I confess that I didn’t have a lot of enthusiasm going into Prometheus (which explains why I hadn’t seen it until this).  The first two-thirds worked well enough for me, but the final act really spiraled into story cliches.

Also, there isn’t sufficient character development to invest viewers in anyone deeply enough to generate an emotional response.

If you like science fiction, my favorite film in that genre in recent years is Moon.  Check it out.  Compelling story and a character you will care about!

 

I’ll make an appearance on the WGHP morning show tomorrow around 9:30 to talk about — no surprise here — movies.

The great thing about cable on demand services is having the ability to catch up (or keep up) with shows you might not have in regular rotation.

Based on the British show The Thick of It, created by Armando Iannucci (who also did a film I admire, In the Loop), VEEP went though another incarnation or two in the US before landing on HBO.

Over the weekend I watched the eight, half-hour episodes of season one (it has been renewed for a second season) and discovered that I was ambivalent about the first half of the season but drawn in by the second half of the episodes.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays Vice President Selina Meyer, and she’s pretty unlikeable.  Honestly, it was her chief of staff Amy (played by Anna Chlumsky, who is also featured in In the Loop) and body man Gary (played by Tony Hale) who kept me engaged in the early episodes.

I can’t say I like any other characters more in subsequent episodes, but a visit by the VEEP’s daughter, a pregnancy scare, and a few other story elements ratchet up my interest level as the series progresses.

What continues to bother me about VEEP is the idea there is no real service in public service – just a lot of self-serving players.  The series presents a cynical view, and I know there are plenty of people who are one-dimensional in politics, but the idealist in me cries out, “Say it ain’t so…”

Is the shallowness of political life represented in this series all there is?  I can’t believe that.

Do I recommend it?  No.  Was it as terrible as I expected?  No.

Surprisingly, that’s because of some of the grown up actors in the film, even Tom Cruise.  I have a hard time watching him in films since the couch performance and declarations of undying love on Oprah years ago, but his dissipated rocker character in this film is weird enough to make him watchable.

Not much plot, even less character development, and most of the music never made it to my iPod.

Rock of Ages falls somewhere between Rock ‘n’ Roll High School and Across the Universe, but it lacks the low-budget edginess of the former and the conceptualization and craft of the latter.

Seeing this film reminded me how much I appreciate Across the Universe.

Can anyone say “Jumped the shark”?  The season finale of Girls was a disappointment.

I finally made myself watch the pilot and first episode.  No more.

When I was in college, Dallas was a popular show, a bit of a cultural event.  So much so that friends on my hall would gather in dorm rooms and lounges to watch weekly episodes before we would scatter across campus (or, more often, move in big clumps to the same destinations) for social activities.

What was the appeal?  I can’t remember.

Watching two hours of the new version of the series revealed some familiar, if aging, faces and locations and reminded me of the trite dialogue spoken by cardboard characters drawn in stark black or white.

The theme song made me smile a little, but in the final analysis, the only difference between Dallas and various daytime soaps (that also don’t engage me) is the production budget and the lighting.

That’s not enough to make me a viewer.

I recorded Dallas last night.  Do I have the energy (interest) to watch it?

The ending of the fifth season of Mad Men wasn’t jaw dropping, but I do wonder what will happen next.  Sometimes that is good enough.

Until recently, CBS Sunday Morning was an occasional thing for me.  Sometimes I’d watch it while reading the morning papers (online) or knitting a little, but the show was never appointment TV or included on my weekly DVR list (like Reliable Sources and This Week).

Until now, that is.  I’ve discovered the perfect way to enjoy CBS Sunday Morning, and that is in bits.

Like the novel with short chapters or a book of self-contained essays, CBS Sunday Morning is perfect for parceling into little pockets of time while eating morning cereal or filling a few minutes before another show begins.

It’s nice to have a little something in reserve that is comfortable but interesting, topical but not time-sensitive, informative but not frustrating.

Now I’m a regular viewer – but only sometimes on Sundays.

There’s an interesting article in The New York Times this morning about how Disney is trying to assist in the war against childhood obesity by changing menus at the theme parks and eliminating certain advertisers from the channel if their food products don’t meet certain standards (link below).

Some libertarian types may take issue with this as one more example of the nanny nation (they think) we’ve become, but children need to have someone looking out for them.  Besides, Disney will have plenty of opportunities to capitalize on this initiative.

The whole thing makes me think of a diagram I often draw in class presenting media and culture as two parts of a circle where it is impossible to determine where one begins and the other ends.

Some have argued that film mirrors culture by reflecting our most closely held hopes and desires.  As Shakespeare and Humphrey Bogart have said in other contexts, “The stuff that dreams are made of…”

I think it’s more complicated than that because our hopes and dreams are also informed by public culture in what feels today like a whirling dervish because there are so very many moving parts.

As for film and television, it is only recently (in the postmodern age) that the boundaries between so-called high art (think opera) and low art (think soap opera) have collapsed for scholars (and film studies emerging in the 1960s and growing madly since the 1970s has been instrumental in that process), but the tensions between art and commerce have always been in place across time and mediums.

Link to article: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/05/business/media/in-nutrition-initiative-disney-to-restrict-advertising.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120605