage yearning and teenage love and first-time love, and the power and the strength of all that, with love comes heartache as well in many stories. I think it enabled us to tell a really emotional and powerful story for a character that we’d really come to enjoy in the form of Jack. So that was one element to it and I think for Kevin it was a very personal story as well, and it was a way to again put a whole different perspective on the teen ensemble drama in a way that it hadn’t been done before. The second element to it was the fact that when Joey started that relationship with Jack, it was not going to go on forever. The key relationship in our series was what was going on between Joey and Dawson and Pacey, so the Jack character, that romance, was ultimately going to come to an end. And I think there was the thought of what a powerful way to see the relationship head south when the character starts to realize an insight into his own sexuality.

TDW: Going back to the Dawson-Joey-Pacey relationship, I read in Jeff Stepakoff’s book “Billion-Dollar Kiss” that Greg Berlanti–whom I adore–was the one to suggest putting Joey and Pacey together. I was wondering how accurate that story was in the book.

Stupin: Well, at the top of every season, we’ll sit and we’ll talk about [our plans]. We take a couple of weeks and we talk about each character and where we were going and what the sort of macro-issues were that we want to cover over the course of that particular group of 22 episodes. And Greg was definitely a part of that and the thought  of telling sort of a whole Joey-Pacey romance did in fact come out of that, absolutely. But I think you can go back, you can look at the pilot and you can look at the chemistry–and I did, in looking at the pilot last week–you can look at the chemistry between Joey and Pacey and you just know they’re sort of two peas in a pod and sooner or later that element of the triangle is going to get explored. So it’s definitely true what Jeff had in the book but I think that Greg was building from the seeds that were established in the original conception of the show, to tell you the truth.

TDW: Right.  Going to a more somber note: this probably came early on for you guys given how you plan the season but a lot of people were really surprised and devastated when in the 5th season Mitch [John Wesley Shipp] died [Episodes 5.03 & 5.04, Capeside Revisited & The Long Goodbye].

Stupin: Yes.

TDW: I’m wondering what the idea for that was. We never knew if it was casting reasons or storyline-dictated.

Stupin: It wasn’t really casting issues. The thing with Mitch was every year we would figure out a way to have 1 or 2 sort of emotional stories between Dawson and his mom and dad. In the first season we had all that great stuff with her affair with a newscaster. That was just sort of natural. The second season we have the story with mom and dad trying the open marriage, and it’s arguable as to how memorable that actually was. It seemed like such a fresh idea. I’m not sure that it translated quite as well as the idea initially seemed. And then after that, when the inter-relationships between the teenagers grew ever-more prominent and people became much more invested, it felt like the parents–though still important–were not quite as much a part of the storylines. So that’s when we would always try to include them, to have them in different things, to have great sort of Dawson-mom, Dawson-dad scenes but I think we were straining a little bit. And I think that when we got to the point of deciding the fate with Mitch, it seemed like we weren’t using him altogether that much in the series, in the seasons. We were using him but we weren’t using him in a huge way. There weren’t any financial or casting considerations. It really did come from the creative angle, in terms of how would it affect Dawson’s character if in fact this happened to his dad, and exploring that, and exploring the unexpected tragedy of it seemed like another way to really heighten the exploration as to who Dawson was, so that’s basically where that came from. And I remember talking to John Wesley and mentioning that the one thing that this would provide is that it was going to take the Dawson-father storyline to a really heartbreaking sense of conclusion and, at that point, we weren’t using him as much as we had in the past.

TDW: How does that contrast, then, to the decision in the series finale [Episodes 6.23 & 624, All Good Things... & ...Must Come To An End] to have another death and this time it be Jen?

Stupin: It was so interesting last week; it came up that in a way it was a great book-end for the series. It frankly never occurred when we were talking about the beginning or the end of the show but one could argue that the series began with a catalyst and that was the arrival of Jen. And the series ended with a catalyst as well, and that was the departure of Jen. And the one thing that I think that it did is it really brought a sense of emotional resonance and power to that final episode, because one of the things with a final episode you want to be able to do, you want to be able to end a series in a satisfying and emotional and interesting way. And if we essentially had the last episode in history for Dawson’s Creek, we could talk about and we could explore issues of mortality involving some of our characters. Then when we talked about it, if we were going to be dealing with the characters’ mortality, she seemed like the most natural character in which to explore that.

