Kudos to John Frankfurt for sending me these links to the lost clips from John Cassavettes' Shadows, one of my favorite movies. The evil Gena Rowlands won't allow these to be released officially. Highly annoying watermarks, but what are you going to do?


Opening

Next Clip

And another

YO JO-JESSICA!

I'm finally taking this video down off my myspace profile, but not before posting it here.

SNL - Hip Hop Kids

Don't miss George McGovern's smackdown of Big Dick Cheney. Here is a man with some things to get off his chest.

Here's a taste: "We, of course, already know that when Cheney endorses a war, he exempts himself from participation. On second thought, maybe it's wise to keep Cheney off the battlefield — he might end up shooting his comrades rather than the enemy."

This Saturday at 11 am, I will be on the KEYS 1440 AM Weekend Magazine discussing Dr. Strangelove.

Also, this years airdates for the Territory are as follows:

KEDT, Channel 16, Saturdays @ 10pm.

May 19
May 26
June 16
June 23
June 30

Alec Baldwin is great on 30 Rock, but man do his parenting skills suck. Listen to his phone message to his daughter: "You don’t have the brains or the decency...I don’t care that you’re 12 or 11 years old.” Ouch! But hey, those Hollywood kids are so damn precocious, she can handle it.

Interesting backstage footage of Colbert Report with Colbert talking (out of character) with John Kerry. Colbert: "I will be in character. I am an idiot." This is from a TalkingPointsMemo.com interview with Kerry, so it's a couple of minutes before you get to the footage.



enjoy.

PULITZER PRIZE WINNERS: HOT OR NOT?

Cormac McCarthy has now won the Pulitzer for The Road, but how many stars does he rate on a hot or not scale? Entry from The Huffington Post rating the relative hotness of the Pulitzer winners.

I watched Battlestar Galactica the miniseries this weekend, and it was great. I watched it all in one sitting on Saturday afternoon, and I was really impressed. I can’t imagine that I’ll have anything academically interesting to say about it, so for now I’m turning off the critic switch and just enjoying it. It’s such great entertainment--the combination of drama/soap and action and FX is just great. Plus, it’s way sexier than I imagined. I expected some man/robot love, but I didn’t expect it to be so hot! I love all the characters...nuanced, compelling, and interesting dynamics between them. So, needless to say, the rest of series 1 is in my Netflix queue, my DVR is set to record all episodes, and I think I’ll make 1 and 2 in by the time I’ve got all of them to watch. Maybe they’ll do a parody episode I can write about...

After one week of resistance, I broke down last night and re-subscribed to HBO. I couldn’t download the new episodes of the Sopranos as easily as I hoped, so I’m back onboard. And it’s great as well. I’m showing last night’s episode in class today, along with the Tom Ford/Jeff Koons episode of Iconoclasts. It’s “quality TV” week, and next week is “postmodern TV” so those seemed like good choices. I’ve been dying to do something with the Ford/Koons thing for a while.

That Cormac McCarthy book, The Road, that makes a nice companion piece to Children of Men, got anointed by Oprah’s Book Club, and now it’s the number one bestseller. I hope he doesn’t go all Jonathan Franzen elitist and balk at Oprah. I think he’s too old to do that, probably. As a matter of fact, I think I might pair The Road and Children of Men for a week in my Media War seminar next year.

My new favorite song is “Girlfriend” by Avril Lavigne. I heard her perform it on SNL, and immediately got up to download it. I tried to temper this with also downloading the new Nine Inch Nails. Not that shameless pop music needs tempering. I will quote an unnamed colleague on this: “on the one hand this a reaffirmation of our masculinity through pop connoisseurship--but no doubt it is also a reaffirmation of our lechery through pop tart connoisseurship.” There it is, indeed.