Year One - innocuous fun. Michael Cera and Jack Black play, well, the same characters they always play. But funny.
The Venture Bros - best show about failure in the history of TV.
SNL - a really solid episode this week. The China press conference was great, Dave Matthews as Ozzy, the Say Anything spoof, but the genius moment was the ""let's have Andy Samberg sing a song about being in love with Reba McEntire, who is actually a black man wearing a red wig."
Community is really hitting its stride.
Friday Night Lights - still my favorite drama on TV.
Misfits - picking up depth and entertainment with ep 2.
FlashForward - really nice [and accurate, imho] Japanese cultural commentary this episode. The show is still equal parts awesome and suck, tho'.
The Mentalist - the Red John mythology eps are the best.
Doctor Who - The Waters of Mars - really, really excellent. The Doc is going off the deep end. Can't wait for the xmas special. The preview for The End of Time looks genius.
Daily Show - moment of the week was Stewart sparring with Lou Dobbs.
[Pt 1 - pt 2 & 3 on the web here and here.]
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Exclusive - Lou Dobbs Extended Interview Pt. 1 | ||||
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The Prisoner remake on AMC - Watched it through to the end, more pity to me. Not even a slight departure from the original ideas and concepts of the first show, but an actual direct repudiation of the very ideas. The 'we can make a good village' at end sums it all up. Be prepared to sacrifice your individuality and freedoms as long as the "right" people are in charge and for the "right" cause. How fucking horrifying. McGoohan must be spinning in his grave. Sad that this is what passes for daring media discourse. Trust Big Brother, for they have your best interests at heart and are only trying to help. Disgusting.
This review is spot on regarding it - REVIEW: AMC’s The Prisoner – Look! It Moves! #25 by Adi Tantimedh | Bleeding Cool Comic News & Rumors:
"Let’s get this out of the way: THE PRISONER remake is shit. Pointless, generic shit.
Yes, it’s pretty-looking and expensive and shot in Sunny South Africa with decent actors, but it is shit. It’s shit because it either completely fails to understand what the original Sixties version was really about or it just violently disagreed enough with it to use the superficial elements to repute what the Sixties version wanted to say.
Which kind of defeats the whole point of the story in the first place. Why remake a popular story if you’re going to toss everything that people liked about the original under the bus? The catchphrase and key theme of the original show was Number Six’ weekly decree, “I am not a number, I am a free man!” In an interview in last week’s New York Times, the writer of the remake said he felt the need to modify that sentiment into something more, moderate, less individualist, more… community-minded.
...McGoohan was making a parable about one man’s struggle to assert his individuality in a world that’s trying to pin him down and break him, but the individuality he fought tooth-and-nail for might be an illusion after all, and the fight might be part of the system after all, but it still needed to be fought, for everyone. The remake feels like a piece of fanfic at best where the writer decided to rewrite the story to accommodate their own theme of the need to be part of a community in order to be of worth, which is about a million miles from what the original show was getting at. While the makers can go around trumpeting that they’re tackling contemporary issues like the oppressiveness of the Surveillance Society, that theme was already dealt with at length and with more wit and finesse in the original series... The remake is a redundant and much duller trap, rather than attempt to express a real point, it’s hamstrung by caution and stays steadfastly in the middle. The original series posits that the world is the Village. The remake seems to say that maybe the Village isn’t so bad after all, if it was only run by nice people."
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