A quick guide to In Rainbows.

I like Radiohead. “Creep” was a fluke that would have, no, should have been a footnote in pop music history. It’s a silly piece of mopery, with an unironically majestic chorus that caught the ear of the mainstream. Unfortunately, these guys are “smart” - something that is deadly in their chosen profession.

And that’s the tragedy of popular music: If it weren’t for “Creep” somehow seeping into the American mainstream these poor “chaps” would’ve never had the chance to grow - and growth is essential to all important and relevant art. The remainder of Pablo Honey is sub-standard, The Bends is adequate at best, but the formulaic depression of “Fake Plastic Trees” and the MTV friendly video with it’s silly anti-consumerist stance helped Radiohead beat the odds of fading into oblivion. They scored just enough hipster popularity to stay relevant long enough to record OK Computer, and it isn’t until then that they really make an original mark.

OK Computer is basically lauded by every critic in the world as the second coming, and generally they’re right. So once you live up to the hype, what happens next? They put out Kid A in an attempt to find an identity, all the while knowing you’ll never live up to your previous success. They put out Amnesiac saying “Hey, man, it’s b-sides.” But then your real slump is Hail to the Thief. I can’t even begin to go into what a schizophrenic morass that one is. [ed. note - I agree 100%, HTTT is so terrible that playing it at someone should be considered a war crime. Perhaps the interrogators at Guantanamo Bay should use it frequently.] After that your lead singer decides to sequester himself with a laptop and a microphone and vomit out a solo record with bleeps and farts.
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In the most recent season of South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone turned their satirical eye on viral internet videos. In Canada On Strike, the main characters try to create an internet sensation so they can earn millions of dollars. What they learn instead is that the internet is a wild (and in the show, deadly) frontier that nobody has mastered.

The episode’s masterstroke is the sweet and naïve Butters singing and dancing to a song “What What (in the butt)”. The original “What What (In The Butt)” is one of the most viewed videos on YouTube – over 11 million views and counting. There is also a side-by-side comparison of the original video with the South Park copy, that reveals the close attention to detail that Parker and Stone paid to the source.

The original Samwell video was created by Bobby Ciraldo and Andrew Swant, who have a Milwaukee-based production company called Special Entertainment, with a subsidiary imprint, Brownmark Films. In addition to its YouTube success, the video was embraced by the blogosphere and many mainstream media outlets as well. The runaway internet success of “What What (In The Butt)” put them squarely in the crosshairs of the internet exploitation that South Park parodied, and in an interview, they reflect on the aftermath.

They also have a number of projects in the works. A new Samwell video is in the works, and their feature length project William Shatner’s Gonzo Ballet is poised for release this summer. They can be reached via their website at www.BrownmarkFilms.com.

Q: Before the episode of South Park aired, did Trey Parker and Matt Stone contact you for permission to parody the Samwell video? What was that process like?
BROWNMARK FILMS: We were completely surprised by the South Park homage — we were never contacted by anyone at South Park. We each had random friends call us up to say, “Dude! Your video is on South Park!”

Neither of us have cable so we had to run to our local bar - The Uptowner - they turned off the juke box and turned on Comedy Central just for us. When Butters’ “What What In the Butt” video came on we thought we were dreaming. We sent Trey and Matt a thank you email the next day but never heard back.
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Countdown lists are generally arbitrary and pointless. The E! Network has almost single-handedly devalued the concept of the countdown with their innumerable, filler-laden programming of “The 50 Greatest Celebrity Trainwrecks.”

Sketch comedy is like pop music - it comes in so many flavors and styles that a comprehensive list is almost a task in futility. It comes as an incredible surprise, then, that Nerve.com (the sub-par Salon) not only has the temerity to try and rank the 50 greatest pieces of sketch comedy of all time, but that their list is so damn accurate.

The Nerve list covers an incredible amount of comic ground. The historical tent-poles of sketch comedy are well represented - Saturday Night Live, Monty Python, and Kids In The Hall. The list gains credibility, though, from a deep historical reach. Your Show Of Shows, Sid Caesar, and The Four Yorkshiremen (featuring a pre-Monty Python John Cleese) all make the list. The best part of the list is that almost all of the listings have a link to the sketch on You Tube, giving you the chance to re-watch a favorite and get acquainted with one you’ve never seen before. The Sid Caesar/Nanette Fabray argument to Beethoven’s Fifth is a spectacular piece of performance.

