Hope Lies on Television #16 - The End of 30 Rock and More Besides

To commemorate the final episode of 30 Rock, Tina Fey's critically adored, popularly ignored sitcom nominally about the behind-the-scenes antics of a sketch show, I wrote about the evolution of the show, how it managed to stay on the air for seven years despite having none of the usual per-requisites for such longevity, and what its legacy might be for future shows.

Side Note: I wrote this article before seeing the excellent final episode, which is why it's focused so much on the past of the show rather than its actual ending, but needless to say the final episode did not disappoint. It managed to offer up plenty of great jokes, some emotional resolution for the characters - even Lutz! - without becoming too sappy or maudlin, and it went out on a great final gag which managed to be both about the history of television and the history of the show itself. A wonderful achievement and a fitting ending to show that was so consistently great I began to take it for granted.

Hope Lies on Television #16 - Luck, David Milch and Humanity

To commemorate the release of HBO's Luck on Blu-ray and DVD, I wrote about the ill-fated horse racing drama, as well as offering my thoughts on the themes of David Milch's career and how they relate to Luck's world of jockeys, trainers and gamblers. Also, because I never miss a chance to make a Father Ted reference, I managed to relate it to My Lovely Horse in a way which still manages to be somewhat reverent.

Luck is available now and is absolutely worth seeking out. It's a beautiful, thrilling and utterly unique series that will hopefully overcome the stigma that has, in all honestly rightly, become attached to it since its cancellation.

Hope Lies on Television #15 - Only Forward

After a lengthy break which was largely due to me moving countries, I have now started writing the Hope Lies on Television column for Hope Lies at 24 Frames per Second. Since this is in some sense a reboot of the series, and because it's nearly Halloween, I decided that the subject of the first new addition to the series would be remakes. Using the remake of The Munsters (renamed Mockingbird Lane) as the jumping off point for a broader discussion about the differences between cinematic and televisiual remakes, it returns to key themes that I've written about before - the importance of character and length of time - whilst also taking in the different economic models that film and television are based upon.

I'm really pleased to be writing the columns again since I find them really fun and rewarding, and I'm hopeful that the new monthly schedule (with the occasional extra column when appropriate) will offer plenty of time for research without leading to the lengthy breaks that have marked the column in the past.

Hope Lies on Television #14 - Chasing The Moment

For this edition of Hope Lies on Television, I decided to take the opportunity to write about my current obsession, HBO's Luck, the horse-racing drama from David Milch and Michael Mann. I've been thinking a lot recently about the changing nature of television in the era of heavily serialised dramas, and wondering whether or not we are heading towards a television landscape where television shows air almost as an obligation, since people will probably not watch them until the whole series has air and been recorded on their DVR, or released on DVD. 

Luck, to me, seemed to indicate a way in which serialised dramas can compel people to watch every week by offering small, beautiful moments that might lose their power if viewed on anything other than a weekly basis, and that is the overall theme that I tried to explore here. In the end, I think I just wound up saying how much I liked the show, which is no bad thing.

In a case of very unfortunate timing, the article went up on Hope Lies mere hours before it was announced that the show had been cancelled due to the accidental death of a horse on set, the third such incident since production began on the show. Considering that I love the show, this is a disappointing but completely understandable result: you can't make a show about horses and the people who idolise them and allow real horses to die without seeming hypocritical. Still, the column seems a little bittersweet now, and I'll really miss all the characters that Milch populated his little world with, and I'll especially miss the amazing opening credits sequence, which I hoped would run before many more stories over the next few years.

Hope Lies on Television #13 - Two Detectives, One Name

To commemorate, if that is the right word, the end of the second series of Sherlock, which airs on BBC1 tonight and on PBS from Januray 15, I wrote an article for Hope Lies comparing the two current iterations of the great detective: Sherlock and Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes films. As a big fan of the series, someone who like the films and who burned through all the original Arthur Conan Doyle stories last year, this was immensely fun to write, especially since I felt that it worked within the framework of the columns - writing about the differences between television and film on a grander scale - very well.

