Film Review: Tomorrow Night (1998)

For many years, Tomorrow Night existed as little more than an IMDb entry: a curio that, despite featuring a lot of people who would go on to be very successful and fairly famous, had been seen by basically no one. Though the debut feature of writer, stand-up comedian and filmmaker Louis C.K. played at several film festivals in 1998 and received fairly decent notices, it failed to pick up distribution and remained squirreled away in C.K.'s personal collection, with not even a scant trace of the film existing online. In an age where seemingly everything is available to us somewhere, Tomorrow Night remained stubbornly out of reach.

What Kind of Year Has It Been?

With 2012 rapidly receding and 2013 inexorably encroaching in defiance of the Mayans' will, it's time for reflection and the arbitrary ranking of art. Since I primarily write about films, I'll be putting up my Top 20 of the year up on January 1st as per tradition, but before then, I wanted to talk about the non-cinematic stuff that delighted and enchanted me this year.

Most of it's TV related because TV is still the most exciting medium going - compared to the admittedly fairly good year in cinema, TV had another banner year in a steady succession of them - and because I read precisely one book released this year (Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise, highly recommended) but there's music, comedy and such mixed in as well so that the New Year can begin completely free of guilt over unacknowledged greatness.

Album Review: "Live" by Tig Notaro

For fear of making a gross generalisation, I think it's safe to say that most people, if they were diagnosed with a life-threatening disease, would not make going onstage to talk about it to strangers a priority. Not only that, but I think that even fewer people would want to get onstage and perform comedy about the disease they literally just found out that they had. I mean, what with all the tearful phone calls and general despair, where would you find the time?

Ante Up: Differing Depictions of Cards in Film and Television

To feed my already fervid anticipation for the third season of FX's Louie - which, so far, has been great - I recently rewatched the first two seasons. Whilst watching the second episode of the show, "Poker/Divorce", I was really struck by how, even though one of the segments of the episode unfolded entirely around a poker game between Louis C.K and his friends, hence the title of the segment, the game itself was completely incidental to the scene.

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.