PJ Lifestyle

Ed Driscoll

Blogging since 2002, affiliated with PJM since 2005, where he is currently a columnist, San Jose Editor, and founder of PJM’s Lifestyle blog. Over the past 15 years, Ed has contributed articles to National Review Online, the Weekly Standard.com, Right Wing News, the New Individualist, Blogcritics, Modernism, Videomaker, Servo, Audio/Video Interiors, Electronic House, PC World, Computer Music, Vintage Guitar, and Guitar World.

For Those Who Confuse Battleship and Battleship Potemkin

Last night I installed Fandango onto my Roku. (Now there’s a sentence that would have been meaningless a few years ago.) It’s a an HD movie trailer channel set up by the folks who sell online movie tickets. Opening next month at a theater near you, is a new film starring Dwayne Johnson (“The Rock”), Bruce Willis, and Jonathan Pryce, the star of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and co-star of Larry Gelbart’s HBO production of Barbarian at the Gates. The three team up for a gritty new high-tech action movie about the president (played by Pryce) being replaced by an evil twin, sort of The Manchurian Candidate meets Kevin Kline’s Dave movie from the early 1990s.

Produced by Hasbro:


I don’t begrudge any man in Hollywood his $20 million paycheck, but…dude. Incidentally, I love the bit where Johnson describes Willis’s character as “The reason why we call ourselves Joes.” He’s the original GI Joe — But isn’t that rather obvious, given that Willis’s character is 12-inches tall in the movie and all the other actors are only 3 and a half inches tall?

Cross-posted from EdDriscoll.Com

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Posted at 1:11 am on May 22nd, 2012 by Ed Driscoll

Last Dance for Donna Summer

According to TMZ, Donna Summer has passed away at age 63:

9:27 AM PST- TMZ has learned … Donna died from lung cancer. Several sources are telling us Donna believed she contracted it by inhaling toxic particles after the 9/11 attack in New York City.

9:35 AM PST- Donna’s family just released a statement, claiming, they “are at peace celebrating her extraordinary life and her continued legacy.”

Donna Summer — the Queen of Disco — died this morning after a battle with cancer … TMZ has learned.

We’re told Summer was in Florida at the time of her death. She was 63 years old.

The reference to 9/11 sounds like her survivors are preparing some sort of lawsuit against the City of New York, but in the meantime, RIP to the late-’70s-era icon.

(Cross-posted at Ed Driscoll.com)

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Posted at 10:37 am on May 17th, 2012 by Ed Driscoll

Audio Interview: Whit Stillman Discusses Damsels in Distress

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Ever since 1990′s Metropolitan, writer-director Whit Stillman has been documenting the foibles and mores of elite WASPs the “urban haute bourgeoisie.” His latest film, Damsels in Distress, is set at fictional Seven Oaks College, and explores the efforts of Greta Gerwig as Violet Wister, Analeigh Tipton as Lily and Megalyn Echikunwoke as the posh London accented-Rose, to reform the slovenly boys of the school’s frat house. Along the way, they team up to create the Sambola, the dance craze of 2012.

In this ten minute interview Stillman discusses:

  • Why it’s been 14 years since his previous film, The Last Days of Disco.
  • How the independent film market has changed since the 1990s.
  • How Damsels references both Metropolitan and Last Days of Disco.
  • When we can expect to see 1994′s Barcelona on Blu-Ray and/or in the Criterion Collection.
  • When we can expect Stillman’s next film.

And much more. Click below to listen to our interview:

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If your browser/Internet connection balks at the Flash player above and/or downloading the audio, click on the player below, or click here to be taken to YouTube, for an audio-only YouTube clip.  Between one of those versions, you should find a format that plays on your system.

For the rest of podcasts at the PJM Lifestyle blog, start here and keep scrolling.

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Posted at 10:56 pm on April 27th, 2012 by Ed Driscoll

Interview with the Authors of The Unofficial Mad Men Cookbook

Judy Gelman and Peter Zheutlin are the co-authors of The Unofficial Mad Men Cookbook: Inside the Kitchens, Bars, and Restaurants of Mad Men. Knowing how much I love the show (at least in its early seasons — get back to me when this season is over…) my wife gave me a copy of the book for Christmas, and I was surprised at how thorough and accurate the authors’ research of Mad Men, and early ’60s drinking and dining in general was. If you’re planning a Mad Men-themed party, or simply want to make the same kind of Old Fashioned that Don drinks, Roger’s favorite Oysters Rockefeller recipe, or heck, Pat Nixon’s Date Nut Bread, this is your book.

Among the topics we discussed are:

  • While aesthetics in general may have arguably gone downhill since the swank suit and skinny ties of the early 1960s, food has actually gotten much more varied. How basic were the dining and drinking choices in Don Draper’s days? The answer may surprise you.
  • How did the authors compile a list of all of the food and drink shown on the show?
  • How cooperative were the restaurants that are still around, and mentioned in the show in working with the authors?
  • Have they met any of the cast members since writing the book?

13 minutes long, click here to listen:

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If your browser is unhappy with our MP3 player, an audio-only YouTube version is also available:

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To download straight to your PC, right click here for the 12 MB MP3 file, or right click here to download the 3.40 MB MP3 lo-fi version.

For our previous podcasts at the Lifestyle blog, click here and keep scrolling.

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Posted at 2:13 pm on April 24th, 2012 by Ed Driscoll

Levon Helm of the Band dies at 71

Just over the wire from MSNBC:

Levon Helm, singer and drummer for the Band, died on April 19 in New York of throat cancer. He was 71.

“He passed away peacefully at 1:30 this afternoon surrounded by his friends and bandmates,” Helm’s longtime guitarist Larry Campbell  tells Rolling Stone. “All his friends were there, and it seemed like Levon was waiting for them. Ten minutes after they left we sat there and he just faded away. He did it with dignity. It was even two days ago they thought it would happen within hours, but he held on. It seems like he was Levon up to the end, doing it the way he wanted to do it. He loved us, we loved him.”

In addition to his musicianship with The Band, Helm was also an accomplished actor in supporting roles as Sissy Spacek’s father in A Coal Miner’s Daughter, and as the wingman to Sam Shepard’s Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff, with a stick of Beemans (the official gum of test pilots) always at the ready.

Incidentally, as someone who wasn’t a fan of The Band and its mythology in the 1970s, what’s the deal with “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down?” Its pro-Confederate lyrics are the very definition of politically incorrect. Is it granted a pass by the left because of The Band’s association with Dylan? Does it help that it’s describing the end of the Confederacy? Or are fans simply listening to the melody and the dynamics of the song and not paying attention to the lyrics? (When I saw the Funk Brothers, the Motown house band, play at a Northern California winery five or six years ago, I got a chuckle out of couple of thousand Bobos in Paradise, few of which are likely NRA members, shouting every word of Junior Walker’s “Shotgun;” presumably Robbie Robertson’s song gets a pass as well.)