Shot/Reverse Shot, Episode 1: 2011

In November, I recorded the pilot of a new podcast with Adam Batty (of Hope Lies) and Joe Gastineau (of The Wooden Kimono). It was pretty sketchy on the technical front, owing to the less than stellar circumstances under which we recorded it, but the central idea of taking a theme and hashing it out through a roundtable discussion was sound, and we just needed to work out the kinks.

Hope Lies on Television #12 - A Family Tradition, From A Non-Traditional Family

A few weeks ago Adam Batty, the editor of Hope Lies, suggested that I should write about The Simpsons for Hope Lies on Television, with a particular focus on their Christmas specials to provide a bit of seasonally appropriately content for the site. Since I sometimes spend most of my days thinking about The Simpsons anyway, it being my favourite television show ever and the single piece of art which has done the most to shape me as a person, I relished the opportunity, but never really found a way into the subject matter.  Fortunately, the show itself came to my rescue by producing a great Christmas special this year that created a nice framework for the resulting article, which I'm pretty proud of, even if the proof-reading leaves something to be desired on my part.

As an aside, I was surprised to discover whilst researching the article that I had seen all but one of the specials, since my viewing of The Simpsons has been spotty in recent years, so in the end all I had to do was catch that last un-watched episode. The episode in question was "The Fight  Before Christmas," and whilst it isn't the worst episode I've ever seen, but the moment at the very end when they make a joke about a Muppet version of Moe performing oral sex on Katy Perry makes a strong case for being the nadir of the show as a whole.

Hope Lies on Television #11 - To End, or to Finish

After a brief-ish hiatus, which was brought on partly by being too busy in real life to research the columns and partly due to a lack of strong ideas for them, I semi-triumphantly returned to Hope Lies on Television with a column about the possibility that Community might be cancelled, and how the reactions of the fans to that possibility suggest that the way in which people perceive television shows has changed over the years, to the extent that a show that people are worried that Community, a show which does not have a strong central narrative, might end before it gets to properly tell its story.

This was a fun, if difficult, column to write since I got sidetracked on a massive tangent about serialisation in television. Thankfully, I realised before the column got completely swallowed by the tangent that the subject was too big to be just an afterthought, so it'll form the basis of the next one.

The Martini Shot: Debuts

Over the last couple of months, Adam Batty (of Hope Lies), Joe Gastineau (of The Wooden Kimono and No Ripcord) and myself (of this parish) have been talking about starting one of those podmacular casts that we heard so many people talk about whilst sipping mint juleps at our club, in which we would discuss pressing matters of the day in a most erudite and cromulent manner. After many weeks of false starts, dead-ends and daring escapes, we finally sat down in a room together and recorded something about films in a slightly mumbly and sweary manner.

That's a roundabout way of saying that the first episode of our new podcast, tentatively* called The Martini Shot, can now be listened to on, or downloaded from Podbean here. The premise, vague as it is, is that every week we will come up with a theme which we will then discuss with reference to films relating to that topic. Since this is the first episode and our minds work in super obvious ways, we settled on "Debuts", which worked out pretty well, I think. Apart from Adam's endorsement of The Adventures of Pluto Nash, which I cannot in good conscience support.

We're hoping to get it on iTunes in the next day or so, at which point I'll update this post with the relevant information.

We're still finding our way with this and, although we were all pretty happy with Debuts as a first try, we're determined to improve it and make it the best podcast that we can, so any and all feedback is appreciated and welcome.

*Tentative because there is already another podcast with that title so we may be forced to change ours. Now, we could blame Joe for this because it was his idea and he didn't do a cursory Google search, so we will. It's your fault, Joe!

