Maybe we’re on TV

Maybe we’re on TV August 28, 2015

• RIP Darryl Dawkins. Dawkins was a basketball player — a professional athlete, yes, but one who always seemed to take delight in the fact that he was playing a game. Dawkins treated playing games as something that was fun, and just watching him was endless fun for the rest of us. His loss, at age 58, makes the world a little less fun — a little bit less like the Planet Lovetron he invited us all to live on.

John Fea wrote a nice remembrance here, ending with a photo of perhaps the most appropriate way of remembering Dawkins. Grab a ball and find an 8-foot rim — or, if necessary, a 6-foot rim — and dunk a few in your best Dawkins style. Invent a new dunk and give it a name — something funktastic. Because it’s fun.

• On the plus side, hoverboards are a real thing! We’re living in the future! On the minus side, that future still involves cops roughing up black people for no good reason.

It seems the sci-fi fantasy aspect of Star Trek wasn’t stuff like Geordi La Forge’s future-tech visor. It was the fact that La Forge was simply able to go about his day without worrying about getting beaten or shot by police.

Trailer for Spotlight. The cast here includes a bunch of people — Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, Stanley Tucci, Liev Schrieber — who have been good in every role I’ve ever seen

Prediction: This’ll be critically acclaimed and get nominated for a ton of awards. And that will form the basis for the counter-attack from Bill Donohue and other such religious right conservatives — Hollywood elites, liberal media, latte-drinking intellectuals, etc. Every award or honor bestowed on the film will be cited as a reason that red-blooded real ‘murkans should ignore the true story at the heart of the movie.

Francine Prose on The Brink: “I don’t know why The Brink hasn’t been more popular — or why none of my friends have watched it, or seem to know it exists.”

TheBrinkHere’s why, I think: People expecting an edgy satire tuned in and found, instead, a mordant farce. That’s not something one encounters much on American television, and its confusing to viewers who tune in expecting satire. Satire cuts — it’s a scalpel, a stiletto, the twisting of the knife. Farce twists — it’s a ratchet, a vise, the torque of the wrench. It’s a different genre with different conventions.

Think of the stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera. Or think of that scene in The Ritz where Rita Moreno and Jack Weston and Jerry Stiller and Treat Williams all wind up … well, just any scene in The Ritz, actually. Then add nuclear weapons and three or four countries with leaders bonkers enough to consider using them. That’s The Brink.

• TV audiences can’t be blamed for having trouble distinguishing between satire and farce. The two genres can overlap or blur into one another in confusing ways, nowadays. Consider, for instance, these comments from Fox News contributor and icon of nepotism Alveda King:

They entice these ladies into their facility knowing that once they get there, it’s a very lucrative experience. … Because they’re going to give her medicines and birth control shots and pills and things that will expose her to breast cancer. Then she’ll go to Susan Komen, because Susan Koman exchanges money with Planned Parenthood, the money goes back and forth between them. And if she gets pregnant, they’re going to give her an abortion and then they’re going to traffic the body parts of the baby. So they make a lot of money.

Satire? Farce? Performance art? Who can tell?

• I don’t closely follow the sausage-making machinery of political campaigns and consultants, so I didn’t really have much of anything to say about the ins and outs of conservative political operative Sam Clovis of Iowa switching teams from the Rick Perry campaign to the Donald Trump campaign.

But then I saw a photo of Sam Clovis. And now I’m just immensely pleased to learn that this is a conservative back-room political wheeler-dealer who so perfectly looks like a conservative back-room political wheeler-dealer. If this Trump gig doesn’t work out for him, I hope he’ll consider moving to Hollywood. Central casting could use a face like that.

 

 


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