TDW: Going back to the catalyst idea, it could be extended that that was really what it took for Joey to finally make up her mind between the two boys.

Stupin: Yeah, I think a little bit. I think the interesting thing was the series sort of ends twice. It ends in the episode before then [Episode 6.22, Joey Potter And The Capeside Redemption] where we get the sense that finally Dawson and Pacey are going to be friends and Joey did actually get to Europe. And I think that had a sense of closure. Then we took it another step and went to a sort of even more sort of larger-than-life ending of exploring who she was going to end up with. I think that was the big question: who was she going to end up with? And I think that that was handled pretty well, too. Like I personally love the thought that what this show was really about was not the romance of Dawson and Joey but about the strength and depth of that friendship and how that friendship was going to exist forever.

TDW: So if you had to answer the question, in your heart of hearts, do you think Dawson belongs with Joey in a platonic, friends soulmates sense and Pacey in the romantic soulmate way?

Stupin: In my heart of hearts, I think we ended it the right away. I think that what she did have in the romance with Pacey was as powerful as the friendship with Dawson. And I think that we were able to come up with a sense of satisfying closure for both of them. ‘Cause I will tell you, weirdly enough, when I was looking at The Sopranos–I’ll weirdly liken it to the conclusion of The Sopranos, at least from my weird perspective, because I was a fan of that. I like to think, in my mind, that Tony Soprano is still out there–maybe it wasn’t going to last forever, but maybe he’s still out there with his family, still dealing with the issues and still dealing with all the balls he was juggling. And in my mind, I like to think that Dawson and Joey are still out there in our alternate TV universe, still communicating with each other and still sharing the inner-most aspects of their hearts and still dealing with their friendship as adults, and that Joey and Pacey still have that romance. Because I feel like what we were able to come up with was, for me, an emotionally-satisfying conclusion for both stories which doesn’t let anyone down. And I know there are people who think Dawson and Joey should’ve been together romantically and I totally understand that point of view but I think we did the right thing.

TDW: Well, as a Joey and Pacey fan, I completely agree with you!

Stupin: Well, I can tell you this: that decision wasn’t made until the last hour was being shot and so if you look at the first hour of that final two-hour, I think at that point we were leaning toward her ending up with Dawson and so there are a few, I think, little cues–for the life of me I don’t remember exactly–that were set up to lead us in that direction and then, frankly, in the last hour, when the last hour was being shot–because it wasn’t shot as a two-hour; it was shot as two separate 1-hours–that when we came up with that conclusion, it caused us to shift things around a little bit. So I’ll tell ya, we were undecided up until the very last minute ourselves.

TDW: Wow. Well, switching gears slightly, you spoke about Dawson and the way he would communicate with Joey. Going off that, both Kevin Williamson and James Van Der Beek are on Twitter these days. I was wondering, had the service existed when the show was on the air, how do you think Dawson would’ve used it, if he would’ve used it? As I said, They’re both on it now, and Dawson was very much a storyteller.

Stupin: Well, I think Dawson might’ve used it to express his emotions. I think he might’ve used it as a shorthand way of communicating with both Joey and Pacey. It’s certainly easier to communicate things to someone by Twitter than it is necessarily in real life. He might’ve, at some point in our storytelling, he might’ve used it to express something that he might not have been so willing to express in person.

TDW: When you look back on the show and the television landscape then and now, what do you think the show’s legacy is?

Stupin: You know, I think for me it’s–well, first of all, I’m so proud of the show. I think the characters were amazing. I think their stories were amazing. I think the quality of the writing, the quality of the direction was–of course I’m biased but I think it was just top-flight. And I really do think it took the young adult teen genre and elevated it from just a niche kind of show to something universal and iconic. I think adults could look at it. When we were doing it we never looked at it as just a teen show.  We looked at it as just a smart, interesting, relationship show that happened to deal with teenagers and though our core audience was teenagers, it was written for everybody, for people in their 20s, their 30s, their 40s. And I really think it managed to transcend all of that and bring an element of quality and exploration to the genre that really took it to the next step.

TDW: Do you have a favorite episode or storyline?

