Those Penny-pinching Admen

I've noticed a new trend in television commercials. Take the Cadillac commercials. Initially they featured Kate Walsh and the awesome guitar part from Hum's classic song 'Stars'.
Now they feature Lance Reddick from the Wire and that one really awesome episode of the X-Files--and a clip with the same effect, the same atmosphere and general Hummishness, but a sound-alike clip nonetheless, that likely costs Cadillac none of the royalties they had to pay for the HUm clip.
Likewise a Walmart commercial features an instrumental from Badly Drawn Boy's great About A Boy soundtrack, and later broadcasts of the commercial run with a sound-alike, with the same twinkling glockenspiel as the original without any of the residuals to Badly Drawn Boy.
Way to thrift it up, Madison Avenue!

Dear Simpsons Writing Staff

a). Anagrams are not funny.
b). Puns are not funny.
c). Cleverness is not, in and of itself, funny.
d). Guest stars that play themselves are, generally speaking, not funny.
e). Homer singing is not funny.
f). Long series of product names altered slightly from their originals (e.g. Sketch-n-Etch, Ravenous Ravenous Rhinos, Herschel's Smootches) are, pursuant to b), not funny.
g). Homer suffering brain damage is no longer funny.
h). Bart hinting at deep-seated emotional problems underpinning his behavior is still hilarious.

Aliens in America is good

In my humble opinion. The characters are great and the comedic targets are unique. For example, straight-arrow Pakistani exchange student Raja doesn't usually break the rules, but naturally he accepts the necessity of vandalizing a locker in the name of his host-sister's honor. It is also the first prime-time network show that I've ever seen that featured an extended scene of someone getting ragged on in front of the whole school for 'wanting' his sister. Hilarious.

The worst television show in existence . . .

. . . hands down, is Brothers and Sisters. Literally makes my skin crawl to watch it. I weep for all the people out there thinking they're watching something 1)relevant, 2)'smart', 3)topical, 4)genuine.
It's the smarmiest, most self-satisfied, juvenile and crass thing on television and the people who watch it are either too false or too invested in the show to acknowledge its aggressive idiocy.

Desperate Housewives death watch

First Gabrielle can't get rid of her slutty, penniless mother.
Then Brie can't get rid of her mother-in-law.
Then Gabrielle couldn't get rid of her mother-in-law.
Now Lynette can't get rid of her slutty, penniless mother.
Seems like there would be more than one possible relationships for these people to have with their parents, but, you know, who am I to say so?

Golden Girls movie fantasy cast

I just got disc one of the Golden Girls season 1 from Netflix and watched the pilot.

It got me thinking about the Golden Girls movie. Naturally it would be about the late eighties Golden Girls anachronistically thrown into early twenty-first century Miami, and it would have a cameo from Mario Lopez, but who should star? Here's who I would cast.

Dorothy Zbornak - Nicole Kidman. I would say anyone would have to agree that she's the only actress out there right now with the gravitas to play Dorothy.

Sophia - Laura Linney. Think about it, Estelle Getty was only two years older than Bea Arthur, and yet she both resembled her and made a perfect mother to her. Have you seen Laura Linney lately? Total Nicole Kidman's withered mother material.

Rose - Renee Zellweger. Where would Bridget Jones wind up if she had been born and raised in Saint Olaf, married and subsequently outlived her husband? Miami, naturally.
Blanche Devereau - Tyler Perry. Nobody says 'oversexed southern older woman' like Tyler 'Madea's Family Reunion' Perry.

Stanley Zbornak - John Leguizamo. Oh Stanley, wasn't divorcing you enough to get you out of poor Dorothy's life? Apparently not. Plus die-hard Golden Girlsheads (or Geedgeheads, as they are sometimes called) would be up in arms if he didn't at least make an appearance.

Enriched beer

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia has single-handedly made Korea, Korean barbecue, and Korea's famously delicious beer famous. Finally, Korea enters the ranks of developed parody-worthy nations. (See a woefully non-Korea-related clip here, and then go see if tv-links.co.uk has it up yet.)

Plaque bugs?

The Oral-B Vitality protects against them, according to their commercial.

Plaque bugs?

Grey's Anatomy death watch

Everyone's had affairs with everyone, Knight is gone, they're already in Cousin Oliver territory bringing in Meredith's half-sister for some more opportunities for infidelity, they are treating deer, for God's sake.
And Shonda Rhimes is clearly spreading herself too thin with Private Practice.

The Hills

I'm watching a show called The Hills on a channel called The N. It's about these girls in Southern California who work for Teen Vogue.

It's like watching beavers build a dam. I don't really get what they're all about, but I see them doing something, eating Japanese fusion food and dating humorously bland guys and organizing photo shoots and such and it's soothing to watch, like that plastic bag from American Beauty.

