Sunday Screening

You thought there wouldn't be Sunday Screenings this summer? Ha. YOU CANNOT KILL THE SUNDAY SCREENING. YOU CAN ONLY MAKE IT STRONGER.

This, of course, is the immortal theme from Miami Vice, which -- and I suppose I should have seen this coming -- was not only a #1 single in 1985, but became a music video, starring the rather uncharismatic synthesizer artist Jan Hammer. (That face, when he turns with his guitar and looks at the camera... that face...)

It's one of the all-time great TV themes -- right up there, I'd argue, with Hawaii Five-O (which was in many ways Miami Vice's precursor) -- and it's fitting for a show that was so groundbreaking stylistically. Nothing on TV, then or now, is as visually and aurally arresting as Miami Vice; it was done quite deliberately in a style that was half action film, half music video, and which left no detail to chance. (Producer Michael Mann went so far as to forbid entire color spectra from the show, permitting only whites and pastels.) Look for instance at this iconic scene from the pilot episode, and see how perfectly every shot is composed:

(This, incidentally, is the one and only time Phil Collins was ever cool.)

Or try this selection of clips from a 1988 episode. Ignore the young Julia Roberts -- and Don Johnson's horrible, horrible mullet -- and just watch what they do with the camera:

There are Hollywood feature films with lower production values than this. Utterly amazing.

Miami Vice's heyday was brief; in its third season (1986-87) it was scheduled against Dallas, a blow from which it never recovered (and the subsequent revolving door of producers, which would include Dick Wolf of Law & Order fame among others, robbed the show of its aesthetic consistency). It was cancelled in 1989. Understandably; who could resist Dallas, a show that at that time starred Larry Hagman, Howard Keel, and a man named "Denk Rambo"? This is the 1986 premiere, as it aired:

(I especially love that clip because it contains almost none of actual Dallas, and a whole bunch of Dallas cross-promotion from Minneapolis local news. TV was less subtle in those days.)

Still Miami Vice is something you need to experience; those who are blessed with million-channel cable or satellite packages can see it on, believe it or not, the "Sleuth" Network (can these things possibly be profitable?), which also carries classics like Dragnet, Magnum P.I., and the criminally underremembered Rockford Files. I suggest you take some time this summer, in general, to learn about our TV heritage; what better are you going to be doing? Educating yourself? Changing the world? Come on...

Enjoy the rest of your weekends, everyone; this is an open thread.

Sunday Screening: Primary-Appropriate Edition

So I gather there were some primaries yesterday -- awfully poorly promoted, if you ask me -- in Nebraska, Louisiana, and Washington State. Leaving aside the outcomes of those contests (which I gather favored some crazy youngster named "Omaba" or whatever), I'd like to take you all on a video tour through the cultural artifacts that I, however unfairly, associate with these particular places.

LOUISIANA is a vast and complex state with its own unique heritage and culture; it's one of the most fascinating parts of America. In keeping with that spirit, here is a completely arficial, possibly offensive, stereotype-laden country song about a one-armed Cajun:

That of course is "Amos Moses" by the inimitable Jerry Reed, who for the record is not from anywhere close to Louisiana. This song was a hit in 1971, and you can still hear it on the radio today, as well as on the flawless soundtrack to Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in 2004.

Jerry Reed is probably best-remembered for his straight-country contributions to the Smokey and the Bandit movies, but he also had a number of novelty hits like this one -- the best example is his famous "She Got The Goldmine (I Got The Shaft)", which everyone ought to hear once. (I also urge you to check LimeWire for his theme from the 1976 Burt Reynolds film "Gator", if only to hear the immortal line "Everything's okie-dokie in the Okeefenokee.") Alongside Tony Joe White, Jerry Reed is probably one of country's most purely entertaining figures, and he deserves a bit more attention. Anyway.

WASHINGTON STATE is of course the home of grunge rock, Starbucks, and Microsoft, among others; but for me, I will never think of the Pacific Northwest as anything other than the land of BILL NYE:

Bill Nye the Science Guy (1993-1997) is possibly the greatest accomplishment of educational television, or at least right up there with Sesame Street and The Electric Company. Not since the age of Watch Mr. Wizard had there been so direct and earnest an attempt to bring science to young people by TV; but Bill Nye fused it with a manic, self-conscious, postmodern comedic fury that could only have come out of the 90s Pacific Northwest (the people behind this, including Nye himself, had previously run a local Seattle sketch-comedy show called Almost Live). The result: perfection.