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Posted at 1:55 pm on April 19th, 2012 by Ed Driscoll

Jim Marshall, Namesake Inventor of the Marshall Guitar Amplifer, Dead at Age 88

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From all accounts, Jim Marshall was a truly nice a man, a gentleman in the British sense of the word, who happened to design the amp that caused all our ears to bleed. (Even before they went to #11.) The first guitar amplifier I ever owned was a small Marshall, and back in 2003, Vintage Guitar magazine asked me to write a two-part profile on the History of the Marshall Amp for that august musical equipment manufacturer’s 40th anniversary; here are a couple of excerpts from those articles:

In July of 1960, Jim Marshall, having developed his reputation as a regularly gigging drummer, and drum teacher, opened a musical equipment store at 76 Uxbridge Road in the Hanwell section of West London, which would come to be frequented by some of England’s top guitarists. Most of them felt at the time, Marshall says, that the Fender Bassman was the amplifier to beat—but it wasn’t perfect. “Players like Pete Townshend, Ritchie Blackmore and ‘Big’ Jim Sullivan (a hugely talented player who was one of the most respected and busiest session guitarists in England during the ‘60s and ‘70s) pointed out to me, that although they used the Fender, it didn’t produce the actual sound they wanted. So, they described the sound they were looking for to me and that’s how the JTM 45 came to be.”

That the sound of the Marshall amp would come out of the Bassman isn’t all that surprising, as it’s not too difficult to compare Jim Marshall to Leo Fender. Neither man was a guitarist, but each made his career as an entrepreneur who was willing to listen very, very carefully to their guitar-playing customers, and give them what they wanted.

Marshall says, “I liked the sound of the Fender, in fact it was my favorite guitar amplifier at that time without any doubt, but it wasn’t the sound the boys described to me…it wasn’t the sound I heard in my head.”

Getting the sound Marshall heard in his head required a considerable amount of experimentation. “My repairman, Ken Bran, had a young assistant named Dudley Craven and he was the chap who managed to put what I was hearing in my head into an amplifier”, Marshall says. “Dudley was a brilliant engineer who used to work as an apprentice for EMI and I more than doubled his wages so he’d help us build our first rock and roll amplifier. Dudley made five amps for me, one after the other, and I turned them all down because they didn’t have the sound I was after. Then he made number six and that was the one that did it—that’s the one that had the sound I had in my mind that the players had put to me. The players must’ve agreed too because when we put “number six” in the store in September 1962, we sold 23 that very first day!”

“Number six” was a 35-watt head whose circuitry closely resembled the Fender Bassman. The difference in sound was “the harmonics of the valves—or the tubes as you call them in America—when they’re driven in a certain, special way…along with certain things we do within our amplifiers that we do not discuss!” For those who wish to compare the differences between the first Marshall amp and the Fender Bassman, Tom Doyle’s invaluable book, The History of Marshall compares the circuitry of each amp design in depth.

* * * * *

Nick Bowcott, who is now Marshall’s product manager for their American distributor, Korg USA, Inc., may be prejudiced, but what he told me recently is something that most players can relate to. “This might sound somewhat strange, but when I was in my teens, and my band first started venturing out of our hometown, I truly didn’t feel like I was someone who could be taken seriously, until I got my first Marshall. It was almost like a status symbol, it was like I was saying to the audience, ‘OK, I’ve arrived, I’m serious.’ In my mind, to this very day, there’s nothing like seeing a band you’ve never seen before, and the first thing that hits you is a wall of Marshalls. That’s always been synonymous with the sort of music I like, and great tone. It spoke volumes without a single note being played because it’s such a powerful visual statement.”

And it speaks with even more volume, once it’s switched on, as the clip below, with Eric Clapton playing a late-1950s-era Les Paul plugged into an early Marshall amp demonstrates. RIP, Jim Marshall:

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Posted at 2:23 pm on April 5th, 2012 by Ed Driscoll

A Backstage Look at Saturday Night Live’s Corporate Counterculture

Otto von Bismarck, the father of the welfare state, is often credited — apparently erroneously — as saying that “Laws are like sausages — it is best not to see them being made.” Often, that’s also the case with books about show business. Very often, the finished product is inversely proportional to what bastards the artists who produced it were.

For as Woody Allen — of all people — once told his biographer about five minutes before he became synonymous with the name Soon Yi:

“Talent is absolutely luck,” he said one day while talking about his early fear of performing. “And no question that the most import thing in the world is courage. People worship talent and it’s so ridiculous. Talent is something you’re born with, like Kareem [Abdul-Jabbar] is born tall. That’s why so many talented people are shitheels.”

And there were plenty of artists who inhabited the original edition of Saturday Night Live who fit both halves of that equation, combining varying overlapping degrees of talent and schmuckiness. Which is why the book Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live by Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad, first published in 1986 and recently made available on the Kindle (and selling for under six bucks as of the time of this article), is sometimes reminiscent of Woody’s and Otto’s warnings. In a way, Hill and Weingrad’s book works on a similar level as movies like The Godfather, Scarface, or Goodfellas. In modern-era gangster movies, as long as the cameras keep the audience within the point of viewer of the mobsters, they seem sleek and cool. It’s only when you consider the damage done to the innocent people just off-screen that you begin to appreciate the level of brutality the mob inflicts.

Knowing what we now know of the culture wars that began in the mid-sixties, there’s a sense of that in A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live, though it’s sometimes only tacitly referenced, in this otherwise extremely well-researched book. It’s an excellent read — as the Associated Press noted in a blurb from the book’s original edition, “It reads like a thriller and may be the best book ever written about television” — and based on the quality of writing here and the research and interviews that went into it, that’s not exactly hyperbole.

Don’t Trust Any Boom Operator Over 30

To understand how SNL changed television, it helps to understand the era before its debut. Hill and Weingrad explore that extensively from the point of view of late sixties and early seventies underground comedy. But as far as the TV industry itself, the best source is likely Ben Shapiro’s 2001 book Primetime Propaganda, which has a lengthy section that charts the history of the growing leftward tilt of the television industry in the 1960s and early 1970s.

It’s safe to say that by the mid-1970s, there probably weren’t a whole lot of Republicans left at NBC, and certainly not in the more prominent roles at the network. We know that much of the on-air talent on its various shows, such as Johnny Carson, James Garner, and news readers such as Tom Brokaw and Bryant Gumbel, were liberals to one degree or another. The union crew members who built the sets, manned the cameras and aimed the lighting rigs were likely majority Democrat as well. But they were of the old-school middlebrow left, where a classy and polished product was still the goal. And as Hill and Weingrad demonstrate, there was a hard culture clash between the old school liberals who worked at NBC in the mid-1970s, and the young radicals who made up the production staff and on-air talent at Saturday Night Live.

