• What Do You Need Your TV To Do?

    posted by: Noel Murray February 8, 2010 - 01:02p.m.

    One Super Bowl commercial that Scott and I didn't address in our Crosstalk was this ad touting Vizio's new internet-enhanced HDTVs:

    This has become an industry trend: multi-tasking technology. Your Wii will stream Netflix movies. Your Blu-ray will show your digital photos. Your TV will help you Tweet. It's a glorious new age.

    The problem is that none of these devices yet do exactly what I need them to do. I have a laptop; I don't need my TV to surf the web for me. Web-surfing is what I like to do while I watch TV. No, what I need are TVs―or boxes attached to TVs―that will allow me to access all the video content available on the internet. And I mean all the content. My TiVo can stream Netflix, and thanks to some third-party apps I can send downloaded video to my TiVo too, but I can't watch Hulu on it yet, nor can I check out videos posted on ABC, Comedy Central, et cetera. I can stream YouTube via TiVo, but the library is curtailed, and the search function sucks.

    For example, after watching the Temple Grandin biopic over the weekend ...

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  • Great Job, Internet! Demon sheep, organ-selling coroners and the art of the insane attack ad

    posted by: Nathan Rabin February 8, 2010 - 11:02a.m.

    We sit in front of our computers most of the day, connected to our friends and co-workers by the series of pipes, strings, and nimbostratus zackets called the Internet. Many times per day, things flash before our eyes--videos, photos, songs, sites--that are funny or strange enough to warrant sharing with other people, but not funny or strange enough for us to write a big ol' post about. We've occasionally posted blogs under the heading Awesome Internet Thing, but that was a boring title, so it never caught on. Genevieve recently suggested a new title--Great Job, Internet!--and thus a new type of blog post is born.

    Attack ads are by definition critical. We're all far too acquainted with ubiquitous ads showing the rival candidate glowering menacingly in black and white as a scolding narrator delineates his many fatal character flaws (corruption, waste, male pattern baldness, cannibalism) before presenting a shimmering alternative: our guy surrounded by adoring widows and orphans and lit from within with a golden light worthy of Thomas Kinkaid as he leads us into a tomorrow beyond our wildest fantasies.

    But few attacks ads take the "attack" part as seriously as these two notorious political ads ...

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  • Great Job, Internet! Hipster Puppies 

    posted by: Genevieve Koski February 5, 2010 - 02:02p.m.

    We sit in front of our computers most of the day, connected to our friends and co-workers by the series of pipes, strings, and nimbostratus zackets called the Internet. Many times per day, things flash before our eyes—videos, photos, songs, sites—that are funny or strange enough to warrant sharing with other people. Here's one of them.

    The Internet isn’t exactly lacking in cute puppies—especially now that Puppy Cam is back!—but it’s Friday, and who couldn’t use a little more squee-ness in their lives at the end of a tough week? Despite the fact that its premise is predicated on one of The A.V. Club’s least-favorite words, Hipster Puppies gets a “Great job, Internet!” because a) puppies in clothes is always adorable, and b) the captions are pretty damn funny and spot-on. Like the one for Peanut here, who “is sick of explaining to his dates who Luc Sante is.”

    Awww, puppy pretention!

    If your taste in puppies runs more toward the jock end of the spectrum, check out the starting lineup for this weekend’s Puppy Bowl. (No word on who will be headlining the Kitten Halftime Show.)   

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  • The AVQ&A questions we won’t answer (including that sex-music thing you keep asking about)

    posted by: Tasha Robinson February 5, 2010 - 11:02a.m.

    Recently, a reader complained that we haven’t been answering enough reader questions over at AVQ&A, that we’ve been defaulting to staff questions too often. That’s a fair cop. This week’s bad-ass question is from a reader, and we have more reader questions coming up in the immediate future. But we get an awful lot of reader questions we’re never going to answer, because they just don’t work for AVQ&A for various reasons. Here are some of them, with explanations of why they aren’t right for us. Or why we’re just too squeamish. Feel free to discuss these yourself… just don’t ask us to.