If you feel like wasting an entire afternoon, or possibly day, one kind soul on YouTube has posted a bunch of full-length Bill Nye episodes (get 'em while they're hot, since Disney's probably on the copyright warpath). One thing I urge you to do is go through an clip you've just watched, and listen carefully to the sound effects -- this show was lavished with witty sound production. (I'll never forget the day in seventh grade geography, Elora P.S., our class sitting unsupervised watching a Bill Nye video, when the crazed shop teacher Mr. Rupnow came wandering in and rewound the tape so we could "listen to the sound effects without distraction." It was a magical experience) Also, be sure to sign the petition to Disney to either put the show back on the air, or release it on DVD for the non-educational market; this decade's young people should not be deprived of such genius.

Finally, NEBRASKA for me will always be the land of Alexander Payne movies. Granted, I am only thinking of two -- 1999's Election and 2002's About Schmidt (I will never forgive him for going mainstream and setting Sideways in California), but they're both so impressive and so scrupulous to their Omaha setting. Here's a heartbreaking clip from About Schmidt, with Jack Nicholson playing against type in what should have been a Best Actor performance:

It makes sense to set these movies, which are about the banality and meaninglessness of life, in a place like Nebraska. Flat, empty, generic. And Payne tends to it with such care; think of the Omaha skyline montage at the beginning of About Schmidt, or the constant reappearance of those skeletal electric towers throughout Election. I can't think of many other present-day filmmakers who use manmade landscape like that. If you haven't seen these movies, they're worth your time. (Election, to boot, is hilarious.)

Anyway, to top it off, here's a fun (if rather unfair) mashup of Reese Witherspoon's character from Election with Hillary Clinton:

...I feel kind of bad posting that -- and yet it's so perfect...

I'm going to go take a shower. Enjoy what's left of the weekend, everybody!

The triumphant return of the Sunday Screening

Ha ha! You thought I'd given up, didn't you? Just because the last Sunday Screening was all the way back in November -- well, seven thousand pages of academic writing later, I'm back and ready again to subject you all to mind-numbingly obscure bits of YouTube irrelevancy. Like the above -- do you realize what an enormous selection of TV signon/signoff clips YouTube has? Unbelievable. Every era, every location. I considered devoting an entire post to them, but then I decided I should at least make an effort to retain my tiny, precious audience... if you're interested, though, start at these nuggets of pure gold and work your way out from there. Nothing captures the aesthetic of a given time and place quite so perfectly, I contend, as its incidental TV graphics.

But what I've been fixated on lately is this fascinating footage of Mitt Romney arguing with a reporter. Look:

Now, leaving aside the factual content here (and the press secretary's incredibly douchey reprimand at the end), my question is: WHY would Romney's people put him in front of a rack of office supplies? My God are they trying to make him look like a bland corporate automaton? BALLPOINT PENS, for crying out loud. Not even an aisle of cool office supplies, like printers. No. PENS. You could not ask for anything more banal. The obvious allegory here is The Office--

--which perfectly captures just those mindless, soulless Ward-Cleaver-with-a-low-IQ tendencies that Romney's working so hard to hide. (I wish there was video somewhere of the scene from Season 3 where Michael confronts Dwight in an actual Staples; the aesthetic is just perfect.)

Speaking of The Office, I want to promote this video made last year by the Harvard undergrad Government Department. I'm late to this party (h/t: Dani Rodrik back in December), but it's well worth your time; who knew that Gov had so much deeply rooted anxiety?

...Really that's what The Office, and its derivatives, are about: anxiety. These are programs about people who are unsure of their places in the world, lacking confidence in the structures that are supposed to support them. In the Scranton, Pa., that The Office shows us, life is basically meaningless; Jim Halpert, the "beta male" hero, always gives that Kafkaesque look to the camera that asks -- both hilariously and heartbreakingly -- "What am I doing here?" We haven't seen this kind of ennui creeping into the popular culture since the paranoia films of the 1970s. It's an indicator of a nation, and particularly an economy, in serious trouble.