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Posted at 12:09 am on March 21st, 2012 by Ed Driscoll

Tebowmania Concludes in Denver

36 year old Peyton Manning chooses the Denver Broncos as his next team, which means that likely Tim Tebow is on the trading bloc, Mike Silver of Yahoo sports reports:

Two of the greatest quarterbacks in NFL history just hooked up on a “Go” route for the ages, and there’s no question which one feels like walking around with his arms raised to the heavens in celebration.

No matter what Peyton Manning does as a Denver Bronco, John Elway just threw the executive’s equivalent of a game-winning touchdown pass.

Elway, since taking over as the Broncos’ top football executive 14 months ago, has been looking for a quarterback befitting of his Hall of Fame legacy, or at least someone doing a decent impersonation. Instead, thanks to an against-the-grain decision by the prior regime and a stunning series of dramatic developments during the surreal 2011 season, he got Tebowmania – and it wasn’t going away.

And thanks to Manning’s equally extraordinary divorce from the Indianapolis Colts, Elway saw an opening – a bold, emphatic way to rid himself of Tim Tebow without causing an insurrection in the Rockies.

True to his nature, the old gunslinger seized it, going all out in his pursuit of Manning, with whom he surely connected on a level none of us can understand.

On Monday, Elway learned that he’d found his target, with Manning choosing the Broncos over the Tennessee Titans and San Francisco 49ers. To say the reaction at the Broncos’ Dove Valley training facility was one of jubilation would be an understatement. Sure, the notion of landing one of the greatest players in league history was a pick-me-upper. However, there was also a decided ding-dong-the-witch-is-dead strain to the exultation, as unfair and irrational as that may seem.

“Peyton Manning allows John Elway and the Broncos to wash their hands clean of Tim Tebow,” the headline above Silver’s story blurts out with an obvious anti-Christian dig, even though Silver, a former Sports Illustrated writer, does a pretty good job of controlling his own biases in the article.

In a way, Elway’s career has come full circle — he was the successor to Craig Morton, the former Dallas Cowboys starter, who was released when Roger Staubach emerged as a superstar in the early 1970s. After stopping for a cup of coffee in New York, Morton found redemption with Broncos, taking them to their first Super Bowl at the conclusion of the 1977 season (where they lost to Morton’s former team). Now Elway as the Broncos’ general manager is placing his team’s current Super Bowl aspirations on the arm of another 30-something quarterback, who may or may not be damaged goods.

Will Elway get the job done and end his playing career, as Elway did, with another Super Bowl ring in Denver? And what will happen next with Tebow? Did Tebow’s religious proselytizing speed his demise with a team he took into the playoffs?

Toss the rhetorical pigskin around in the comments below.

(Thumbnail on Lifestyle blog homepage assembled from multiple Shutterstock.com images.)
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Posted at 4:15 pm on March 19th, 2012 by Ed Driscoll

Andrew Klavan: At the Corner of Hollywood and New Media

Ed Driscoll (L) Andrew Klavan (R), during the November 2011 NR Cruise.

Novelist, screenwriter, GBTV.com and PJTV contributor and PJ Media columnist Andrew Klavan and I spoke on Sunday for a 22-minute long podcast interview, in which we discussed:

I’ve admired Andrew’s work ever since seeing True Crime with Clint Eastwood in a San Jose theater back in 1999, and have featured his PJTV material numerous times on PJM’s Sirius-XM show during its run. But I had never spoken with Andrew before the National Review Cruise this past November. So it was great to ask him some thoughts on new media, Hollywood, conservatism, and the future of the movie industry.

Click below to listen to our interview:

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(22 minutes long; 22 MB file size. Want to download instead of streaming? Right-click here to download this show to your hard drive. Or right-click here to download the 7 MB lo-fi edition.

If your browser/Internet connection balks at the Flash player above and/or downloading the audio, click on the player below, or click here to be taken to YouTube, for an audio-only YouTube clip.  Between one of those versions, you should find a format that plays on your system.

For the rest of podcasts at the PJM Lifestyle blog, start here and keep scrolling.

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Posted at 10:55 pm on March 5th, 2012 by Ed Driscoll

How Davy Jones Changed the World

I still find it hard to believe that Davy Jones, the teen idol star of TV’s The Monkees died today at age 66 of a heart attack. Given that Mick Jagger is still going strong, and while Keith Richards appears to have morphed into Treebeard at some point over the last decade, he recently concluded a tour to promote his best-selling autobiography, 66 isn’t that old for today’s geriatric rock stars – particularly if Jones had stuck with the milk diet implied by the Monkees’ first sponsor, Kellogg’s Cereal.

I wouldn’t go as far as Kathy Shaidle’s claim that they were “better than The Beatles,” but certainly the latter group’s prefab imitators had their moments. In their early days, with Don Kirshner leading their sessions, they had the pick of New York’s Brill Building songwriters, such as Neil Diamond, Carole King, and Gerry Goffin. In their second season, after they fired Kirshner, the hits slowed down, but their quirky attempts at psychedelia were some of their most fascinating songs, along with Mike Nesmith’s proto-country rock experiments, which anticipated ‘70s groups like The Eagles by a good five to ten years. (Nesmith’s experiments in music video in the following decade would be dubbed by some as a direct precursor to ‘80s phenomenon MTV.)

You could make a case that 1966 was a seminal year in boomer pop culture. A young person could turn on the TV and flip through the dial to find:

  • Star Trek
  • Mission: Impossible
  • Batman
  • The Green Hornet
  • I Spy
  • The Avengers
  • The Wild, Wild West
  • And of course, The Monkees

Those shows would be the backbone of syndicated rerun packages for the next quarter century, and most would also be developed into at least one motion picture, and for the first three, entire franchises that continue to this day.

The Monkees’ own picture would arrive first, their infamous 1968 movie Head, featuring a co-writing credit to Jack Nicholson, of all people. As Peter Biskind explored in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, his seminal history of the “New Hollywood” of the late ’60s and seventies, Nicholson was on the staff of RayBert, the company formed by Monkees producers Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson.  Schneider and Rafelson would use their profits from the TV show they co-created to produce a number of seminal early-‘70s films such as Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces. Schneider would also later be at the center at arguably the nadir of the Academy Awards, when he read aloud at the 1975 Awards (along with co-producer Peter Davis) to a standing ovation, a congratulatory telegram from North Vietnam on Davis and Schneider’s anti-Vietnam War documentary, Hearts and Minds, just three weeks before South Vietnam’s final surrender.