    Hey, I was curious if any members of The A.V. Club have creative outlets beyond their jobs. Have any of you been in a band, written a screenplay, hosted an art show, done stand-up/improv, given G.G. Allin a run for his money or anything like that? If so, can we see YouTubes/mp3s/jpegs? —Bob

    What is each reviewer’s favorite genre or subgenre within the medium they review?  A couple favorite examples from that genre would be cool also. —BK

    So you ...

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  • Great Job, Internet! Selleck Waterfall Sandwich

    posted by: Josh Modell February 4, 2010 - 03:02p.m.

    We sit in front of our computers most of the day, connected to our friends and co-workers by the series of pipes, strings, and nimbostratus zackets called the Internet. Many times per day, things flash before our eyes--videos, photos, songs, sites--that are funny or strange enough to warrant sharing with other people, but not funny or strange enough for us to write a big ol' post about. We've occasionally posted blogs under the heading Awesome Internet Thing, but that was a boring title, so it never caught on. Genevieve recently suggested a new title--Great Job, Internet!--and thus a new type of blog post is born.

    So... All you need to know about this amazing new website is that it's called Selleck Waterfall Sandwich, and it contains a series of images featuring those three things: Tom Selleck, a waterfall, and a sandwich. One example is below. There are many, many more here.

    If that's not enough, it appears that the same artiste has started another site dedicated to three other sweet, sweet things: Adrian Zmed, elegant dining rooms, and pack animals.

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  • "And They Have a Plan": What good is knowing what comes next?

    posted by: Todd VanDerWerff February 2, 2010 - 12:02p.m.

    Heading into the final season premiere of Lost tonight, the big question at the back of every fan's mind is just how thoroughly the writers of the show have planned the series out. Will they answer all of the questions that need to be answered? (There's likely not enough space in 18 hours of television—plus commercials—to answer every question the show has ever raised.) Will those answers satisfy on some level? And, in the end, does it really matter if the show gives the many enjoyable characters it's cooked up over the years the kind of closure appropriate to their arcs? A significant portion of the Lost audience is probably only watching to see the final pieces placed into the jigsaw puzzle, and it seems unlikely they'll be pleased with what happens. But even more interesting is the significant portion of the audience watching to see if the show lines up as a planned-out narrative, if the series hangs together as one, big picture or if there are glaring contradictions and plot holes.

    And to those people, I would say that if Lost had been painstakingly planned out from the first, it would be ...

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  • The worst (best?) album cover of 2010 

    posted by: Kyle Ryan January 27, 2010 - 11:01a.m.

    I know we're barely three weeks into the new year, but I'm pretty sure Jeff Beck's Emotion & Commotion will vanquish all others when it comes to the title for the Year's Worst Album Cover. And by "worst," it's also kinda the best—an image that would work as well air-brushed to the side of a bitchin' van as it would tattooed on some chode's bicep. Take it in:

    Jeff Beck Emotion & Commotion

    Josh dropped a press release about this on my desk yesterday, and I'm mesmerized. Seriously, I secretly think David Cross or Patton Oswalt designed this as a gag.

    Somewhere, Toby Keith and the Nuge are kicking themselves for not thinking of this.

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  • Lost Season Six: The Pre-Game Post

    posted by: Noel Murray January 26, 2010 - 07:01a.m.

    Back when I was TV Clubbing Lost’s fourth season, I attempted to enhance my theorizing skills by re-watching Seasons One, Two and Three, in part to look for recurring thematic elements and bits of mythology, and in part to see if Lost holds together as one long story. The results on the latter point were somewhat inconclusive, perhaps because it’s not until the end of Season Three that Lost starts to pic up some serious steam. So to prepare for the sixth season—premiering one week from today!—I re-watched Seasons Four and Five, to see how they play without the stop-and-start of weekly viewing. Again, I was curious if Lost works as serialized storytelling, as opposed to a moment-to-moment thrill ride. I also wanted to focus on what Lost has been up to over these last five years—and what it has left to do.