Stupin: You know, I’m so biased. It’s like trying to pick if you have 120 kids which one’s your favorite. But I think for me there are certain sort of moments that I love. There’s certain episodes, like the pilot because it introduced us to that world, and I remember so much of it almost like it was yesterday. The first season-ender when Joey went to visit her dad in prison, I loved that. I loved the detention episode [Episode 1.07, Detention]. A lot of them are some of the original ones. But then I think I love the episode when they graduated high school [Episode 4.22, The Graduate]. I thought that was just sensational. I love the one-hour ender as well as the two-hour series finale ender. I think there’s so many. The episode where they studied and it was an all-nighter [Episode 2.07, The All-Nighter]. The episode where Joey had to enter the beauty pageant [Episode 1.12, Beauty Contest]. I just love all of those.

TDW: Well, conversely, do you have a big regret or something you wish you did differently?

Stupin: Yeah. My biggest regret would probably be, as I think about it–and it was a mistake we made–was the character of Eve. Remember that character?

TDW: Yeah. You guys even have a joke about that in the episode before the series finale.

Stupin: Yeah. I don’t think the first episodes of season 3 really were as memorable as the other episodes. And I think that whole notion of “Is she Jen’s sister? Is she not?”–I don’t think that was that effective. I don’t look back on that run of episodes as my favorites.

TDW: Yeah, I think the fans do agree with that.

Stupin: Yeah, but you know what, we turn it around.  In the middle of that season we turned it around with–

TDW: With Joey and Pacey.

Stupin: Yeah, with Joey and Pacey. And that certainly helped get us back, I think, to our roots.

TDW: Going more to your history, I know you played a bit of a role with the creation of Beverly Hills 90210.

Stupin: Yes, I did.

TDW: What influence, if any, did that show have on Dawson‘s Creek?  If you learned anything from how viewers took to what was really the first teenage show, as Dawson’s Creek is largely considered the next step in the genre.

Stupin: Well, two things. And it’s an interesting question. The first thing: when I hired Darren Star to write 90210, I felt as if his voice was just so unique in terms of his ability to write characters and come up with dialogue and wit that seemed like it would be a particularly good fit if he put into teenager characters’ mouths. So in a way I think that when I read Kevin’s voice, I felt some of it was the same in terms of being clever and sharp and smart and pop culturally-savvy. I felt like I had found another voice who was capable of taking the genre to the next step. So I felt like both Kevin and Darren brought originally a really unique sense of humor and sharpness to their creation of characters and dialogue. So I think there was a similarity there. The one issue that I took away from 90210, that was very effective in 90210, was the mix of issue-oriented episodes and personal inter-relationships. Though, when we jumped into Dawson’s, we veered away from doing the issue-oriented episodes and explored further just all of the great inter-relationships.

TDW: Going further ahead to the rest of the genre and the teen dramas that are on today, do you think Dawson’s Creek influenced them?

Stupin: I’m sure it did, though I can’t say–you know, again, I’m biased. I don’t know. In my mind, I’m undecided as to what the next real step in the genre is after Dawson’s. I’m not sure what it is. I haven’t watched enough of the shows. I hold, of course again I’m so biased, but I hold everything up to the prism of Dawson’s. I don’t know if any of them that have come since have quite represented that cultural milestone that Dawson’s did.

TDW: Do you think Dawson’s Creek would fly on The CW today? Because it’s so different than what The WB was.

Stupin: Yeah. I’m not sure. I’ve often thought would I be able to sell Dawson’s today? Would I be able to pitch that as a series and get it going, and I’m not altogether sure. Because now, when you look at Dawson’s, we sold it off the strength of the characters and off of the strength of Kevin’s voice being so fresh. Now, I think that the networks are looking for slightly higher concepts. So I’m not altogether sure that a Dawson’s would be able to sell today.

TDW: I have to ask, then, why do you think the 90210 spin-off sold?

Stupin: Oh, I see, are you talking about bringing able to bring it back, for instance?

TDW: Well, no, not for it to be a spin-off. But the 90210 concept today is working.

Stupin: Well, I think the 90210 concept–everyone, myself included, has fondness for that original show. The thought of sort of putting two new outsiders into that world and bringing the  show back is a great way to hook people into a whole new group of characters, and I think it was a great idea. The thing with Dawson’s is I don’t know if bringing the world of Dawson’s Creek back with a bunch of new characters would generate quite the excitement. Because I think when you think about the show, you think about Dawson and you think about the very unique 3 characters, the 4 characters we had, and the actors that played them. And I’m not sure if it was brought back again–I certainly wouldn’t want to redo it with a new Dawson or a new Pacey. So the question would be could we go back to Capeside with a whole new group of characters, and I’m not sure we would be able to put together a new group of people as memorably as we did originally.