If that’s a long way from “Hey, Hey, We’re the Monkees,” I doubt very much that Jones knew he signing on for a show that would be the spearhead in a cultural revolution in Hollywood, but hey, hey, that’s how it all worked out. For a group dismissed as trite bubblegum, for better or worse, that’s some legacy.

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Posted at 4:26 pm on February 29th, 2012 by Ed Driscoll

Product Review: Logitech’s Harmony 900 Universal Remote

While building a home theater stocked with a variety of electronic components is lots of fun, unfortunately, going the do-it-yourself route often ends with, well, not quite the proverbial Tower of Babel but perhaps worse from your significant other’s point of view – the dreaded Coffee Table of Babel. Those remote controls for the TV, A/V receiver, DVD or Blu-Ray player, cable or satellite set-top box, and other electronic equipment all begin to pile up, making for an ugly mess, and making the home theater appear more complex to operate than it otherwise is.

Back in 2004, Logitech acquired Easy Zapper, a Canadian startup specializing in universal remote controls, giving a firm best known for computer accessories such as replacement keyboards and mice a foothold in the home theater industry.

Under their Harmony division’s moniker, Logitech now produces a full range of remotes in a variety of retail price-points from $29 to $349. While their most advanced remote is arguably the tablet-shaped Harmony 1100, after reading a variety of reviews, I decided to avoid the tablet shape and go with the model directly below it, Logitech’s Harmony 900, which as of the time of this review, sells for $240.99 at Amazon.com.

This is a remote geared towards someone who knows his way around both his home theater and to some extent his PC as well, and who’s prepared to tinker a bit to set up the remote. In other words, expect a bit of set-up time, but once complete, it does make for a rather powerful remote.

Programming the Remote

After installing the supplied software on your PC, the first step is to gather all of your existing remotes, and to write down the brand and model numbers of all of your home theater components. Logitech maintains a database of approximately 5,000 brands and 225,000 devices, which the Harmony 900’s PC interface will search in order to set-up your remote. If you have a component that’s not on there, don’t fret – as long as you have its remote, you should be able to manually program its codes into the Harmony 900 while it’s plugged into your computer via its supplied USB cable.

It’s also possible to tweak the remote to add functions not included in the database. For example, since I do just about all of my TV watching with my A/V receiver on for surround sound, I ended up programming the A/V receiver’s volume and mute controls into the various devices controlled by the remote. Depending upon the amount of equipment you own, and the level of control you’re aiming for, early on you may have to do a fair amount of tweaking to customize the remote to your preferences.

While the Harmony 900 allows control over individual components, its first emphasis is on what it calls (on the remote’s GUI) “Activities.” These typically include watching TV, watching a movie, playing a CD, etc. The Harmony 900 will group together tasks so that pressing one button on the remote will automatically do things such as:

  1. Turn on your A/V receiver.
  2. Switch it to the TV input.
  3. Turn on your TV.
  4. Make sure it’s switched whichever input the satellite TV is on.
  5. Turn on the satellite TV digital set-top box.

And so on. A similar activity can be programmed watching a movie, which switch everything on to watch a DVD. For those with a few pieces of home theater gear that need to work together in harmony (if you’ll pardon the pun), this is a pretty convenient way to begin a few hours of television watching.

The Harmony 900 also supports individual components of course, which it calls “Devices.” The remote’s GUI can be toggled back and forth between devices and activities.

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Posted at 2:39 pm on February 27th, 2012 by Ed Driscoll

Product Review: LG 55LK520 55-Inch LCD HDTV

While the PC has quickly become the de facto home entertainment center for many, there are still moments – such as the Super Bowl or when it’s time to view Lawrence of Arabia or Star Wars on the big, big (home) screen – when sitting down, leaning back, and spacing out in front of a big-screen TV is a welcome change of pace.

LG’s model number 55LK520 55-Inch LCD HDTV produces a knockout 1080p picture. With three HDMI inputs, it’s possible to connect a satellite or digital set-top box, a Blu-Ray player, and an Internet device such as a Roku box. For the home theater industry’s equivalent of “legacy devices,” there are also component and composite inputs. (There’s no S-video connection, curiously. This may be the first video product I’ve purchased in 25 years without one.)

The LG 55LK520 lacks 3D, but I can’t say I’m enamored with that concept, particularly since it involves wearing ’50s-style 3D glasses over my own. And it lacks an Internet hook-up, but that’s OK as well. I’d rather plug-in a device of my own to connect to the Web. (Besides, my DirecTV receiver, Blu-Ray player, and Roku box all have various Web capabilities.)

The unit shares the same IR codes as the LG BD670 Blu-Ray player we reviewed last month; that unit’s remote is capable of performing the basic functions of this TV, though not vice-versa. It’s sort of academic though, as likely most will use some sort of universal remote, such as Logitech’s Harmony 900 or a similar device.

Initially, I was surprised by how “processed” some DirecTV HD programming looked on the 55LK520. Movies that were clearly shot on 35mm had an almost “live TV” sort of look, with little or no film grain visible. But you quickly become used to it. When I mentioned in my review of the Blu-Ray player last month that you can read the Winston logo printed on the band of Martin Sheen’s cigarettes in Apocalypse Now, or praised the details of a vintage Pimm’s Cup bottle label in the Blu-Ray edition of Boardwalk Empire, this was the TV I was viewing them on.

I had purchased the LG 55LK520 to replace an eight year old JVC rear-projection HD set, and immediately found that there was one feature on the older unit that I missed — the ability to zoom an 4X3 image to fill the screen. In contrast, unless I missed an option, the 55LK520 was only capable of black bars around a 4X3 image. If you watch a lot of older movies, or non-HD programming on cable or satellite, this might be something to keep in mind.

Also, for those who wish to place the LG 55LK520 on a tabletop (as I did, placing the unit on the stand in the middle of my home theater cabinets where my older — and much heavier rear projection once sat) my find that the base that the 55LK520 rests on feels a little on the flimsy side. It can do the job, but I wish had built with a more robust feel. Also, for those who placed their older rear projection sets with the screen flush with the edge of their supporting cabinet, the base causes the LG TV to be recessed about five inches in, which may require some adjustments if you’re planning to place the unit inside of a home theater cabinet. For those who wish to mount the LG 55LK520 on their wall, the rear of the set contains the usual VESA mount.

One of the handiest features on the back is a Toslink digital audio output. For those with limited digital audio inputs on their home theater receivers, the LG 55LK520 will output the audio of whatever device is currently displaying on the screen, thus simplifying use of the set with an A/V receiver, and reducing the number of digital audio inputs the A/V receiver needs for your various components. This also makes it easier to use the LG 55LK520 as a switcher for HDMI inputs, which is particularly useful if your A/V receiver has a few years on it, and lacks these connections.