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia

It's back. September 13th. I know where I'll be.

And incidentally, if you like things a bit more NSFW (Danny DeVito with his shirt off NSFW) then by all means click here.

Goodwill Ambassador of the Week

This week's Goodwill Ambassador of the Week is none other than Beauty's Chatterbox star panelist Bronwyn!
We here at the Paint Roller Blog would like to thank Bronwyn for her contribution to international understanding. On the August 27th episode of Beauty's Chatterbox, or 미녀들의 수다, or 미수다, or Misuda, or whatever you call it, Bronwyn helped bridge the gap separating Koreans from foreigners by explaining that she never goes to Hongdae because of the smell. The foreign men there, explained Bronwyn, drink too much and throw up so much that you literally have to gingerly tiptoe down the street to avoid the nearly blanket coverage of vomit. To drive home the point, the outgoing South African then stood up and demonstrated what it is like to walk down the streets in front of Hongik University. Way to go, Bronwyn!
This show, for those of you who don't know, is a panel show in which pretty foreign girls who speak Korean discuss Korea and talk about how it is different from their own country, what surprises them, what they like and dislike etc. When the show began the women on the panel were mostly old hands, Korea-wise, in particular American Leslie Benson Bensfield, who's spent 11 years in Korea and speaks fluent Korean. The show was mostly people who know Korea well telling Koreans about their own country, gently pointing out some of Korea's less proud aspects, in particular, its sexism.
There was also plenty of laughs for all. Common topics of the show included:

1. Those tough ajummas.


2. Eating dog, fermented skate (홍어), and spicy food.


3. Booking (nearly delved into every episode)


4. Dating Korean guys.


5. Korean drinking culture

Well after plodding these well-worn boards for a long time, these topics have ceased to be interesting. Anybody out there who watches this program will notice that in an effort to maintain the interest of basically talking about in-your-face old ladies, drinking soju and eating dog meat, they have changed the format from 'knowledgeable foreigners discuss their experiences in Korea thoughtfully' to 'buckwild foreign chicks who don't know anything about Korea and can barely speak Korean say shocking, uninformed things in barely understandable Korean'
And somebody please tell me what's up with this?

I imagine that the next step when this concep' has run out of steam will be to have some models and sorority girls come to Korea for the first time, take them out for a night of drinking, booking, and dog meat and then ask them about it the next day while they model Andre Kim teddies. I propose a title change to 미녀들이 서툴다.

Seoul Drama Awards, desperate self promotion

Desperate self promotion for desperate self promoters. I am in the middle of watching the 2007 Seoul Drama Awards, and boy are they a piece of work.

First of all, the logo for the awards ceremony is an abstract three legged bird/samjogo/삼족오, which happens to look like the logo for Jumong, one of the Korean dramas in competition.

Oh wait, the logo in the video from their website is exactly the same.

Second, the use of English is comically spotty. The Japanese winners all give at least part of their speech in English, but not a single Korean has uttered a word of English, except one of the hosts, who told an Australian winner who had his acceptance speech in his hands "We would like you to say a few words, please."
Third, the hosts (The guy from the Capentech commercials and the hostess of one of Korea's many exploitative news magazine shows) take time out between every award to point out that Korean dramas are now in international competition with dramas from all the top countries. A Korean miniseries beat out a British miniseries with Helen Mirren in it, and this fact was explicitly pointed out.
One of my favorite parts is when Lee Hyori and some dude present the nominees for some award, one of which is The Tudors, and Hyori just went off on how she totally loved the Tudors, but as for the rest of the nominees . . . dunno. The camera went to a Japanese "Hallyu star" in the audience in what appeared to be the Japanese section, and both he and the woman behind him had a sort of shocked, 'we are not amused' look on their faces.
Also, when they introduced 'foreign dramas' and 'Korean dramas' and every single example of a foreign drama they showed during that montage (Lost, Desperate Housewives, Prison Break) was an American show, and yet I don't think any none of those shows were even up for any awards.
To be fair, when the award show started I was convinced that every single award would be won by the Korean nominee, and they haven't gone that far. Way to show restraint. I guess its enough that now Jumong, Hwangjini, and all the other big dramas this year can honestly say that they've won awards in international competition.

Korean TV makers hate their viewers

Or think they are morons, or have terrible taste. And perhaps at times they are right. I a talking in particular about the excremental program entitled Zoozoo Club (주주클럽), in which animals are put in ridiculous staged situations with little regard for their welfare or that of the humans appearing on the show.

The other thing that I hate about this show is that it features Boom, Korea's most depressing TV personality. He is doubly blessed with the soju-addled puffy face of a middle-aged man and the asinine, childish haircut of an exceptionally impressionable teenager.