TDW: Right. You know, they say lightening strikes once.

Stupin: Right. And you know, I’m afraid you always run the risk of–when you make a sequel to a movie that’s not as good, it kind of reflects negatively on the original movie.

TDW: I completely agree.

Stupin: And I like to think of all our episodes as being so special, I’m not sure it’s something you could bring back.

TDW: Well, my biggest disappointment right now is that Dawson’s Creek is no longer on any channel in America.

Stupin: Really? You know, they gotta get on that! Wasn’t it running like forever in the early morning hours?

TDW: It used to be on TBS. When I was in high school, it used to be on at like 10am. And then they pushed it to 4:30am, 5:30am and then it just faded away there and now it’s not on at all.

Stupin: I’m not sure what the design is on that because I always like to know that Dawson’s is out there.

TDW: I know, I know. It saddens me that it’s just not in repeats anywhere anymore in this country.

Stupin: You know what, those things tend to be cyclical. Maybe in the future you’ll be channel surfing one night. Knowing you, you’ll know way before then but maybe you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

TDW: Fingers crossed.

Stupin: Exactly.

TDW: Well, let’s bring it back and finish on today. You’re with Make It Or Break It on ABC Family. Just looking at your career over the years, what is it about Make It or Break It that you’re here now?

Stupin: Well, what I love about Make It Or Break It is I’m a big fan of the genre, having originally developed 90210 and then developed Dawson’s. When I left to become a producer, I never really thought that my first real success would be in the same genre as 90210 because I actually never thought that lightning would strike twice in that genre for me as quickly as it did. But after I ran Dawson’s, you know, for six years, I developed a real love for the genre. And the thing that I love about Make It or Break It is the idea. It’s a fresh idea, it’s a fresh world. And it provides a pretty unique prism in which to explore sort of teenage relationships in a really unusual way. I mean, these girls aren’t normal teenagers. They’re elite gymnasts and there are rules against relationships as they’re pursuing their passion. How do they deal with that? And how do we deal with the same elements of teenage love and relationships and heartbreak but from a whole different perspective? And I love that about it, and I also love the relationships between the main characters and their parents and their parental figures. I think they’re a really organic element to the show and give us an opportunity to deal with really unusual family situations as well. So that’s why I love it. And also the gymnastics is just really cool. It’s a lot of fun just to see the gymnastics.

TDW: Oh, the gymnastics is just phenomenal to watch.

Stupin: So I think that Make It Or Break It is just such a special show. We’ve done 10 episodes and I think it’s just starting to get its sea legs. I think it has a huge successful life in front of it, I hope.

TDW: Well, best of luck to you on that!

Stupin: Thank you!

Come back next Sunday for another exclusive interview!

TDW Interview Index

14/10/09 – 16h56 – Atualizado em 14/10/09 – 17h22

Filme ‘Onde vivem os monstros’ ganha bênção do autor do livro

Dirigido por Spike Jonze, longa estreia nos EUA na próxima sexta (16).
James Gandolfini e Forest Whitaker emprestam vozes a personagens.

Jil Sergeant Da Reuters

Cena de “Onde vivem os monstros”, dirigido por Spike Jonze (Foto: Divulgação)

Transpor para o cinema de Hollywood um livro que é um clássico da literatura infantil requer coragem. Quando o livro em questão é o sombrio mas amado “Onde vivem os monstros”, de Maurice Sendak, e quando o original ilustrado contém apenas nove sentenças escritas, ajuda se você conta com a bênção do autor.

O diretor Spike Jonze tinha as duas coisas quando começou a levar para a tela grande o livro premiado de 1963, em versão que é ao mesmo tempo diferente do original e uma homenagem a este, feita para agradar não apenas às crianças mas também aos adultos.

A versão de Jonze de “Onde vivem os monstros” (“Where the wild things are”) — que levou cinco anos para ser feita e funde ação ao vivo, fantoches e animação computadorizada — chega aos cinemas norte-americanos na próxima sexta-feira (16) em meio a resenhas altamente positivas, mas também muitas reservas.