Inevitably, one of your favorites has been left off the list, and every comedy afficionado out there can argue some of the rankings. Kudos to Nerve.com for putting together such a comprehensive list, and let the debating begin over their few errors and omissions.

The 50 Greatest Comedy Sketches Of All Time

Now it can be told! A good friend has a film premiering at the Tribeca film festival. If you’ve read that “about” page, and wondered what my non-writing career is like, here’s a very good sample… I created the trailer for his film, which is available both below and at the Tribeca Film Festival website.

The link to the trailer is right there on the main page. Comments are welcome.

This is an incredible documentary which, due to a heavy personal bias, I can’t really review… but I will shamelessly plug the film because it’s spectacular. It’s the story of Kassim Ouma, a kidnapped child soldier who deserted the Ugandan army, fled to America with nothing, and became a champion boxer. The film is a reflection on his path to success, and documents his struggle to return home to visit his family in Uganda. Because of his status as a deserter, he has to fight for a military pardon from the President of Uganda in order to return.

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(Disclosure alert – I was once employed by CBS to produce television advertising for CSI: Miami; the opinions expressed below inevitably have been informed by that experience.)

The odds are that CSI: Miami is either a show you love, or a show you love to hate. Whichever camp you fall into, it’s a certainty that your opinion of the show’s star, David Caruso is the defining feature of your opinion.

Since its 2002 premiere, it has consistently ranked in Nielsen’s top 10 shows. One study claims that it is the most watched show in the world, based on internationally aggregated top ten ratings.

The last show to lay claim to that title was Baywatch, and both shows have a fair amount in common. They’re silly, two-dimensional cutouts; liberally sprinkled with bikinis, music driven montages, and non-linear storytelling that translates easily to foreign languages. If it barely adds up in English, then translating it to Russian, Vietnamese, or Swahili can’t hurt. But where Baywatch was content to cheaply sell T&A to afternoon audiences, CSI: Miami is dedicated to pushing the boundaries of style.

While talk of the best shows on television inevitably revolves around the dramatic heft of The Wire, Battlestar Galactica, or The Sopranos, few discussions look at the other end of the spectrum. CSI: Miami draws millions more viewers on a weekly basis, and in a populist medium, that’s a significant metric. The lesson here is that quality and artistry are not synonymous. If producing fluff was easy, the radio waves would be flooded with a hundred successful Britney Spears clones. There are imitators, to be sure, but the key word is ‘successful’. Vacuity is as hard to achieve as substance, perhaps harder.

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When I look over my portfolio, sometimes I try to see what’s missing. It’s difficult to look for ways to add some variety, while at the same time challenging myself artistically. For a while I’ve noticed that I never really paint any types of animals. So when I was given the opportunity to paint something I haven’t tackled previously, in this case a great white shark, I went for it.

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Oliver Stone is at it again. After taking a run at the JFK assassination and Nixon, he’s wading back into presidential politics with a fast-tracked production of a film about George W. Bush. Josh Brolin, fresh off his blank turn as Llewellyn Moss in No Country For Old Men gets the nod for the lead role.

Rumors are already flying about the project, which supposedly spans the life of W. from his frat boy party days at Yale, his battle with alcoholism, conflicts with his father, and ends with the invasion of Iraq. The first four pages of the script have been posted online by Steven Zeitchik on his Risky Biz Blog, and they reveal almost nothing of import.

Stone’s “Bush” - the first four pages

That’s about all that is known concretely about the project. Scripts change during shooting, and again during the editing, and what’s on the page often is a far cry from what winds up on screen. There’s bound to be months of rumor, hype, accusations, and inflammatory rhetoric that circle the film, and what lands in theaters won’t resemble any of it. Here’s what we do know about Oliver Stone: [Read more →]

Season twelve of South Park continues to hit high notes with “Canada On Strike!”

This is what South Park does best — lining up the confluence of power and self-righteousness and gleefully hanging it with its own rope. Trey Parker and Matt Stone despise the arrogance of authority and privilege. One of the most common satirical motifs in South Park is an authority figure imposing a politically correct theory in blind defiance of common sense.
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