Having finished my new song and video, Living in Korea, I decided to spend some time away from the computer/mandolin/video camera axis of evil and spend some time with my wife. I sat down to watch the story of a borzoi who had given birth to puppies (you can see two of the puppies by following the link above). Then the owner's four year old daughter is 'alone' with the dogs (and the cameraman, and the producer . . .) and she starts carrying around the puppies by their necks and front limbs and basically freaking out the mother dog, who diplomatically jumps the girl to free her choking pup. This is played repeatedly in 'horror movie' slow motion and color correction.
Then the little girl is depicted 'saving' one of the puppies in a rain storm, which is clearly made by a garden hose pointed in an arc at the little girl and dog. There are copious images of the little girl really crying while being pelted by hurricane-force artificial rain.
Finally and most ridiculously, the mother and daughter are given potatoes by the producer, which they steam and then three-bearsishly go away while they cool. Naturally the mother borzoi is pushed in the house through a window and guided by the detached, noninterfering superpro cameraman to the potatoes, which she eats. She runs away and another little non-borzoi dog comes on the scene to find scraps of potato, at which point we see freeze-frame reaction shots of the mother and daughter angry at the little dog. Then they brutally corporal punish the little dog, even though they know full well what the deal is.
This would make sense if there were any pretense to fiction, but these events are portrayed as real, apparently under the impression that Koreans are still under the same sway of the magic of TV that they were when they first got a glimpse of it, fresh off the farm as they were at that point. Lazy lazy lazy.

Forget dinosaurs, mammals are the chosen ones.

I spent the idle hours of the past weekend watching the faux-nature documentaries Walking with Monsters, Walking with Prehistoric Beasts and Alien Planet. Monsters does its best to bring the vertebrates and mammal-like reptiles that ruled the Earth before the dinosaurs out of obscurity, Prehistoric Beasts attempts the same with the mammals that lived after the dinosaurs but before our time, and Alien Planet dramatizes the voyages of two artificially intelligent probes sent to the planet Darwin IV to search for microbial life and instead finding what seems to be somewhat intelligent life.
The first two series have a definite bias towards humans, in that the very first and earliest episode shows a few early crustaceans before focusing in on the most seemingly insignificant little worm, which is of course the first vertebrate. Narrator Kenneth Brannagh constantly reminds that this or that humble creature is destined to spawn class mammalia. It's prehistory written by the winners. There are in addition several themes which crop up throughout the two series, the most recognizable of which are

• Complex behaviors like nest guarding, parental care, social cohesion and cooperative hunting developed slowly and independent of each other. The series thus tends to focus on first instances of these things (the first australopithecus clan defending a weaker member as a group springs to mind), but that's not always the case, as in the most memorable iteration of this theme, in which a dimetredon that has violently defended her nest nearly to the point of death immediately ceases to defend her offspring upon hatching and in fact attempts to eat some of them. The point, which is well taken, is that it is not the case that one day niceness just evolved up out of nowhere, and that the suite of adaptations that we humans consider to be either honorable or uniquely human all exist for some logical reason.
• The hunter becomes the hunted, on a ridiculously regular basis. The series positively revels in apocalyptic death beasts evolving into prey. Case in point, did you know that the ungulates (hooved mammals including cows and pigs and sheep and goats) were originally carnivorous, and that the only descendants of that group to still be carnivorous are the cetaceans (whales and dolphins)?
  
• The story of evolution is not a straight line, and the development of certain killer adaptations can re-write the course of it. The series cites the sense of touch in early invertebrates, the abovementioned complex behaviors, walking on hind legs and speed and agility in early dinosaurs and walking on hind legs in humans. The series also goes out of its way to suggest that mammal-like reptiles were the kings of the earth before the dinosaurs appeared, and that essentially the dinosaurs sort of stole the throne for one hundred and change million years but in the end they died out and we took our rightful place. It's sort of fatalistic in that way.
• If there had been cameras and nature photographers in ancient prehistory, animals of all periods would have shown a great interest in them. The camera in both series is constantly being hit, nudged or broken by herds, fights, etc. It's verite in that same way that the debris from the exploding Cloud Nine on Galactica hit the camera.
  
• Climate rules everything. Climate (and oxygen levels) can turn insects huge, kill off dinosaurs, give rise to grass and thus create whole new categories of grazing animals, change whales from hunters to filter feeders and basically just trump whatever is going on evolutionarily. Certainly no fault to be found with this view.
• We are destined to kill every animal that cannot live in a human-scaled world. No matter how hard we try to save the whales and the pandas and the elephants, they are doomed, because we have already killed 90% of the large animals that existed when we evolved, not by hunting them (the series claims we didn't hunt mammoths at some point because they were too huge and dangerous) but by simply making their lifestyle unsustainable.
  

