PBS on Sunday Nights

-
You can catch all kinds of not terrible programming on PBS, as I'm sure you know, and you can sometimes catch shows that you wish you liked more. For example, Dan and I tried to watch Masterpiece Mystery last Sunday night, hoping that it would be an episode of Zen, but instead, we got Lewis and Hathaway. Maybe we were both just tired, but it was a hard show to follow, mainly because we couldn't understand the accents (here's where Padhraig would say, "Racist") or the colloquialisms. I swear at one point, one of the coppers said, "Put a badger on the grill and smack off the what z-it." Not sure if this was an insult or a misunderstanding, but most of the rest of the show was like that--we were in need of subtitles. Later, Dan made me fall sideways laughing because he saw fat Emma Carol stretched out on the bed and said, in a British accent, "Look at you, you sack of potatoes, you like your crunchy food?"

On Saturday, we watched the first hour of A Roman Holiday starring the adorable Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck, but it seemed awfully dull. I related this to Leigh Ann and she said she thinks it has to do with the fact that the films are in black and white. She said she could easily get through Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz (only in black and white half the time), but could not manage even a thrilling Hitchcock movie. I think it's also because some of the earlier movies have been redone so much that though the premises were new and fun at the time, we've now seen them 100 times over. Also, as much as I love Audrey Hepburn and her cute short haircut in the movie, it now seems to be a little on the corny side. To wit, the poster. That's Eddie Albert of Green Acres fame on the back of the moped:


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Candyman: Race, Class, Sexuality, Gender, and Disability

-
Candyman hits on almost all of the sections we discussed over the last six weeks. Let's start from the most obvious and move from there.   Race: A large part of Candyman confronts the anger and rage of the Black community after years and years and years and years of systemic racism. Candyman is an embodiment of all of the men who have suffered at the hands of whites (white police man, the white community, white systems that have set them up to fail such as the housing projects of Cabrini-Green). The monster of Candyman is a tornado of retribution, a hive of bees swirling angrily and containing the men who have been lynched or tortured by whites, starting with the original death of a Black male painter who dared to fall in love with a white woman whose portrait he painted. This monster, like the original, can be summoned by anyone who dares to say his name out loud in front of a mirror five times. Until the very end, the only people who do this are white--and every one of them is
Read more

Short story by Lauren Groff, "At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners"

-
Image
You have to maintain a much more focused attention when reading a good short story versus a novel, because if you skim, you might miss something.  For this reason, I find it a little more difficult on my brain to read short stories.  But if you're going to write in the form, you should read in the form (and others--I have yet to memorize a poem as was suggested in my workshop last week), so I've been trying. Lauren Groff has a story called "At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners" in Best American Short Stories, 2014. You might have read her novel The Monsters of Templeton, or her other short story from a previous Best of collection, "Delicate Edible Birds" (also the name of her book of short stories), I have a vague recollection that that story was about World War II or possibly World War I and a dinner party where the people invited are living it up . I seem to also remember a line about the crunching of tiny bird bones. The Monsters of Templeton
Read more

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

-
Image
It’s all about the recaps. It’s a show made of recaps from previous shows. I purposefully skipped the first 40 minutes. These guys are all a bunch of idiots. They are turning on one another. Wes has not shown up, because he will probably come in at the very end for some kind of surprise. They are all trying to humiliate Jake because he is too perfect and too sweet (however, he just referred to himself in the third person; kind of irritating). I don’t remember any of these guys, to be honest. Who are these women in the audience? Oh, okay time for a short break because the show has been on now for three minutes. You know what, I’m going to go ahead and time the difference between the commercials and the actual airtime of the show. >Show returns at: 8:47 p.m. Don’t forget the 20 minutes of clapping in between the scenes. I can’t tell you how much hair mousse has been used in the making of this show. Dave is the crazy dude who has decided to grow a beard for the recap Juan is being atta
Read more