Film Clash Episode 6 - Kill List

No really substantive posts today, but a quick one to say that I was a guest on the podcast Film Clash, which is co-hosted by Adam Batty (editor of Hope Lies) and Ali Bianchi (film editor of Exposed magazine), both of whom have decidedly different views on film. I had a really great time talking about Kill List, Colombiana and the latest changes to Star Wars.

You can hear the podcast here, and you can download it from iTunes here (it's the Kill List episode).

Hope Lies on Television #10 - Movin' On Up

In the latest instalment of Hope Lies on Television, I use the success of The Inbetweeners Movie (review up soon, maybe, but I liked it) as a jumping off point to look at the reasons why a television show might want to make the leap to the big-screen - and I have limited myself solely to spin-offs, rather than adaptations a la Bewitched - with specific interest in ideas of content and scope. It also gave me the opportunity to write a little about In The Loop and South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, which are two of my absolute favourite spin offs.

The Numbers Game

As well as writing the Things I Learned From Movie X columns for them, I've been a contributor to Box Office Prophets for just over a year now, and in that time have developed a keen interest in the various trends that are always running underneath the surface of the business side of the movie industry. I've watched the rise of 3D, the decline in attendance and the sharp increase of foreign box office receipts with great interest, and would consider myself, if not an expert, then certainly a talented amateur when it comes to examining the whys and hows of box office performance. This interest led Adam Batty of Hope Lies to ask me to write a Box Office column for him examining the summer movie season, which I was more than happy to do since I've been studying the performances of this year's crop with particular interest.

The resulting article can be found here, and I have to say that I am pretty damn proud of it.

Hope Lies on Television #9: One For All And All For One, For Once

Slightly delayed Hopes Lies on Television article on the differences between TV and film comedy, with particular attention paid to the rise of the ensemble comedy in U.S. television, as exemplified by Modern Family and Parks and Recreation, both of which focus on groups of people who genuinely like each other, as opposed to films like The Hangover Part Two and Horrible Bosses, whose humour is very much based in humiliation and insults. Not a bad thing, as I say in the article, but the fact that these two completely opposing kinds of comedy are arising in different medium struck me as pretty interesting.

Hope Lies On Television #8 - It All Ends

Having spent the last few columns focusing on specific creatives within the television industry - something which I found very interesting and will return to soon, I imagine - I wanted to return to a more conceptual idea by considering Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, which I liked a great deal, as a finale to a long running series, rather than as a film in its own right. In doing so, it allowed me to write a little bit about the finales of Lost and Friday Night Lights, both of which are shows that I love, and which had endings that would have far less impact if viewed by people who are unfamiliar with the shows in their entirety. In much the same way, Deathly Hallows means much more to people, like myself, who have lived with the characters for over a decade, in both film and book form.

Hope Lies on Television #7 - Walk With Me: The Work of Aaron Sorkin

Continuining the slightly new direction of the column away from broad concepts about television to the work of specific auteurs within the medium, this week I tackled the work of one of my very favourite writers, Aaron Sorkin.

I'm very, very pleased with the way that this column turned out, especially because the first draft of it was a mammoth 3,000 words. The current version isn't exactly short, but it's much more concise and has a stronger central argument behind it than the first, in which I tried to cover every aspect of Sorkin's career, including lengthy digressions about the way in which his film work fits into the work he did on television. Some of that stuff was good, but I felt that it distracted from the actual point I was trying to make. The punchier, more focused version is far preferable.

Hope Lies on Television #6 - One Man, One Show, One Vision

Having written a bunch of more conceptual pieces about kinds of television, I decided that I wanted to write a couple of articles that focused on the careers of people I would consider to be auteurs of the medium. Since Hope Lies on Television has always been about examining the points at which film and television overlapped, I thought it was only fitting to apply one of the most purely cinematic terms - auteur - to television, and I thought that Louis C.K.'s show Louie was about as perfect a place to start as any, since the degree to which he puts himself and his life into the show, and the amount of control that he maintains over every aspect of the series, make it one of the most readily identifiable auteurist shows on television. Plus, the second season starts tonight and that tied in nicely.