    First things first: that nagging question. Does Lost hang together? Is it like an epic fantasy novel, or is it just another episodic TV show, with all the attendant gaps and lapses?

    That depends on which season you’re talking about, really.  When I was making my way through the fourth season ...

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  • Soderbergh, Coppola & The Cycle Of Fogeydom

    posted by: Noel Murray January 19, 2010 - 07:01a.m.

    Back in 1997, while promoting the legal drama The Rainmaker, Francis Ford Coppola spent some interviews all but apologizing for making something so generic, explaining that he had more ambitious movie ideas in his trunk, but that he couldn’t find financial backing for them. Back then I sympathized with Coppola—to a point. While I enjoyed The Rainmaker, nothing about it marked it as the work of the man who made Apocalypse Now, The Conversation, One From The Heart, Rumblefish or Tucker. But it’s not like Coppola had to make The Rainmaker so middle-of-the-road, and it’s not like he had to wait on Hollywood to make the more personal movies he wanted to make. For example: a few months before reading about The Rainmaker, my local arthouse screened Steven Soderbergh’s Schizopolis, a playful exercise in auteurial self-examination that Soderbergh threw together for around $250,000. And even that was a big budget compared to what a lot of commercially and artistically successful indies cost in the mid-‘90s.

    It took a decade, but Coppola eventually realized the possibilities of going indie, when he followed up The Rainmaker with 2007’s Youth Without Youth and last year ...

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  • The top 25 pop hits of 2009, all in one terrific mash-up

    posted by: Tasha Robinson December 30, 2009 - 03:12p.m.

    Want to experience 2009 in pop music in less than five minutes? This amazing song/video from DJ Earworm condenses Billboard's top 25 pop songs of the year into one infectious dance number that's considerably more than the sum of its parts. And it mashes up those songs' video to boot.

    This is a follow-up to similar mashups from 2007 and 2008, both available on YouTube and as free mp3 downloads on DJ Earworm's bare-bones website, linked above. Man, does this thing ever give us some quickie flashbacks. It incorporates the following songs:

    The Black Eyed Peas, “Boom Boom Pow”
    Lady Gaga, “Poker Face”
    Lady Gaga Featuring Colby O’donis, “Just Dance”
    The Black Eyed Peas, “I Gotta Feeling”
    Taylor Swift, “Love Story”
    Flo Rida, “Right Round”
    Jason Mraz, “I’m Yours”
    Beyonce, “Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)”
    Kanye West, “Heartless”
    The All-American Rejects, “Gives You Hell”
    Taylor Swift, “You Belong With Me”
    T.I. Featuring Justin Timberlake, “Dead And Gone”
    The Fray, “You Found Me”
    Kings Of Leon, “Use Somebody”
    Keri Hilson Featuring Kanye West & Ne-Yo, “Knock You Down”
    Jamie Foxx Featuring T-Pain, “Blame It”
    Pitbull, “I Know You Want Me (Calle Ocho)”
    T ...

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  • Advice for aspiring and first time authors or what I learned about the book business in '09

    posted by: Nathan Rabin December 22, 2009 - 05:12p.m.

    I have not exactly been shy about mentioning my book The Big Rewind: A Memoir Brought To You By Pop Culture in these here pages. But I’ve never really talked about the experience of putting out a book, which has been perhaps the greatest and most rewarding of my life (yes, better even than doing a basic-cable panel show in Canada with Erik Estrada). The end of the year is a time for reflection and now that I’ve turned in my follow-up, the My Year of Flops book due out in October of 2010 (at the risk of being immodest, I feel it’s quite good and has a fuckton of new material), I thought I would share some of what I’ve learned through this amazing, exhilarating, heartbreaking, glorious, terrifying process and offer some advice and tips to aspiring and first time authors. I know a lot of you are writers yourselves, so I figured this information might be useful. Throughout this journey (and that’s what it’s been, an incredible journey) I’ve gotten wonderful advice from my agent, editor and fellow authors so I’d like to pay it forward, Haley Joel Osment style ...

