Movie/TV recommendations

[Nachimir]

is very good, and well titled too

I found it via a fellow thumb on twitter, but I'm afraid I can't remember who.

[Nachimir]

If I were one of the writers on House, I'd feel pierced by this.

[Roderick]

It's funny, but is the writer really complaining about a serie being formulaic? The formula is awesome and has enough variety, interest and heart to keep it a fantastic show. So I don't see this thing as particularly stinging. Pooping a lung is funny though =)

[Ginger]

Given the recent Wire loving, thought I post this Louis Theroux's look at law and order in phili.

Edited December 1, 2008 by Ginger

[ysbreker]

UK only, ginger

Good thing it's on youtube too

It's a rather sobering and saddening look at the underbelly of America.Quite the total opposite of John Adams. Which I watched over the weekend. Which is a pretty interesting mini series of the live of the 2nd US president.

[ThunderPeel2001]

I saw that mentioned in the newspaper and immediately made The Wire connection, too. I haven't actually watched it yet, but I guess I'll have to remember that The Wire is fictional world...

[DanJW]

I was going to post that as well ginger. A lsightly different direction for Theroux, although his completely non-threatening approach still gets good results.

Instead, I will post more about Outnumbered, which I mentioned briefly, earlier. Series 2 is a few episodes in on BBC right now - I missed most of series 1 and plan to rectify that as soon as possible.

A must for everyone that likes deadpan sitcoms, it is practically unique n the way it handles the children - the writer and director have spoken about how the young children are given a briefing for each scene but do not have a script, and so a lot of it is ad-libbed and it comes across as incredibly natural. Here's a trailer for series 1, although due to the slow-burning nature of the comedy a short clip does not really do it justice. There are still some great lines though.

[Marek]

Just saw the Theroux documentary. Fascinating and totally depressing. Also 100% The Wire.

[Wrestlevania]

Given the recent Wire loving, thought I post this Louis Theroux's look at law and order in phili.

I couldn't watch that on Sunday, as Mrs V likes that abysmal celebrity jungle crap on the other side.

Thanks for reminding me I need to add this to my iPlayer queue, though!

[Wrestlevania]

Instead, I will post more about Outnumbered, which I mentioned briefly, earlier. Series 2 is a few episodes in on BBC right now - I missed most of series 1 and plan to rectify that as soon as possible.

A must for everyone that likes deadpan sitcoms, it is practically unique n the way it handles the children - the writer and director have spoken about how the young children are given a briefing for each scene but do not have a script, and so a lot of it is ad-libbed and it comes across as incredibly natural. Here's a trailer for series 1, although due to the slow-burning nature of the comedy a short clip does not really do it justice. There are still some great lines though.

I really rate Hugh Dennis and this looks like it has a lot of potential. Cheers, Dan!

[Ginger]

I really rate Hugh Dennis and this looks like it has a lot of potential. Cheers, Dan!

I really like him, but feel he's been over-exposed with his work on Mock the Week and The Now Show thus reducing his impact. Listening to this week's episode of the Now Show made me really miss The News Quiz and its left leaning comedy.

[ysbreker]

File under: It'll never work.

Neuromancer

HOw can they even think to make this into a proper movie?

[Wrestlevania]

HOw can they even think to make this into a proper movie?

Perhaps by not using a director who's specialism seems to be highly disposable lavish pop videos (Britney Spears, Blink 182, etc.)..? Worse, animatronic mannequin Hayden Christensen was pencilled to be playing Case earlier in the year; the cast list has since been completely removed, but I'm not hopeful at this point either.

One glimmer of promise, however, is that Gibson has been fiercely guarding the rights to Neuromancer for years now, turning down numerous screenplays from several directors. What's interesting is that I believe he's very much on board with this latest effort, so things could go well.

[ThunderPeel2001]

Sad thing is that it's kind of dated now... The Matrix kind of stole its thunder, I'd say. But I'd still love to see a movie that captures the experience of reading it.

[Wrestlevania]

Sad thing is that it's kind of dated now... The Matrix kind of stole its thunder, I'd say.

I agree in principle, but I think Neuromancer has the potential to be a grossly superior film.

And no, I'm not saying The Matrix is shit. But I think Neuromancer's vision of our future is considerably more intelligent, likely and therefore tangible than the Wachowski Brother's efforts.

[brkl]

I'd like to see Snow Crash. There's a lot in it that really wouldn't translate, but the world run by franchises would be great to see. I ran into this:

http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/index.php?category=0&id=39447

Clooney is producing a six hour miniseries of The Diamond Age!

[ysbreker]

6 hours of the diamond age would be all kinds of awesome!

[Wrestlevania]

Clooney is producing a six hour miniseries of The Diamond Age!

