The surviving Pythons are going to get the band back together.

…or, alternately, gets paid by the list.

For Buzzfeed writers, either is likely.

Now, I’ll be working on a worst-to-best list for Scrubs.

It’s true.

And about 100% of my “entertainment news”, too.

According to at least a few crew members, “Captain Phillips” is to the Maersk Alabama saga what “Forrest Gump” was to traumatic brain injuries.

Bill Glahn – who you need to be reading, by the way – on the Minnesota Orchestra debacle as a bellwether for how Big Art gets funded:

I suspect we will see more of the Minnesota Orchestra-type of dispute in the next few years. Since the financial crisis of 2008, the business models of a whole range of industries are no longer viable. Until we collectively figure out what’s next, the irresistible forces of “we can’t go on spending like this” will be crashing up against the immovable objects of “we don’t want to give up what’s been ours for decades.” A new model will eventually emerge to bring the fine arts to patrons. In the meantime, the adjustment period will be painful for everyone involved.

If there is any good news, it’s that the institutions and industries that go through the adjustment first will be best positioned later on. Those that cling to the failing system loner will end up in liquidation, rather than reorganization.

If you support art (if not necessarily Big Art), it’s an interesting time, in the full Taoist sense of the term. 

For starters, the biggest institution supporting Big Art – Big Academia – is also on the bring of an epochal shakeout.  The era of Big Institutions Who Do Things For Your Own Good as a whole seems to be fizzling, slowly – up to and including that biggest Institution That Does Things For Our Own Good, Big Government. 

I can’t imagine it means good things for Big Public Media – one of the other key patrons of Big Art – either.

So what will the epic restructuring of Big Art mean for art?

Ask any hipster; the stuff that nobody but they have seen is infinitely cooler than the stuff everyone else knows about.

And if you talk television, one of the things hipsters and the too-cool-for-thou all agree on is that the British version of The Office is sooooo much better than the American version (which just signed off the air after nine seasons).

They’re wrong.

Don’t get me wrong; I’ve seen all fourteen episodes of The Office (UK).  It’s funny.

In fact, it’s almost too funny. 

And that’s part of the rub.

The Brit original, starring Ricky Gervais – who’s credited as creater for the series on both sides of the pond – aired for two six-episode seasons on the Beeb, along with a two-episode “retrospective” that tied up all the loose ends that’d been left. 

The series – there as here – was about what happens when you pack a bunch of very disparate people into the artificial environment of the modern office.  Also, about Ricky Gervais’ flair for the outrageous. 

The show reminds me of “Fawlty Towers” – John Cleese’s classic seventies-era BBC series about a bumbling, henpecked hotelier.  In “Fawlty”, Cleese’s protagonist, Basil Fawlty, would spend each episode spiraling down a vortex of self-induced and ever-more-absurd social pratfalls, aggravated by Fawlty’s arrogance and provincialism, ending inevitably in a classic volcanic meltdown.  It was ingenious stuff; the comic tension building as Fawlty’s ineptitude and duplicity built on each other to almost superhuman levels of absurdity.  There’s no way to explain it.  If you haven’t watched it, find it and do. 

And you might just find as I do – that you can only watch Fawlty every couple of years. Fawlty Towersis to comedy what Fourth of July is to fireworks; if you do it every day, it loses its impact. 

Gervais’ British Office is the same.  The David Brent character is like Fawlty – it’s all so gloriously over the top that the comic tension is almost unbearable. 

And it is the show.  Oh, there are other layers, nuances in the show – but they can only get developed so far in a show that only lasted fourteen episodes.  The “Tim and Dawn” romance is rushed and perfunctory, basically to give a breather from Brent’s antics. 

It’s hilarious – and, likeFawlty Towers, it wears me out. 

Which is fine.  But sometimes I want more…

…which we’ll come back to in a bit here.

That’s how I greet this news.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Separated at birth?

Pablo Picasso – aka “The John McClain of abstract art”

and…

Bruce Willis – aka “The Pablo Picasso of the action movie”

I can totally see it.

Danny Boyle is doing a sequel to Trainspotting, 20 years on.

I wonder what Renton’s opening monologue…

…will be like this time?

It was seventy years ago today that Casablanca made its New York debut.

The movie – which started as a script for a never-produced play, “Everybody Goes To Rick’s” – was by no means a sure thing.  Its production, under director Michael Curtiz, was almost legendary for its difficulties; the script was being revised constantly during shooting, both for plot reasons and to satisfy objections from the “Production Code Administration”, the industry’s standards and practices board that enforced the “Hays Code” that governed the morals shown in American movies up through the sixties; the references to Major Renault trading sex for visas, and Rick and Ilse’s fling in Paris, were originally treated much less elliptically than in the final cut.

