So My Big, Fat, Gypsy Wedding is under attack for being racist? This week’s outcry over Channel 4’s advertising campaign smacks of a certain hypocrisy and no small amount of double-dealing in my eyes. Accused of stereotyping gypsies as it pulls in the channel’s highest ratings this year, complaints over Channel 4’s poster campaign has reached a crescendo with billboards being defaced all over Leeds.
I first saw Melancholia (von Trier, 2011) on my TV during the day while home alone. A few weeks later I saw it again at the cinema with friends. It’s a film about two sisters Justine (Kirsten Dunst) a chronic depressive, and Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) a rich bourgeois housewife, and their experience of the end of the world.
I watched Inspector Montalbano on Sunday evening. Thank goodness I didn’t stay in on Saturday evening to watch Borgen’s replacement. Sam Wollaston’s Sunday morning review promised much, according to him ‘It looks gorgeous’ – really? In a seventies B film kind of way maybe. The drained colour, tinny music and sweeping helicopter shots over Ragusa reminded me of crime dramas from my youth. And not in a good way.
According to Dr. Janet McCabe (Birkbeck) and Dr. Deborah Jermyn (Roehampton), co-organisers of Friday’s Age Spots and Spotlights one-day research symposium: ‘ We live in a culture where youth is revered and envied, while ageing remains feared, even repugnant .’ One thing is clear, living your life in the glare of the media may bring its rewards, but once the glow of youth begins to fade, living those autumn years under the
I have, both on this blog and elsewhere, moaned long and hard about the evil TV snatcher Rupert Murdoch. Like The Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Murdoch dresses up his new channel, Sky Atlantic, as a glossy and shiny treat that will give TV viewers the shows that we would otherwise be denied.
Remember when ITV’s new flagship current affairs programme Exposure (26 September 2011, 22.35) was itself exposed for using videogame footage, claiming it showed IRA members trying to shoot down a British army helicopter in 1988?
http://www.fox.com/alcatraz / takes you to Alcatraz , a new series that began on Gringo TV last month.
January 2009. “I am a believer in evolution not revolution.” “Things are changing and its really important that we make sure that as they change, they change for the better and *Dr. Horrible *was just a little bit about that-about putting power in different hands.” Joss Whedon at Comic Con 2008
Passion and passion in its profoundest, is not a thing demanding a palatial stage whereon to play its part. Down among the groundlings, among the beggars and rakers of the garbage, profound passion is enacted. And the circumstances that provoke it, however trivial or mean, are no measure of its power.
Recent CST blogs have taken up the ‘end of TV theme’, arguing that timeshift viewing, video-on-demand and box-set bingeing is the end of broadcast TV. It’s more complicated than that, surely.
I’ve left Mexico and moved back to my beloved, benighted, lonesome home of LA. Improbably, in balmy temperatures, there are skaters on the Pershing Square rink that I look down on from my loft. It’s some distance from Coyoacán and my neighbor/protestors who saw themselves as the southern wing of Spain’s indignados : The week before I left Mexico City, we had a major earthquake.