Okay, the last one is all mine, but tell you that some TV series made by scientists said it and it picks up a little authoritay, does it not?
The two series are great because they highlight incredibly interesting periods in the Earth's history that often go overlooked in favor of dinosaurs. They undoubtedly oversimplify and tend to favor flashy minority opinions, like that some 200 million year old hunter used venom to kill its prey.

American TV: a million times better than jazz

I always hear the old saw that jazz is America's only native art form. That doesn't sit well with me. I believe the Simpsons count animation as another one, and I'll back that. Edith Hamilton, the classicist, wrote a book, the title of which made my mom question my sexuality, The Greek Way. Hamilton was a great lover of the ancient Greeks, who she felt were high minded lovers of pure ideas and art. In a less famous companion-piece called The Roman Way, Hamilton basically performs a massive smear job on the Romans, who she sees as somewhat soulless, heartless engineery types who thought themselves into world conquest and then tried to buy themselves a high culture with their dirty dirty money. This argument strikes me as something that a modern American would come up with, with our painfully polarized, Jocks versus Nerds society. It was Hamilton's position that when we look at ancient cultures we should judge them mainly on their artistic and cultural production, and that all the rest is just filler. This is of course nonsense.
But it has a certain elegance to it, which is the thing that really gives ideas sticking power. It's a very college freshmanny, emo-y way of looking at the world, and I must confess to frequently turning to it in times of trapped-in-a-foreign-country frustration. There is no one realm in which I claim American cultural supremacy more sincerely and enthusiastically than in the domain of television. American television of late has been absolutely fantastic, to the point where I would much rather watch an episode of a good show than see a movie. I think there may be many reasons for this, but I think the two most important ones both stem from the internet. The first is the level of information available to television fans that enriches the experience, and the other, much more important one is competition from the internet for viewers.
My proof is irrefutable. In America, television has become better and better over the last several years while movies have arguably become worse and worse. In Korea, the movie industry has become one of Korea's greatest success stories (on the strength of a few excellent movies) while television is stuck in the American fifties, stylistically, recycling the same toothless soap opera melodrama endlessly with little concern for repetition and little improvement over time. Why, pray tell, would this be? The answer is simple and elegant. In The U.S., TV is primarily watched by young people, and American movies are primarily watched by the general population and, increasingly, foreigners abroad. Thus American TV faces direct competition from the internet, driving it to improve or die, while the movies face most of its competition from other forms of "going out" style entertainment such as restaurants. In Korea, the average young person has zero free time, watches a couple hours of TV with the family every weekend and isn't holding the remote control. Young people must go out to the movies just to get a few hours away from their houses, which are never empty, or else lock themselves in the computer room and play World of Warcraft until their eyes bleed. Thus Korean TV stagnates while movies are pushed by competition to improve.
So enough about that. What American TV shows are great and why? Here's a short list:

• The Wire: No show does a better job of showing how human flaws and ideals slap up against each other, how the chthonic and the technotronic intersect and influence each other. The show follows a revolving door team of Baltimore city police officers who go after a different big, intricate criminal endeavor each season. The first season paints a layered portrait of both the police running the case and an up-and-coming drug dealing empire and the inner workings of each groups. The second season takes a personal grudge between a police commander and a stevedore union boss and uses it as a jumping off point for a case including white slavery, drugs, a blue collar half black/half Polish dock culture and swarthy Greek international bad stuff traffickers. The highlight of the show is the way that police laziness and ass-covering just barely gets the job done while criminal ambition and the high stakes nature of the business makes them efficient.
• Battlestar Galactica: The epic battle between humans and the Cylon robots that they created goes to the next level when the Cylons almost annihilate the human race, leaving only 50,000 humans running through space on a ragtag convoy. This show has several similarities with The Wire, now that I think about it: lots of poorly thought out sex and bad decisions, almost too-flawed characters, the whole rag-tag angle, and so on. The third season just started and it leaves mankind living in an occupied refugee camp full of terrorism by humans against Cylons. This show will change your life. Whenever I call home my father spends the entire call talking about the Cylons.
• Deadwood: touches on similar themes with the aforementioned: like the Wire it is to a great extent about the innate limits placed on people by society, also deals with the development of networks and personal relationships in a similar way with Battlestar. The story revolves around the last and greatest gold rush in mid 1870s Dakota territory. The most infamous and colorful character is saloon-keeper and whoremonger Al Swearingen, and his foil is town sheriff Seth Bullock. The two develop a sort of adversarial equilibrium: they form a complex relationship, sometimes enemies, but increasingly on the same side. The most interesting arc in the show is the increasing level of civilization in the camp. In the first season, a good throat-cutting takes care of any problem, but by the end of the third season, violence seems less and less of an option, and politics gains more and more of a role. The other main theme that shares with both the above shows is the same one that the producers of the Simpsons claim on their DVDs all the time: people never change. Yet on Deadwood, they do. And they don't it's complicated. I mean, it should be, right?