Incidentally, this is as good a place as any for a friendly reminder, which may be old hat for some, but if not:  if you’re doing your own installation, invest in a Brother P-Touch labeler or similar device and label your cables, putting the product the cable terminates in on the opposite end of the cable. Once you start building up a home theater with say, an A/V receiver, Blu-Ray player, Roku box, legacy equipment like a VCR, tape deck, CD player, etc, you risk finding yourself in a bewildering labyrinth of cables when you go to update your gear, or pull a device to send it to the repair shop. Having used masking tape, index file labels, and Crutchfield’s pre-printed cable labels,  the tough vinyl P-Touch so far are the only labels that I’ve seen that don’t become brittle and risk falling off over time, but any label is better than none.

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Posted at 3:13 pm on February 14th, 2012 by Ed Driscoll

Who’s Up for a Remake of Space: 1999?

Space: 1999 “is poised for a comeback,” according to the Hollywood Reporter:

ITV Studios America and HDFILMS announced plans for a reimagining of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s famed franchise of the 1970s, then called Space: 1999. The news comes months after Fox and producer Seth MacFarlane announced they would be reviving Cosmos: A Space Time Odyssey, a 1980s miniseries from Carl Sagan.

“Science fiction is a powerful format capable of visualizing the human condition in thought-provoking ways,” said HDFilms president Jace Hall, who will spearhead the effort and serve as an executive producer. The project is in the development phase and has yet to be shopped to networks.

Be afraid. Be very afraid:

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The original Space: 1999 was first conceived as a sequel to Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s wildly uneven, but occasionally pretty cool UFO series from 1970. Apparently, the scenes set on UFO’s moonbase had the best test results from focus groups, and as a result, the Andersons decided to set their next TV series entirely on the moon — but floating freely in space so that it could visit other planets, a la Star Trek’s USS Enterprise. Never mind the physics of a moon that moved faster than light so that it could arrive at a new planet each week, yet slow enough so that it could launch its exploratory “Eagle” spacecraft, and never get permanently caught in the gravity field of the planet of the week. The result was a show with a not-bad theme song, nice 2001-inspired production design, and pretty good special effects for the pre-Star Wars-era that was completely undermined by a ridiculously overloaded premise. According to Wikipedia, “Gerry and Sylvia Anderson were surprised and disappointed that the public (and critics) never granted them the suspension of disbelief given to other science-fiction programmes.”

There aren’t ropes strong enough to suspend that amount of disbelief. No wonder the show sank.

Star Trek: The Next Generation and its spin-offs proved that it was possible to successfully update an older sci-fi TV series, and the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica certainly had its fans. But a reworked Space: 1999 might be going to the gravity well once too often.

Were you a fan of the old series? And would you tune in for a remake?

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Posted at 1:04 pm on February 13th, 2012 by Ed Driscoll

Audio Interview: Thomas Hibbs on ‘Shows About Nothing’

What connects seemingly disparate works such as The Silence of the Lambs, Cape Fear, Mad Men, and Seinfeld? It is the philosophy of nihilism, first popularized by Friedrich Nietzsche in the late 19th century. But in the last few decades,  how did it become the dominant worldview of Hollywood? In 1999, Dr. Thomas S. Hibbs, currently the Distinguished Professor of Ethics & Culture and Dean of the Honors College at Baylor University, wrote the original version of Shows About Nothing: Nihilism in Popular Culture. Last month, Baylor University released an updated version of the book, which explores shows and films that have debuted since Hibbs’ original work was published. In this half-hour interview, Hibbs discusses:

  • How post-WWII Hollywood originally explicitly rejected Nietzsche and nihilism, before ultimately embracing him with open arms.
  • Why horror movies eventually eradicated God for charming nihilists who fashion their morality as “beyond good and evil,” such as Dr. Hannibal Lecter.
  • Seinfeld: the sunny side of nihilism.
  • How man successfully threw off the encumbrances of authority and tradition only to find himself subject to new, more devious, and more intractable forms of tyranny.
  • How aesthetics came to usurp morality.
  • Mad Men’s Don Draper: the man in the gray nihilistic suit.
  • Can Hollywood move beyond nihilism?

Click below to listen to our interview:

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(29 minutes long; 27.2 MB file size. Want to download instead of streaming? Right-click here to download this show to your hard drive. Or right-click here to download the 5 MB lo-fi edition.

If your browser/Internet connection balks at the Flash player above and/or downloading the audio, click on the player below, or click here to be taken to YouTube, for an audio-only YouTube clip.  Between one of those versions, you should find a format that plays on your system.

For the rest of podcasts at the PJM Lifestyle blog, start here and keep scrolling.

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Posted at 12:02 am on February 1st, 2012 by Ed Driscoll

Review: LG BD670 Blu-ray Disc Player

To give you a sense of how far video technology has advanced, and how far prices have plummeted, let’s first go back to the mid-1990s. Back then, Pioneer Elite’s CLD-97 laser video disc player was one of the finest video playback systems a consumer could buy. Selling at about $2500, it weighed 37 pounds and its exterior case featured a sleek, rich piano black finish with rosewood side panels. With the right source material, it was capable – for its time – of a stunning picture, and can be seen as one of the last steps in the 12-inch laser disc’s evolution before the 4.7-inch DVD came along in the US back in 1997.

But that’s all Jurassic-era history. Currently selling for $124.77 on Amazon, the LG BD670 3D Wireless Network Blu-ray Disc Player with Smart TV leaves the $2500 CLD-97’s picture quality in the dust. And unlike the home theater technology of the 1990s, it’ll talk to your home’s local area network, too.

Amongst the formats it supports, the LG BD670 is capable of playing high-definition Blu-Ray discs, which output up to a 1920×1080 picture, plus 3d Blu-Ray discs, conventional DVDs, compact audio discs (CDs), WMA, and MP3s . We’ll get to those last two in just a minute.

The LG BD670 does a very good job of upconverting most DVDs before outputting them to an HD television. I wrote my recent review of Boardwalk Empire based on standard definition DVDs played through the LG BD670 on a 55-inch LCD TV and thought, man, this picture looks great. Of course, when the Blu-Ray review copy finally arrived from HBO, I was blown away by how sharp it was; you could discern the weave in Nucky’s proto-zoot suit. Or read the text on the bottles of Pimm’s No. 1 he procures for a politician he’s bribing. Watching Apocalypse Now in Blu-Ray, it was possible to read the “Winston” script on the band of Martin Sheen’s cigarette while he was taking a drag. On some films, this can lend dramatic differences in perception. The pace of 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film I’ve seen dozens and dozens of times over the past decades, on pan & scan VHS, a couple of different letterboxed laser discs, DVD, and on a few rare occasions in revival theaters, seemed noticeably faster. The difference was that I could make out the myriad fine details embedded into every shot as eye candy. And I could watch Keir Dullea – almost always photographed in long and medium shots to frame him in his environment  – act. It was a potent reminder of how much is lost, even on high-quality playback systems such as anamorphic standard definition DVD.