O mundo visto por uma criança

O livro é uma história com pouquíssimo texto, mas muitas ilustrações, sobre um menino travesso que veste fantasia de lobo e sai em busca de aventuras, mas, ao ser mandado de volta a seu quarto, acaba recorrendo à sua imaginação. Desde os anos 1970, é um dos dez livros infantis mais vendidos nos Estados Unidos.

Mas Jonze, responsável pelo excêntrico “Quero ser John Malkovich”, de 1999, disse que não pretendeu fazer um filme tradicional para crianças.

“Eu me propus a fazer um filme sobre a infância”, disse Jonze, co-autor do roteiro, juntamente com o romancista Dave Eggers.

“O filme trata de como é ter 8 ou 9 anos de identidade e tentar entender o mundo, as pessoas à sua volta e as emoções, que às vezes são previsíveis ou causam perplexidade”.

“Ele (Sendak) sentiu orgulho do filme”, disse Jonze, que também fez um documentário com o escritor de 81 anos, que será exibido pelo canal a cabo americano HBO.

Dunas em vez de florestas

Na maior diferença em relação ao livro, o solitário mas brincalhão Max (o novato Max Records) foge de casa e veleja até um deserto habitado por monstros peludos e com presas, que procuram o tipo de líder que Max quer ser.

O filme foi rodado perto de Melbourne, na Austrália, e, em vez da floresta verde que cresce magicamente no quarto de Max, no original, tem dunas de areia, praias e bosques devastados por incêndios. Tem um clima de filme de arte, algo raramente visto nos filmes infantis de Hollywood.

Os monstros são dublados por atores, entre eles James Gandolfini (“The Sopranos”) e o premiado com o Oscar Forest Whitaker, e ganham substância física com a ajuda de outros atores usando figurinos criados pela Creature Shop, de Jim Henson.

http://g1.globo.com/Noticias/Cinema/0,,MUL1341124-7086,00-FILME+ONDE+VIVEM+OS+MONSTROS+GANHA+BENCAO+DO+AUTOR+DO+LIVRO.html

The canary who helped decimate the DeCavalcante mob, the inspiration for “The Sopranos,” is headed back into a cage, The Post has learned.

Vincent “Vinny Ocean” Palermo, 63, had hoped he had seen the last of a prison cell when he and his family were relocated to Texas with new identities as a reward for his decade-long career as a Mafia turncoat.

But Manhattan federal Judge Jed Rakoff this week sentenced him to 1½ years in prison after weighing his long record against his admittedly “off-the-charts” cooperation with the feds.

Palermo recently opened a Penthouse club in Houston, sources said     

Como en estados Unidos son muy aficionados a hacer listas con todo tipo de cuestiones, ahora no llega una en la que nos revelan los “10 mejores episodios pilotos” que ha habido en la historia de la pequeña pantalla. La fuente de dicho análisis es AOL (AOL televisión), una web bastante visitada en el continente americano.

El caso es que muchas han sido las series que se merecen estar en ese ranking y que lamentablemente se han olvidado de ellas. ¿Qué os parecen las candidaturas? ¿son justas o injustas la inclusión de algún piloto en esa lista? ¿echáis de menos a alguna serie que debería presentarse en este ranking?

1. Lost (Perdidos).
2. The Sopranos (Los Soprano).
3. ER (Urgencias).
4. Dallas.
5. Desperate Housewives (Mujeres desesperadas)
6. The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
7. The Cosby Show (El show de Billy Cosby).
8. Glee.
9. 24
10. The O.C.

A favor de la lista: que evidentemente hay series que merecen estar ahí como “24”, “Urgencias”, “Mujeres desesperadas”, “Los Soprano” o indudablemente “Perdidos”.

En contra de la lista: se han dejado grandes episodios piloto de series tan buenas como “Héroes”, “Anatomía de Grey”, “Sobrenatural”, “Veronica Mars”, “Embrujadas”, “Dexter”, “V”, “Castle”, “The Vampire Diaries”… y una infinidad más… A parte que por ejemplo “Dallas”, “Glee” o “The O.C.” no creo que tengan un episodio piloto demasiado bueno para pertenecer a este ranking tan distinguido.

¿Qué pensáis vosotros? ¿falta alguna serie? ¿cuál?

The answers to all our questions about these and other famously ambiguous film endings here.

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