I'm really pleased with how this one turned out, particularly in terms of charting C.K.'s career for anyone unfamiliar with him, and I'm looking forward to the next one, which will be on the career of Aaron Sorkin.

Hope Lies on Television #5 - If It Looks Like A Film, And Sounds Like A Film...

After a month away, thanks largely to a sojourn to Florida to visit my parents (during which I could have written an article or two but you try writing anything when you're somewhere as sunny as Florida; I don't know how Carl Hiassen manages it), I returned to Hope Lies on Television with an article that I've been meaning to write for a while, but which I had to keep pushing back because of other commitments that kept me from actually watching Mildred Pierce, the HBO miniseries which forms the backbone of the piece. I'd become fascinated by the movement towards miniseries that were, in essence, long films, rather than short TV series. I wanted to also talk about something like Generation Kill, which, even though it was directed by multiple people, unlike Mildred Pierce, has the clear stamp of David Simon on it and so feels like the work of a single creative mind, but I thought that a sharper focus would be best. Plus, I'm planning on writing about Simon in a future column, and wouldn't want to repeat myself so soon.

In Defense Of...The Happening

A few weeks ago, Adam over at Hope Lies, following an article of the Seth Rogen film The Green Hornet, decided to launch a new feature in which the various writers for the site would take turns writing articles defending films that had fared poorly either critically or commercially. I suggested one about M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening, a film which I didn't hate as much as everyone else when it was released back in the Summer of 2008. I make a lot of similar points in the article as I did in my original review, although I like to think that the writing is a good deal sharper than it was three years ago, and even though my overall enjoyment of the film has decreased in that time - I watched it on TV not long ago and it does not hold up very well - I still think it is an interesting attempt to make a horror film that doesn't bow to traditional generic conventions.

The best part of the article, though, are the pictures that Adam found of various cast members looking fearfully off-screen, which just about tells you everything you could ever want to know about the film.

The Brutal Absurdity of War - Paths of Glory

A couple of months ago, Adam Batty from Hope Lies floated the idea of doing a cross-blog project in which different writers would tackle one of the films of Stanley Kubrick, ostensibly to coincide with the release of several of his films on Blu-ray, but really just as an opportunity to celebrate one of the greatest film-makers who ever lived.

I chose to write about his 1957 anti-war movie, Paths of Glory, in which Kirk Douglas plays a Captain in the French army who has to defend several of his men against charges of cowardice following a failed attack which, the film makes painfully clear, was a suicide mission that the generals undertook for less than militarily sound reasons. It's a wonderful film that I had seen a few times, once because I was going through a completist phase in which I just had to see every film by every director I liked, and once a few years later when I read an interview with David Simon, creator of The Wire and Treme, in which he cited Paths of Glory as a huge influence on the tone and viewpoint of The Wire. I touch upon that in the article slightly, but mainly I talk about the humanist aspects of the film, which is probably Kubrick's most affecting, despite being as bleak as every other film he made barring Spartacus.

Anyway, here's the article itself, I hope you enjoy it. Please bear in mind that it goes into a lot of detail about the plot, particularly the ending, so anyone unfamiliar with the film should check it out before reading the article.

A Self-Made Man: "Badlands" and The Legend of Kit Carruthers

Here's an article I wrote on behalf of Hope Lies for Cinemezzo about Terrence Malick's Badlands, part of a cross-blog project in which different writers each tackle on one of Malick's four feature films to date, culminating with a review of his latest, The Tree of Life, when it opens in the U.S. next week.

I was originally meant to write about The New World, Malick's fourth film, which I was looking forward to because it would finally give me an excuse to watch it, but the original writer of the Badlands piece had other engagements which meant that The New World suited his schedule more. It worked out well, I think, since Badlands is a film I really love, and getting to write about it in detail was a real treat.