Speaking of which, the results can vary in quality when watching a standard definition DVD on the LG BD670. I already mentioned the anamorphic standard-definition DVD version of Boardwalk Empire. But plenty of DVDs have been released in TV’s traditional 4X3 format. My DVDs of the legendary early-1970s Thames TV series The World at War probably looked their very best on the LG BD670, but there’s only so much its electronics can do for a series consisting of alternating WWII newsreel footage and 16mm interviews. The worst offender I’ve seen so far was my first generation DVD of the 1989 Michael Douglas, Ridley Scott potboiler Black Rain, which Paramount issued in letterboxed non-anamorphic format shortly after the DVD format debuted. All of the smoke and diffusion in the cinematography made for a muddy, pixilated image after so many lines of resolution were lost in the letterboxing format. (Fortunately, it’s now out on Blu-Ray.)

(Disclosure: my LCD TV doesn’t have 3D, and I’m not a fan any format that requires me to wear extra glasses over my own glasses, so I did not test any 3D discs.)

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Posted at 9:51 pm on January 25th, 2012 by Ed Driscoll

How Sparkly Nail Polish Doomed the Green Bay Packers

When did America start having emotional meltdowns over sports? A pair of recent events during the run-up to the Super Bowl highlight a disturbing trend among sports fans.

Most recently, as Peter King writes at Sports Illustrated, fans of the San Francisco 49ers aren’t handling Sunday’s defeat in the NFC Championship game very well:

Nice crowd the 49ers have on Twitter. One of their “fans” tweeted to Williams (@KyleWilliams_10): “Jim Harbaugh, please give @KyleWilliams_10 the game ball. And make sure it explodes when he gets in his car.”

It’s only sports, people. Only sports. Around here, the fog will come up tomorrow.

I know Jim Harbaugh has tried to transform his formerly finesse-oriented team into tough blue collar-style bruisers, but who knew he’d also turn San Francisco’s formerly wine and sushi-enjoying crowd into snarling Oakland Raiders-style fans?

Similarly, assuming it’s not play-acting to deliberately create a viral video (and it wouldn’t be the first time, if that turns out to be the case), this clip is a fascinating look at the mindset of a crazed sports fan, crestfallen that the Green Bay Packers lost in the playoffs:

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Vince Lombardi built the Packers of the 1960s into a tough, Spartan football team, and the Packers fans of that era were similarly flinty and cool. (Pardon the frozen tundra-inspired pun.) Looking down from NFL Valhalla, what would Lombardi think of the above video?

I love the magical thinking implicit in blaming her sparkly nail polish (!) for the Packers’ loss. The solipsistic belief that she alone displeased the Football Gods so badly they caused the Pack to lose to the Giants on January 15th.

Then there’s the polypropylene cheesehead and Packers jersey she’s wearing. Hulu, the streaming video site, has a section devoted to the NFL, where you can watch NFL Film’s Lost Treasures series, which looks back at the founding of the league’s film division in the early to mid-1960s. Watching those episodes, you’ll quickly notice that prior to the 1970s, there was little in the way of NFL merchandise for adults to wear. If you watch newsreel footage of the 1957 NFL championship, when the Baltimore Colts beat the New York Giants at the legendary Polo Grounds, the majority of men in the stands wore sober business suits, top coats, and fedoras. This past Christmas, I watched an NFL Channel presentation on “The Longest Game Ever Played,” the double-overtime playoff battle between the Miami Dolphins and the Kansas City Chiefs, the last game played in Municipal Stadium, the predecessor to Arrowhead Stadium, the Chiefs’ current home.  As late as Christmas Day, 1971 there were still several men wearing suits, ties, and fedoras to games.

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Posted at 3:56 pm on January 23rd, 2012 by Ed Driscoll

Roku Offers Beaucoup Streaming HD Video

Back in the 1990s, when the World Wide Web was still new and shiny, and all things seemed possible, television ads promised us a future where every movie ever made would one day be available for streaming on the Internet. (At least if I’m remembering the ads I saw around ’97 or ’98 or so correctly.) The Roku set-top box is a big down payment on that promise. And if I were the cable or DBS companies, I’d be a little scared.

While lots of people will keep watching good ol’ network TV, the ability to cut the cable is now within sight. After seeing numerous links at Instapundit.com, typically with comments from readers about how much they enjoyed their Roku set-top boxes, I decided to give one a try.

Once out of the box, while a few people have complained in comments at Amazon about interconnectivity issues, for me, hooking up the Roko XS couldn’t have been simpler. Plug in a LAN cable, plug the Roku’s A/C adaptor into an outlet, pop a pair of AA batters into the remote, and then follow the instructions on its GUI, and let it do its thing. Within a few moments, it was happily talking to the server back at Roku HQ, and was good to go.

The whole design philosophy of the Roku seems to be “strip everything down to its basics, and keep the interface as clean and minimal as possible.” The remote control bundled with the Roku XS only contains 10 buttons, and an up, down, left, right controller. The onscreen GUI is similarly minimal. But then, this is a unit designed primarily to do one thing: get streaming content off the Web and onto your TV screen.

One element of the Roku is too minimal, in my opinion. I was surprised that the only hook-up options are an HDMI cable to connect to most of today’s HDTVs, and an all-in-one analog output, with a mini-plug-sized jack on one end for the Roku box, and RCA connections for video and analog on the other. I would have liked to have seen a separate digital audio output, whether it was RCA or Toslink, to plug the audio into an A/V receiver for surround sound. Fortunately, my LG HDTV has its own Toslink audio output, and I was able to snake a cable back to my A/V receiver as a workaround.  Currently, only the Roku XS model has an outlet for hardwired 10/100 mbps Ethernet, and a slot for a microSD card.

Where No Set-Top Box Has Gone Before

So how is the picture? Pretty damn good, I must say. All of the Roku units output a minimum of 720p HD; the Roku XD and XS up the picture quality to 1080p. Of course, picture quality is dependent upon the source material the unit outputs, which can vary widely. But I watched the remastered version of “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” the second pilot for the original Star Trek on Netflix, and this was the sharpest I had ever seen the original show. (Which sometimes didn’t work in its favor: the picture was so sharp, you could see where Leonard Nimoy’s makeup was applied. And the crude appearance of Gary Lockwood’s reflective silver contact lenses.)