Bums... is this another novel I should have read years ago?

[ThunderPeel2001]

I'd certainly love to see a fair vision of Neuromancer.

As for Snow Crash... Hmmm. I don't know. If I'd read it when I was 14 I think I would have absolutely loved it. As it stands... I just found it to be annoying (and I ultimately stopped reading it). *shrugs*

[brkl]

The Diamond Age is definitely better, and yeah it's something you should read.

[Wrestlevania]

As for Snow Crash... Hmmm. I don't know. If I'd read it when I was 14 I think I would have absolutely loved it. As it stands... I just found it to be annoying (and I ultimately stopped reading it). *shrugs*

I read Snow Crash last year for the first time, and found it difficult and somewhat irritating to get into also. I did, however, finish it and thought it wasn't half bad.

[ysbreker]

I can't understand how snowcrash is hard to get in to. I mean just the opening chapter is just awesome:

The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory. He's got esprit up to here. Right now, he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest, Where his body has bony extremities, the suit has sintered armorgel: feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books.

When they gave him the job, they gave him a gun. The Deliverator never deals in cash, but someone might come after him anyway -- might want his car, or his cargo. The gun is tiny, acm-styled, lightweight, the kind of gun a fashion designer would carry; it fires teensy darts that fly at five times the velocity of an SR-71 spy plane, and when you get done using it, you have to plug it into the cigarette lighter, because it runs on electricity.

The Deliverator never pulled that gun in anger, or in fear. He pulled it once in Gila Highlands. Some punks in Gila Highlands, a fancy Burbclave, wanted themselves a delivery, and they didn't want to pay for it. Thought they would impress the Deliverator with a baseball bat. The Deliverator took out his gun, centered its laser doohickey on that poised Louisville Slugger, fired it. The recoil was immense, as though the weapon had blown up in his hand. The middle third of the baseball bat turned into a column of burning sawdust accelerating in all directions like a bursting star. Punk ended up holding this bat handle with milky smoke pouring out the end. Stupid look on his face. Didn't get nothing but trouble from the Deliverator.

Since then the Deliverator has kept the gun in the glove compartment and relied, instead, on a matched set of samurai swords, which have always been his weapon of choice anyhow. The punks in Gila Highlands weren't afraid of the gun, so the Deliverator was forced to use it. But swords need no demonstrations.

The Deliverator's car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator's car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens. You want to talk contact patches? Your car's tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator's car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady's thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta.

Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a role model. This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it -- talking trade balances here -- once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here -- once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel -- once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity -- y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else

* music

* movies

* microcode (software)

* high-speed pizza delivery

The Deliverator used to make software. Still does, sometimes. But if life were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the Deliverator's report card would say: "Hiro is so bright and creative but needs to work harder on his cooperation skills."

So now he has this other job. No brightness or creativity involved -- but no cooperation either. Just a single principle: The Deliverator stands tall, your pie in thirty minutes or you can have it free, shoot the driver, take his car, file a class-action suit. The Deliverator has been working this job for six months, a rich and lengthy tenure by his standards, and has never delivered a pizza in more than twenty-one minutes.

Oh, they used to argue over times, many corporate driver-years lost to it: homeowners, red-faced and sweaty with their own lies, stinking of Old Spice and job-related stress, standing in their glowing yellow doorways brandishing their Seikos and waving at the clock over the kitchen sink, I swear, can't you guys tell time?

Didn't happen anymore. Pizza delivery a major industry. A managed industry. People went to CosaNostra Pizza University four years just to learn it. Came in its doors unable to write an English sentence, from Abkhazia, Rwanda, Guanajuato, South Jersey, and came out knowing more about pizza than a Bedouin knows about sand. And they had studied this problem. Graphed the frequency of doorway delivery-time disputes. Wired the early Deliverators to record, then analyze, the debating tactics, the voice-stress histograms, the distinctive grammatical structures employed by white middle-class Type A Burbclave occupants who against all logic had decided that this was the place to take their personal Custerian stand against all that was stale and deadening in their lives: they were going to lie, or delude themselves, about the time of their phone call and get themselves a free pizza; no, they deserved a free pizza along with their life, liberty, and pursuit of whatever, it was fucking inalienable. Sent psychologists out to these people's houses, gave them a free TV set to submit to an anonymous interview, hooked them to polygraphs, studied their brain waves as they showed them choppy, inexplicable movies of porn queens and late-night car crashes and Sammy Davis, Jr., put them in sweet-smelling, mauve-walled rooms and asked them questions about Ethics so perplexing that even a Jesuit couldn't respond without committing a venial sin.