Mitt Romney's campaign, it seems, does not recognize this. They certainly are not playing the symbological game very well (as vs., for instance, Obama); he's running a nice conventional GOP campaign that will win him a nice conventional 40%. And meanwhile they've got Mike Huckabee, who I'll leave you with, nipping at their heels making just this argument -- don't let anybody tell you America's not a class-conscious society...

Sunday Screening

APROPOS OF NOTHING, here is Ralph Nader in the world's most awkward Sesame Street appearance:

(from Classic Television Showbiz via WFMU)

Do kids still watch Sesame Street today? I feel like we might have been the tail end of that generation, what with all the crap you hear now about SpongeBob and Dora the Explorer and so on and so forth. Ever since Teletubbies, really -- which as we all know promoted the homosexual agenda -- Sesame Street seems to have left the spotlight. It seems slightly outdated now, like The Electric Company--

--just a little bit too genuine and enthusiastic for today's jaded, media-saturated children.

(Or am I even giving it too long of a lifespan? I know I watched Sesame Street religiously, but I had a very anachronistic childhood -- lots of musicals -- which actually might explain a lot about me... anyway.)

If it has lost its cultural impact, that's a shame, because Sesame Street is just so perfect. It's a synthesis of everything we know our society is with everything we want it to be, and all put together in a way that five-year-olds can understand. If the historians of the future are any good, they will look to Sesame Street as one of the critical primary documents of our era. Besides, how awesome is this:

I really think the world would be better off if we did all our learning in a Sesame Street format. Wouldn't you love to end every Harvard lecture with a singalong? ("These are the laws of supply and demand, supply and demand, supply and demand...") With that in mind, I give you this wonderful SCTV skit that John Hawley brought to my attention a while ago: PHILOSOPHY STREET!

"Well, we've got mechanistic materialism... and dialectical materialism!" Have a good night everybody, and enjoy the upcoming week.

THE WINNER, of the CNN/YouTube Democratic Debate...

...Billiam the Snowman.

Seriously, if you didn't see this, you missed one of the great moments in political history. (Not to mention, Dennis Kucinich answered him.)

Sunday Screening

I have to agree with Ryan that the upcoming film adapation of Get Smart looks, and there is no other word for this, awesome.

Of course many of the recent movie adaptations of classic TV have been miserable failures -- see Dukes of Hazzard, Bewitched, Charlie's Angels, etc. -- but I hold out hope in this case for two reasons. One, because unlike most of those other shows that are fondly remembered today, Get Smart sucked. It was terrible. It wasn't witty, it wasn't clever, it wasn't satirical, it wasn't even INTERESTING a lot of the time. I admit that the Cone of Silence bit was funny, but other than that, nothing. Also at times it was surprisingly racist:

(In the same sense, it's hard to watch I Dream of Jeannie nowadays without noticing that it was amazingly, unrepentantly sexist.)

The other reason I expect this movie to be great is that Steve Carell happens to be one of the best comedic talents of our time. His YouTube catalogue is surpisingly thin (I wish Viacom had left up the old Daily Show clips -- his "Produce Pete" segments were irresistible), but here's one gem. THIS was a symbolic turning-point in 21st century comedy, 2003, where the upstart Carell in the space of one scene completely steals Bruce Almighty from its ostensible star, Jim Carrey. And I note with a little disappointment that this was the only worthwhile moment in Bruce Almighty.

I think I speak for all of us when I say: "LOUD NOISES!"

This has been your Sunday Screening.

Stature

Victory will not look like the ones our fathers and grandfathers achieved. There will be no surrender ceremony on the deck of a battleship.

--George W. Bush, yesterday, address to the nation

In his televised address about Iraq, the president used the book-lined backdrop of the library in the White House to evoke the midwar FDR... Problem was, Bush had long since forfeited the political credibility that FDR was able to maintain through his presidency. Roosevelt made huge mistakes, and the rules of the times allowed him to hold back much information. But the public believed him in his role as a leader of the Western World. Luckily for Roosevelt, he was on the radio for the most part.

--Howard Fineman, Newsweek

Instead of the traditional "Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States," the ever-conversational [Katie] Couric said, "Here he is, the president of the United States." At least she didn't say "Here he is, folks . . . ."

--Tom Shales, Washington Post

"Here he is," indeed.

(h/t Corrente)