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Posted at 1:21 am on January 20th, 2012 by Ed Driscoll

Seaside Sopranos: Boardwalk Empire Comes to DVD

In the first place, I would like to observe that the older generation had certainly pretty well ruined this world before passing it on to us. They give us this Thing, knocked to pieces, leaky, red-hot, threatening to blow up; and then they are surprised that we don’t accept it with the same attitude of pretty, decorous enthusiasm with which they received it…

– John F. Carter, “’These Wild Young People’ by One of Them,” in the Atlantic Monthly, 1920.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. In the first years of a new decade filled with technological wonders, American troops are returning home from an overseas war that was promoted as saving democracy – democracy as it was currently understood – abroad. Concurrently, self-styled progressives, hoping to transform the world into a utopian vision of Heaven on Earth, wake up each day thinking, “What can we ban today?” The wealthiest one percent create enclaves in which the laws that they force upon everyone else don’t apply to them. And a corrupt if charismatic politician seeks to find ways, via his cronies, to exploit this enormous rift in what is thought by the masses to be a free market.

America today? No, America in 1920, as prohibition begins to sink its ugly claws into the decade.

It’s easy to see how Boardwalk Empire was green-lighted at HBO. The Sopranos, focusing on a ruthless, albeit relatively minor wannabe-Godfather, was a huge hit a decade ago. AMC’s Mad Men, which was created by one of the Sopranos’ producers, is a cult favorite and hit with the critics. Why not hire another Sopranos producer and create another crime show set in New Jersey, but with the same sort of boomer-tinged historical triumphalism that fuels Mad Men?

In the opening titles of Boardwalk Empire, set to menacing, vaguely surf-rock sounding electric guitars, an infinite number of Canadian whisky bottles wash ashore while Steve Buscemi as Enoch “Nucky” Thompson, the show’s answer to Tony Soprano, scans the horizon. If there are any messages in these bottles, it’s a reminder that the past is a foreign country, its people increasingly incapable, in the eyes of the Boomers, of having gotten anything right.

Louisiana North

To be fair though, Atlantic City hit the skids long before the 21st century. When I was a kid living in South Jersey, the prospect of an hour and a half car ride to Atlantic City always left me with a feeling of melancholy. A long car ride down route 295 and then 45 minutes on the Atlantic City Expressway, terminated in passing by numerous clapped out seaside homes, on the way to the Boardwalk itself, just before casino gambling was legalized by New Jersey and slightly revitalized the area. Slightly.

But Atlantic City in the 1920s, at least as imagined by HBO, is a sight to behold, with rich swells intermingling with down and out immigrants, and an endlessly variety of storefronts, fortune tellers, and carnival barkers. I’m happy to see the first season of Boardwalk released on DVD and Blu-Ray from HBO. I got hooked on the show in November, when it seemed to be on a continuous loop on HBO while I was back in a very different New Jersey than the one depicted in Boardwalk.

Or maybe not so different; there’s a reason why John Fund wrote an essay for the Wall Street Journal in 2004 titled “Louisiana North” calling New Jersey a “pit of corruption.” Whatever reforms current governor and GOP superstar Chris Christie is capable of, he’s got his work cut out for him.

But then, that’s long been true. In TV’s Boardwalk Empire, the mayor is a figurehead. The man who makes the resort town go is its treasurer, the character played by Buscemi, and based on a real life-life figure, Enoch L. Johnson, who lived from 1883 to 1968 – and who looked nothing like the actor playing him.

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Posted at 12:45 am on January 18th, 2012 by Ed Driscoll

Prominent Sith Lord Tased, Pepper Sprayed, by Florida Police Officers

I’m pretty sure there will be grave repercussions from the Emperor over this hateful rebel incident:

Michael Cole, 28, of Orlando, was arrested on felony charges of resisting arrest and battery on an officer.

According to the FHP, a construction worker informed the trooper around 2:45 a.m. of an intoxicated man wearing a Darth Vader mask who was walking in the middle of a road near Summerlin Avenue and Anderson Street.

The trooper approached the masked man, later identified as Cole, and repeatedly asked him to get out of the road, the FHP said.  Cole instead cursed at the trooper and laid in the roadway, authorities said.

The trooper then told Cole to get up, but he attemtped to punch and kick the trooper, who deployed his Taser, according to the FHP.  Officials said Cole’s thick jacket prevented the Taser from working, so the trooper used pepper spray to subdue him.

Local 6 News captured video showing the man screaming while being placed onto a stretcher.

Click over for the video. Reports that a local supermarket manager has been reported missing could not be confirmed.

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Posted at 4:54 pm on January 5th, 2012 by Ed Driscoll

The Greatest Television Commercial Ever Made

Hear me now and believe me later, when I tell you that what you’re about to witness is the simply the greatest commercial advertisement in the history of television. Around the world:

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No, seriously. Imagine it’s the early 1970s, and this ad appears on Japanese television. If you don’t speak much English, and see Charles Bronson at a swank nightclub, then racing through town in his huge Cadillac Coupe de Ville, and finally, stopping off at his swinging pad to light a pipe and douse himself in…Mandom!…you’d probably think that…

Wait, who am I kidding? This had to look as camp to early ‘70s viewers in Japan as it does to our 21st century American eyes. I can only imagine that the director did several different takes of Bronson with varying expressions and gestures for each shot, and cut together nothing but the wildest shots of Bronson he had, sort of a miniature version of what Stanley Kubrick did to George C. Scott in Dr. Strangelove. Fortunately for all of us, at no point did General Turgidson fling his shirt into the air and pirouette around the War Room.

If you’ve ever seen Sofia Coppola’s brilliant 2003 film Lost in Translation, you can work out the whole backstory for why this ad was made. Bronson was a huge star in Europe and presumably Japan as well, but hadn’t quite yet made it to superstardom in Hollywood, a plateau that would only reach at age 50 when he starred in 1974’s epochal film Death Wish. (Ironically, he was, in one sense, badly miscast – Brian Garfield, the writer of the novel wanted Jack Lemmon in the lead role. Lemmon would have been infinitely more believable as a commercial architect at the start of the movie. And audiences would have been much more shocked at Hollywood’s quintessential milquetoast liberal blasting away at New York muggers at the low point of the city’s existence than they were when the uber-macho Bronson laid waste to the city’s scum.) For Bronson, like Bill Murray’s character in Lost in Translation, shooting an ad while in Japan was an easy paycheck, along with plenty of ego-boosting glad-handing from the local ad agency, eager to work with an American star. And the comfort of knowing that no one back home was going to see the finished ad, no matter how embarrassing it was.