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  • Going Na'vi: Why Avatar's politics are more revolutionary than its images

    posted by: Sam Adams December 22, 2009 - 01:12p.m.

    Avatar

    Given the astronomical expectations for James Cameron’s Avatar—his first narrative feature in a dozen years, and the launching pad for a purportedly game-changing approach to the use of 3D and performance capture technology—it’s not surprising that the movie has split critics and viewers into two unequal but similarly passionate camps. On the one, more populous, side, are those who feel that Cameron has revolutionized the art form, creating a visionary work that will forever alter the medium. The film’s detractors, meanwhile, greet its much-hyped visuals with a collective yawn, arguing that its questionable technical achievements are overshadowed by its thin characterizations, hackneyed plot and heavy-handed dialogue. 

    The latter complaint tends to stem primarily from the explicit connections Cameron draws between his futuristic plot and the present day, particularly with regard to the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and the depredation of the Amazon rain forest by heavy industry. (Intriguingly, Avatar’s attackers seem to be alone in recognizing the film’s political content. The Christian watchdog site Movieguide warns that the film “contains strong environmentalist content and… a strong Marxist overtone,” which is more or less on the money.)

    The laudatory reviews devote the ...

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  • Audio holiday greetings from ZMF. Also: Cuba Gooding Jr.

    posted by: Josh Modell December 17, 2009 - 12:12p.m.

    Superstar commenter and recent A.V. Club office visitor ZODIAC MOTHERFUCKER occasionally brightens our day by leaving rambling, drunken voicemails. In this one, retrieved this morning but presumably sent last night, he wishes us well--and insists that we interview Cuba Gooding Jr. Not a bad idea, really. With his permission, we present the message in its entirety. Happy holidays.

    ZMF Holiday Message

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  • Christmas Markets: Do You Have This Where You Are?

    posted by: Noel Murray December 14, 2009 - 09:12a.m.

    Having spent my whole life in the south and/or the midwest, I sometimes take for granted certain regional institutions or customs that my coastal pals find alien. I have to remind myself that not everyone has ready access to Chow-Chow Relish or chicken finger restaurants, and that when I drop references to these things, I may need to explain exactly what they are. On the other hand, sometimes I assume things to be regional that turn out to be more common than I’d thought. So consider this blog post the first in an occasional series in which I try to determine—with your far-flung help—whether what I see around me every day is what you see around you.

    Today’s example: Christmas markets. Are you familiar with this concept?  I just became aware of them last year, as a byproduct of trying to find something “fun” and “holiday-ish” to do with my kids on a December weekend. The basic premise of a Christmas market—at least as I’ve experienced them—is that you pay an admission fee at the door of some church, school, or community center, for the right to peruse the wares of local ...

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  • "I believe in growing old with grace": A backwards best-of

    posted by: Scott Gordon December 9, 2009 - 02:12p.m.

    sunset rubdown Dear Sunset Rubdown: May you age as gracefully as Iron Maiden's "Eddie" mascot.

    I never thought I'd be able to write about music for a living, and for kind of fucked-up reasons that defeat the fun part of being a music critic. (In a more realistic parallel universe somewhere, I'm actually sitting next to a police scanner at a newspaper office and probably about to be laid-off.) I didn't actively ignore or push away new music before this was my job, but still, I could've been perfectly happy sticking with 20 or so of my reliable favorite records, maybe picking up on a few new things per year via my friends. If I like something released after The Who's Quadrophenia (OK, let's make it London Calling), chances are it's won me over entirely in spite of myself. And that's true of dozens of things I love to death right now, including Ted Leo, all of metal, and all of hip-hop. In a sense, this attitude leveled the playing field at first: Every album that landed on my desk simply had about as much of a chance as, oh, your average Scientology recruiter, until proven otherwise. I'm actually a great deal more open and sympathetic ...

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