I always end up watching pilots in autumn, and I usually give shows two or three episodes to decide whether I'll stick with them or not. The one show which most definitely made the cut just got cancelled. Anybody want to guess which network Lone Star is/was on?
I've always been fascinated by all the different versions of Nikita, so I couldn't escape the new show, and Boardwalk Empire is so overflowing with talent (Martin Scorsese, Steve Buscemi, Michael Pitt, Kelly Macdonald whose Scottish accent is supposed to be Austrian or something) that I expect it to eventually become really good. It's like Deadwood (politics! power! sex! violence!), but set at the beginning of the Prohibition.
The best thing on TV ("this season" doesn't really work anymore) apart from Mad Men is the four-episode-run of This Is England '86 by Shane Madows. It picks up three years after the original film and is just really, really brilliant - incredibly funny one moment, shocking, violent and horrible the next.
Glee is a disaster, and it's the only show I am currently watching just to find things that go wrong. I wish there was a special unit to rescue characters from bad tv shows ("Murphy seems intent on running this character into the ground, but Morris isn't going to have her stop being funny without a fight.") and put them into better ones.
Some of the movies I am looking forward to (apart from the very obvious "epic epicness"), even if most of them are probably not even going to be released in Austria:
Howl, starring James Franco (ever the versatile actor) as Allen Ginsberg during the time he wrote his most famous poem. It also features Jon Hamm (Mad Men) and Mary-Louise Parker (Weeds, but probably more flatteringly, Angels in America).
Let Me In, the American remake of the Swedish horror film Låt den rätte komma in. This begins a period of time in which things that I thorougly enjoy will be remade (Skins, also, although I have my reservations about the original, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). I just started to read John Lindqvist's novel which, according to some reviews, deals more explicitly with the gender ambiguity of Eli. This was only hinted at in the Swedish version and is probably going to be missing entirely from the remake. About ten pages in, I am really intrigued about how the "suburbia" thing is going to translate, considering that this is one of my favourite tropes and seems well suited for an American remake. Chloe Moretz was impressive in Kick-Ass, so I don't think that the movie is going to fail because of the casting.
Never Let Me Go. I read the novel a while back and remember disliking the narrator voice for some reason, although I didn't even mention that in the paragraph I wrote about it. It also completely escaped me that this would have been a pretty good reference for Dollhouse, so maybe my perception of it will have changed over the past (almost) four years. Also, Andrew Garfield, Keira Knightley and Carey Mulligan.
I am also intrigued about The Social Network, because it seems even more strange to me that Aaron Sorkin and David Lynch would devote so much energy and time into portraying the life of a guy who was born in 1983, but then, Mark Zuckerberg is a new kind of villain who everybody seems keen to understand. The personal messages (old ones, but I tend to take 21-year-olds seriously) which surfaced a couple of weeks ago are more interesting to me than all those articles written about how social activism changes (or doesn't) because of social networking sites.
ZUCK: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard
ZUCK: just ask
ZUCK: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns
FRIEND: what!? how’d you manage that one?
ZUCK: people just submitted it
ZUCK: i don’t know why
ZUCK: they “trust me”
ZUCK: dumb fucks
Back when I was younger and not everybody had internet (taking into account that Austria was probably five years or so behind the US), the first thing parents told their children over and over was how dangerous it was: don't tell strangers your real name. Don't share personal information. In fact, the way we were told to use the internet kind of resembles how we learned about sex: I think almost everybody in my generation knew about HIV before having any specific idea about sex (which has apparently changed in the last years). And then, Facebook came along, and suddenly everybody was willing to share all of that personal information (I am waiting for scientists to explain how the interface creates a fake feeling of privacy and security, or how people were willing to do this because thousands before them had also, or because we live in an age bla bla bla).
And finally, in a new category titled "lines I would not have expected in an essay about Tori Amos":
"When you gonna make up your mind?" Tori Amos asked me inside that frigid dressing room. "When you gonna love you as much as I do?"
And then I realize I'm going to be all right. Head first, neck first, balls first—it really doesn't matter. By the fourth listen, I know I'm going to tear that place apart.
It would contribute greatly to the quality of entertainment reviews if paid professional writers were as passionate about what they are doing as retired wrestler Mick Foley is about Tori Amos.
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