Until YouTube came along.

What’s also fun about this ad in retrospect is that it combines multiple elements that political correctness have all but bulldozed over: pipe smoking, the heroic cowboy figure (whom Bronson briefly transforms into with just a splash of Mandom) and Bronson himself. While Death Wish made him a superstar, it also typecast him into that role almost entirely. As Bronson was quoted at the Internet Movie Database, “Someday I’d like a part where I can lean my elbow against a mantelpiece and have a cocktail.” This ad was probably as close as he got during the last 30 years or so of his career. (And even then, gunplay was involved.)

Oh, and pay no attention to that the fact that no woman seems to be sharing Bronson’s swinging pad, even after he bathes in the World’s Most Ultimate Aftershave. Hopefully she arrived just after the commercial fades out, or whoever Japan’s equivalent of Fredric Wertham was at the time would have pondered endlessly the subtext of the ad. Perhaps even more so than future generations will. Which is a reminder that getting lost in translation isn’t always just a cross-cultural communication breakdown, but can be temporal as well.

(H/T: Jim Treacher.)

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Posted at 7:03 pm on January 4th, 2012 by Ed Driscoll

From the Home Office in Hollywood, California…

It’s dueling Top Ten Lists today. First up, USA Today film critic Claudia Puig lists her Top Ten Favorite movies of 2011. Congratulations to our own Roger L. Simon for A Better Life (now out on DVD, Blu-Ray and Amazon Instant Video) making the cut:

  • The Artist
  • Beginners
  • A Better Life
  • Bridesmaids
  • The Decendants
  • 50/50
  • Like Crazy
  • A Seperation
  • The Tree of Life
  • Win/Win

Unfortunately though, quality product was a rarity for Hollywood in 2011, which helps to explain this recent breathless headline in The Hollywood Reporter: “Box Office Shocker: Movie Attendance Falls to Lowest Level in 16 Years.”

Considering similar articles were written throughout the “naughts” (QED), that news shouldn’t come as a “shocker” to anyone, least of all, The Hollywood Reporter. To help right the ship before the iceberg completely subsumes it, Big Hollywood’s John Nolte lists the  “Top 10 Ways Hollywood Can Win Its Audience Back:”

Here’s a sample:

You can trace most of Hollywood’s problems back to the death of the movie star. At first, the industry was thrilled with this development. No movie star meant no big payday, no ego, and none of the baggage too many stahs carry with them. The industry also found that, at least for a while, they could get away with this. Audiences were still packing theatres to see pre-packaged brands developed from high concepts, comic books, novels, and television shows. Sequels, remakes, and prequels were still sure-fire. Who needs to pay Tom Cruise $30 million to run around with CGI’d dinosaurs when just as many people will pay to see Jeff Goldblum do the same?

This was all well and good until the “brands” ran out. Now Hollywood is down to “The Green Lantern” and board games like “Battleship.”

Movie stars, on the other hand, are the most reliable brands out there. People come to see them and if you have enough of them and if you keep developing them, the inventory is limitless. From the 1920s straight through to right around 1990, if you built it with movie stars, audiences would come. Hollywood didn’t need to rely on “brands” because they built pictures around their stars.

Today we’re down to Sandra Bullock, Will Smith, and Denzel Washington — the only three people I know who can still draw a crowd based solely on their name.

Given the Christmastime success of the latest Mission: Impossible sequel, I’d add Tom Cruise to that list — his recent implosions seem not to have fatally harmed his brand. But beyond that, it’s a shorter and shorter list, as Arnold checked out of Hollywood when he became governor, Mel self-destructed, and Bruce Willis’ star power seems to have diminished. And there aren’t a whole lot of younger actors coming up who have the sort of name and good will where moviegoers will say, “Let’s go see the latest [INSERT STAR NAME HERE] movie,” the way that Mel, Arnold, Sly, Harrison and Tom had in the 1980s and ’90s.

The items that immediately follow on John’s list helps to explain why.

(Thumbnail on Lifestyle blog’s homepage by Shutterstock.com)
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Posted at 2:26 pm on January 3rd, 2012 by Ed Driscoll

Are You Ready For Some Football—Taiwanese Animation Style?

Dandy Don and Howard Cosell have each retired to the big broadcasting booth in the sky, and Hank Williams, Jr. has been fired from his Monday Night Football gig. So for some NFL pizazz, there’s only one place left to turn.

Yes, we’re left with Taiwan’s crack team of digital animators, who bring us a preview of Sunday night’s Cowboys/Giants game as only they can:

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What’s your take on the final week of the NFL? Who will go deepest in the playoffs? Feel free to reply via digital 3d animation, or simply in the comments below.

(Via the PJ Tatler.)

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Posted at 1:25 pm on December 30th, 2011 by Ed Driscoll

Surely, You Can’t Be Serious

I think you could make a case for Airplane! — without or without the exclamation mark on the end of the title — as being the funniest movie comedy ever made. If it’s not number one (and feel free to hash it out in the comments below), then certainly in the top ten. For better or worse, it’s also the comedy that ushered in the modern ironic age. (See also headline above.)

Many of Airplane’s (Airplane!’s?) fans know that it was based on a mid-1950s film called Zero Hour!, based on a novel by Arthur Hailey, who would go on to write Airport in 1968, adopted into the mother of all ’70s disaster movies by Universal two years later. Zero Hour! starred Dana Andrews as a washed up fighter pilot named Ted Stryker, Sterling Hayden in the control tower, and then-L.A. Rams star running back Elroy “Crazylegs” Hirsch as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar,  and played deadly, earnestly, straight. So straight that when the Zucker Brothers, coming off their debut Kentucky Fried Movie taped this film off the late-night movie show in the late 1970s, they knew there was the basis for a comedy. But to get a sense of how much the Zuckers stuck to the script of the original film (which they bought the rights to, so as to avoid getting sued) check out this YouTube clip, which cross-cuts between the original and in this case, it’s far superior imitation — the one substitute you should definitely accept.

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And stop calling me Shirley. (Sorry, it was inevitable.)

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Posted at 10:24 pm on December 29th, 2011 by Ed Driscoll

The NFL Play of the Year

To be honest, I’m not sure if Cincinnati Bengals founder Paul Brown or John Facenda, NFL Films’ original Voice of God, would approve of the circus-like acrobatics. But Jerome Simpson of the Bengals obtains NFL immortality, as this clip will be shown endlessly over the coming years on ESPN and the NFL Channel, let alone YouTube:

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So how has your team done this year? Are you ready for — dare I say the word — the playoffs?

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Posted at 3:44 pm on December 28th, 2011 by Ed Driscoll
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