The analysts at CosaNostra Pizza University concluded that it was just human nature and you couldn't fix it, and so they went for a quick cheap technical fix: smart boxes. The pizza box is a plastic carapace now, corrugated for stiffness, a little LED readout glowing on the side, telling the Deliverator how many trade imbalance-producing minutes have ticked away since the fateful phone call. There are chips and stuff in there. The pizzas rest, a short stack of them, in slots behind the Deliverator's head. Each pizza glides into a slot like a circuit board into a computer, clicks into place as the smart box interfaces with the onboard system of the Deliverator's car. The address of the caller has already been inferred from his phone number and poured into the smart box's built-in RAM. From there it is communicated to the car, which computes and projects the optimal route on a heads-up display, a glowing colored map traced out against the windshield so that the Deliverator does not even have to glance down.

If the thirty-minute deadline expires, news of the disaster is flashed to CosaNostra Pizza Headquarters and relayed from there to Uncle Enzo himself -- the Sicilian Colonel Sanders, the Andy Griffith of Bensonhurst, the straight razor-swinging figment of many a Deliverator's nightmares, the Capo and prime figurehead of CosaNostra Pizza, Incorporated -- who will be on the phone to the customer within five minutes, apologizing profusely. The next day, Uncle Enzo will land on the customer's yard in a jet helicopter and apologize some more and give him a free trip to Italy -- all he has to do is sign a bunch of releases that make him a public figure and spokesperson for CosaNostra Pizza and basically end his private life as he knows it. He will come away from the whole thing feeling that, somehow, he owes the Mafia a favor.

The Deliverator does not know for sure what happens to the driver in such cases, but he has heard some rumors. Most pizza deliveries happen in the evening hours, which Uncle Enzo considers to be his private time. And how would you feel if you had to interrupt dinner with your family in order to call some obstreperous dork in a Burbclave and grovel for a late fucking pizza? Uncle Enzo has not put in fifty years serving his family and his country so that, at the age when most are playing golf and bobbling their granddaughters, he can get out of the bathtub dripping wet and lie down and kiss the feet of some sixteen-year-old skate punk whose pepperoni was thirty-one minutes in coming. Oh, God. It makes the Deliverator breathe a little shallower just to think of the idea.

But he wouldn't drive for CosaNostra Pizza any other way.

You know why? Because there's something about having your life on the line. It's like being a kamikaze pilot. Your mind is clear. Other people -- store clerks, burger flippers, software engineers, the whole vocabulary of meaningless jobs that make up Life in America-other people just rely on plain old competition.

[ThunderPeel2001]

Like I said, if I was 14 it would have been my favourite book of all time, for sure, but it all just seems a bit, I dunno... silly(?)/hard to relate to/"kerazy" for the sake of it? I used to LOVE LOVE LOVE that stuff. (I wonder if Neuromancer is actually the same... but I DID read that when I was younger and still love it -- guilty pleasure?)

[Noyb]

I read both Neuromancer and Snow Crash this year, and I much prefer Snow Crash. Stephenson just has so many great little details in his book, from the "pajamas that were either non-toxic or non-flammable, but not both" to the passage about how "everyone thinks they can be the baddest motherfucker in the world" to the crazier stuff about Sumerian mythology to how Hiro specifically turned off his 3d display when coding for real (unlike Gibson's characters who just love floating around and watching programs go out of control while their computers spend precious cycles on arbitrary visualization). Hell, I just finished attending a few lectures on Snow Crash at a local university's science fiction class, so I can attest that there is a world of depth in that book. It's an absurd and exaggerated space where everything is privatized, but it works.

Anything specific you can point to, Thunderpeel?

Neuromancer just feels...generic, lacking. I know the common response to that is that most cyberpunk after it stole everything, diminishing its effect. But it still feels like a juvenile fantasy, mostly in how shallow most of the characters feel. The AIs themselves were cool, though, especially the beach scene. I got a generic blockbuster feeling when reading it, so I guess it could work well as a flashy neon movie.

I'll have to check out The Diamond Age sometime.

[ThunderPeel2001]

I think it might be to do with the hyper-reality and how juvenile it is (Ninja pizza delivery guy?). And I could really give two flying fucks about Hiro, too. Or what Snow Crash is. Actually it sounds like a lot of the reasons you disliked Neuromancer... I hope I'm not horribly disappointed the next time I read it

I loved the little details and observations in NM, and I appreciated them too in SC -- but they seemed less realistic and more OTT for the sake of it. NM was a lot more subtle (as I recall): Molly getting angry/disgusted with Case for not being able to eat his steak (he's secretly on a speed come-down) -- making the subtle point that they had to grow an animal from birth just so he could eat it; an expensive luxury in this dystopian future.