3 posts tagged “show”
Just got finished editing up episode 3 of the CCLaP Podcast, which will be getting posted to the official site tomorrow morning; so like always, I thought I'd post a sneak preview of it here as well, for any VOX readers who are checking in over the weekend. This episode is four minutes long and is a video report from the latest Dollar Store Show at Chicago nightclub The Hideout; run by "Time Out: Chicago" Books editor Jonathan Messinger (who is also one of the founders of Featherproof Books), each month Jonathan asks a couple of people from the city's small-press community to write and perform a brand-new story, based on a piece of merchandise from a dollar store that Jonathan had given to them a month previous. Enjoy!
Links to the projects and people mentioned in this episode:
Jonathan Messinger
The Dollar Store Show
The Hideout
Featherproof Books
Time Out: Chicago | Books
The Printers Ball
THE2NDHAND
Uptown Writers Space
Okay, I admit it -- I watched all 23 episodes of freshman NBC show Heroes this year, despite it being a pretty damn stupid show. How stupid?
"Hi. I'm evil. How can you tell? I wear horn-rimmed glasses!"
"Hi. I'm a hot woman who's also a serial killer. Because dudes love hot women who are also serial killers!"
"Hi! I am non-threatening Asian stereotype! My voice high and squeaky to not upset American rednecks!"
Yeah, pretty fucking stupid a lot of the time, is what I'm trying to get at. That said, though, the show does have some things going for it, which is why I ended up watching the entire season...
--The pacing of the plot is amazing -- easily one of the fastest-moving action shows in the history of television.
--Not to mention, they were able to create enough plot to keep the show moving that fast in the first place, something that would probably give the producers of "Lost" an apoplectic attack.
--They hired actual well-known comic-book artists to create all the cartoony visuals associated with the show. Even better, they worked an interesting element into the plot that explains why several different artists were all painting the same scenes over the course of the season. (See, the cartoons are actually visual interpretations of futurist visions; and over the course of the season, three different characters ended up with the ability to foresee the future, each of whom made their own paintings of upcoming events that were slightly different than the others'.)
--They actually finished season 1's storyline by the end of the final episode, something else it wouldn't hurt the producers of "Lost" to pay attention to. And man, it's hard to beat that teaser for season 2 they added to the end of the finale, too.
So anyway, my congratulations to the cast and crew of "Heroes," for actually making it to the end of the season without getting canceled; if I've got my numbers correct, in fact, this makes the show the very first one to last an entire season, out of the 12 or so "We want a weirdo nerdy hit like 'Lost' too" shows that the American networks have put on the air over the last couple of years. Now, will you please hire some better fucking writers over the summer?!
By the way, I caught an episode of "Drive" last night, the new high-concept action show on FOX that is replacing "Prison Break" over the summer. And I haven't said this about a television show in a long time, because it hasn't been true in a long time -- but "Drive" is one of those shows that is just so goddamn ridiculous and over the top, it spins around and ironically becomes a sincerely huge delight.
See, it's about this group of random everyday schmucks who have all been forced to participate in this illegal cross-country road race, by having various family members kidnapped or framed for crimes they didn't commit, all of it done by this shadowy organization for reasons we don't know yet. And that, frankly, is a pretty ridiculous concept to begin with; but then the producers pack the show with all these scenes that make absolutely no dramatic or rational sense whatsoever, but did cost a lot of money and look all fuckin' cool when you're watching them.
Like, take this extended riff from last night's episode, where one of the characters thought he had been kidnapped by a rogue cop, who had mistakenly identified him as a cop-killer from Nebraska from a decade ago, and who had him locked in an interrogation room and kept beating him all hour long. That's not my point; turns out the entire thing was a ruse, orchestrated by The Shadowy Organization as a way to get this guy more motivated, and that the fake interrogation room was actually inside this warehouse with the guy's car right next to it. But when the time came to reveal all this, did they just open the door of the interrogation room and tell him? Of course not, idiot! First the fake cop had to give some corny line of dialogue, and then he picked up his chair and hurled it through the room's one-way mirror, revealing the guy's just-washed car gleaming under the lights of a dozen man-sized Klieg lamps set up around it in this giant empty warehouse, with of course corporate hard rock blasting in the background the entire time.
Dude, that is FUCKING EXTREME! But seriously, why go to all that trouble and spend all that money, just to briefly impress someone they've already kidnapped in the first place, and who is completely under their control? The show is full of moments like these -- like the end of that episode, for another example, where the finish line for that leg turned out to be this abandoned drive-in theatre in rural Georgia, which The Shadowy Organization had completely retrofitted with a new screen, projector and speakers, in order to give all the drivers the info on the next leg of the race. And again, you find yourself asking why -- fucking why are they going to all this trouble to impress a bunch of people they've kidnapped? And the answer of course is that they aren't -- they did it instead because it's an easy way to blow half a million dollars and ensure that a three-minute clip of it online will get linked to a million times at MySpace.
Now, it's different when a crew are aware of how god-awful their show might be, and sorta wink with one eye the entire length of the episode; that's not nearly as fun, and is why I claim that a show like this hasn't been on TV in years. It's obvious, though, that the producers of "Drive" suffer no such reality; that they sincerely see themselves as a bunch of maverick creative fuckin' geniuses, like another "Lost" staff or the like. And that, frankly, is what makes it such a delight; is that when they're making these complete and utter leaps in logic a dozen times each episode, they think they're actually making sense and are clever, which then pushes them so completely over the top and into such absurdist territory that you can't help but to be fascinated and impressed.
So yeah, I'm completely ashamed of myself, but I'll probably end up watching at least a couple of more episodes of "Drive," and maybe even the entire summer season. It's been a long time since I legitimately enjoyed a fucking awful television show; maybe I'll finally do so again this year.
UPDATE: You know what would make a great black comedy, though? A show about The Shadowy Organization's construction crew, and all the ridiculous lengths they have to go through for these three-minute experiences. Like take the scene I mentioned above, at the end of the episode; to actually pull that off, their crew would need to locate an abandoned drive-in theatre in the middle of nowhere that hasn't gotten torn down yet, buy it, retrofit it with new speakers, projector and screen, and do it all without attracting any attention from the nearby small-town communities, all to convey three minutes' worth of information that frankly could be much more easily communicated via email. ("You're driving to Oregon next. No, we're not really evil, but we can't explain it to you yet. Please forward this to your friends!") I'd love to see a half-hour comedy about the people in charge of pulling these things off; you know, a workplace comedy, like an even more surreal version of "The Office" or "The IT Crowd." Maybe the BBC could pull it off.
