It's the middle of the night. You just finished eating some pizza rolls, you're tired of re-reading the damages problem that as it turns out you won't figure out anyway ( and according to real attorney's you would hire an accountant to compute anyway ) and so you flip on the TV to let your mind relax from the mental fetal position it's been in for the past 3 months...and you get this...
Lately, I've been catching snippets between all the studying I was doing of something crazy. I actually saw some good television. Not seriously, and not just the Daily Show or that show on the History Channel I've never been able to catch the beginning of. I mean there are actually people out there who did not pay attention to legal or the focus group and went ahead and took a shot and came up with decent footage.
We all know bad television. It's called American Idol or Lost or goes by one of a hundred other names and you either know what's coming for the next twenty minutes in the first 5 minutes (commercials people, commercials) or you stopped caring when you lose track of who is supposed to be doing what this episode because you didn't watch the last 10 episodes. Good television, or a good movie, makes you care...or at least get interested... in the characters on the screen for the next little bit. And lately, with rare exception, television hasn't been doing that. Or at least that little bit I was watching.
A few weeks ago, on a Saturday at midnight, tired of looking at my Contracts II notes I turned on a new GI Joe movie on the Cartoon Network. I was amazed. It looked good, sounded like they actually had looked up a factoid or two and unlike every other GI Joe cartoon I had ever seen...PEOPLE DIED. Like the shot soldiers and they died. I was stunned. In the old cartoons the bad guys always ejected just in time or ran in that goofy way that said they skimped on the animation. But this was so good I watched it all before going to sleep at like something AM. It was so good I would buy it on DVD. There is unfortunately no way the live action film will be half as good as this.
Which is a whole other argument I have with people who don't want to give away anything, when the reality is people would actually buy the stuff the like...after they've bootlegged it!
And just recently I watched on Comedy Central's Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire, a hilarious comedy in the mold of Brisco County Jr (another classic) set in an age of swords and sorcery. When the villain stabs the wrong sycophant, then snidely turns to his aide and goes "I thought we were going to get names on the backs of these chairs. Let's make than an action item," I nearly fell off my couch. The villain as played by Matt Lucas of Little Britain fame is so casually evil he quickly makes you wonder why you even believe other villains need to employ histrionics. This DVD will be a buy as well.
Oooh, look at me, participating in the free market system all the wrong way. I already got the product and now I want to contribute.
And this was just what I could catch. Is television making a comeback?
Barkeep. A tall glass of orange koolaid and ....well, if they were still MAKING cheez doodles...
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