In the past, my brother Joel has said he really wasn’t high on KCRW playing so much music. NPR stations weren’t supposed to be like that, was his reasoning.
So Joel’s probably not the audience for the shockingly young and lively Bryant Park Project morning news show from NYC. But at least they don’t play much music.
In contrast, The Sound of Young America plays a fair bit of music, as well as interviewing subjects not typically heard on NPR and spending a lot of time on edgier entertainment subjects than is NPR’s wont.
To me, it represents a sign that when the golden-throated old guard at NPR has retired to their porches at last, NPR itself won’t need to be put out to pasture, to absolutely puree a metaphor or two. (I’d include the midday Day to Day new magazine on that list of good shows, but their movie critic is way too pleased with himself and what he believes to be his sense of humor.)
In any case, in the era of podcasting, Joel and I can both create our own ideal NPR stations, especially since NPR has jumped into podcasting in a way no other media entity has. So he can have lots of talk and news, and I can weave together music and opinion from KCRW, interesting news shows from New York and dope-smoking pop culture shows from Santa Cruz. Win-win.
I didn’t like this as much as I did Death-Proof, which I thought was really, really good, despite me liking Robert Rodriguez’s films more than Quentin Tarantino’s films generally.
Part of it was the genre: zombie flicks have never really appealed to me, other than intellectually. Part of it was that Rodriguez was much more true to the grindhouse inspiration, and made a film much more over the top than Death-Proof and less in keeping with modern sensibilities. (The trailer for Machete, shown before Planet Terror, does the same things, but since it’s a 90 second or so short, it’s just flat-out hilarious.)
As a film geek, it was interesting to note that Planet Terror seems to be “officially” part of the Tarantino universe, with a reference to the death of Jungle Julia (from Death-Proof), Red Apple cigarettes and, of course, Texas Ranger Earl McGraw (also seen in From Dusk Till Dawn and Kill Bill).
This movie
is a 30 minute Twilight Zone episode stretched to more than three times that length. Somehow, we still don’t learn almost anything about the protagonist despite that, other than he’s a terrible poet.
A rental at absolute most.
So, I’m not impressed by Amazon Unbox via TiVo. For starters, the shows aren’t captioned, even though TiVo’s in-house ads and previews always are.
This is an issue because the pilot episodes of Journeyman and Bionic Woman (i.e. the free preview pilots I actually wanted to see) were downloaded sans sound. If I’d paid the insane download rental fee for these, instead of getting a free preview, I would be pretty furious.
It’s a strange omission for TiVo — the captions, not the sound, which is obviously a mistake — since the preview of The Big Bang Theory, a sitcom by the creator of Two and a Half Men that didn’t require any special downloading at all, does have captions. Unfortunately, it also sucks, proving that Two and a Half Men isn’t a fluke.
Ah, well. I’ll just TiVo Bionic Woman and Journeyman like a normal person in a week or two.
If you’ve got a TiVo — and seriously, get a TiVo — you can download four NBC pilots for free using the Amazon Unbox video rental feature. I’m not sold on the relatively pricy rental or purchase system for the most part (why would I want to download a movie for the same price as a DVD that I won’t have a hard copy of, exactly?), but free is a hard price to beat.
The pilots are:
- Bionic Woman
- Chuck
- Journeyman
- Life
I’ll report back after we’ve watched them.
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