Indeed, much of the movie’s flow wasn’t nailed down until the final edit.  The immortal closing scene was very nearly augmented by a “real” ending that showed Rick and Major Renault on a ship full of troops – US and Free French – bound for Africa.  This was cut – thankfully – due to Claude Rains’ unavailability – not the only case where a schedule difficulty helped preserve the movie we finally got…

…which was, in its purest form, a parable for what America really stood for on the world stage.  We, like Rick, preferred isolation – but could be swayed by an overwhelming moral argument.

And what an argument it was.  The moment when you started to have the faintest hint that Humphrey Bogart’s cynical, hard-bitten, paleo-noir “Rick Blaine” might have a soft spot (carefully hidden under layers of callouses and scars) for the underdog maybe one of the most gloriously, over-the-top manipulative scenes in cinema:

At first viewing, it’s a “U – S – A!  U – S – A!” style adrenaline rush with the French – who were sympathetic figures to Americans back then – filling the starring role.  The more you watch it, the more layers it has.  Listen to the way La Marseillaise joins in over the Germans’ Die Wacht Am Rhein, as seamlessly as a nightclub DJ would beat-and-key mix them together.

The scene would make a granite countertop emotional.

I had not watched a lot of old movies, beyond the annual ritual of “Wizard of Oz” when I was a kid.  I had little concept of what the golden age of Hollywood had meant, or been. The movie absolutely gobsmacked me.

And it was thirty years ago last New Years Day that I first saw Casablanca.  And I never really recovered.  I’ve watched it dozens of times, maybe a hundred.  Back during college, I saw it so many times that I could recite the dialog along with the movie.

For starters – and it should surprise nobody that a 19 year old would notice this – but you can count the stars in movie history more radiant than Ingrid Bergman on one hand, with a couple of fingers left over.

The boy meets girl (spoilers follow), boy loses girl during a Nazi invasion, boy finds girl in North Africa,  boy loses girl to charismatic underground leader, boy has a shot at getting girl back but uses that to trick her and boyfriend into leaving to carry on the fight while he heads off to fight the Nazis is an oldie but goodie – and has never been done better.

It was thirty years ago this past New Years Day that I first saw Casablanca.  

And it’d be hard to show us a role that is a greater American archetype than Bogart’s “Rick”.

God knows how many people died of lung cancer decades after seeing Casablanca as a kid – because yes, in the hands of Humphrey Bogart, smoking was cool.  It did make you more suave, hard-bitten, dangerous-looking.  I was tempted to take up the habit after seeing the movie my first couple dozen times.

And there has never been a cliffhanger ending like Casablanca’s.  I won’t spoil it.  But if you haven’t seen the movie, you are shirking your duty as a culturally-literate American. Please see to this immediately.

So my evening plans are set, anyway.

Case #1:  Donatelle Versace…

…and Iggy Pop:

More below the jump.   Continue reading →

I saw “Argo” over the weekend, on Saturday night.

It was really, really, really, really good.  That’s a rating of four “Reallys”.  That ain’t chicken feed.

Why was it so good?

Time Machine:  The movie gives you a good sense of what life was like in the US the last time one of our Presidents left our diplomats out to dry in an “unexpectedly” hostile country – the hopelessness, the impotence, the craven politicization of the White House’s response (Carter’s chief of staff Hamilton Jordan comes off especially weaselly), and the way this nation responded – good and bad – to the “students’” outrages against decency.

And the clothing and hair styles of the seventies, in all their claustrophobic porn-movie-o-liciousness.  Yuck.

It’s an excellently-acted true story that plays like a great suspense thriller.

But perhaps most surprising of all…:

You forget it’s Ben Afflect in the leading role.  He isn’t awful!

Totally worth seeing.  Before the election, even.

Two things, really:

SNL is funny again?: I dunno.  I haven’t watched it in years.  SNL follows a pattern;

1. They fire the old cast and start a new cast – usually 6-8 people.  It’s funny – or at least funny-ish.
2. The show adds more “featured players” to help with some of the sketches.  The show remains more or less funny-ish.
3. The “featured players” get added to the cast, to be replaced by more “featured players”.  Gradually, the show gets less funny.
4. After 3-5 seasons, the cast has grown into the mid-teens, with a big group of featured players in support. And by this point, the show us just desperately un-funny.
5. As the show’s opening credits tip the five minute mark, and the show becomes painfully awful, the critics start to the ritual wondering if SNL isn’t almost done for.  This started in 1981.
6. They fire the old cast and start the cycle over.

We’re apparently in the #1 phase – or so I’m told. I’ve been burned too many times. I’m happy to be the last one on and the first one off that particular bandwagon.

Wait – they went after who?  Lorne Michaels is among the most ossified paleo-libs in showbiz.  The show will treat conservatives – any conservative – with sympathy right about the time Paul Krugman writes a NYTimes editorial admitting he’s a partisan hack who’s outside his depth writing about anything but currency policy.   It’ll never happen.

But bagging on another media outlet?  Well, OK – there, they can have some fun:

Not saying I’m going to watch SNL anytime soon.  But that was fun.