In recent months, while watching hockey games, I’ve noticed these L’Oreal For Mencommercials featuring Patrick Dempsey:
The target demographic for these commercials is surely wives and girlfriends. The cliche here is the wife sitting beside her husband on the couch, a little bored as she half-watches LePeiter pass to Huckenchuck and go offside. Then she immediately perks up when Doctor McDreamy or whatever his frackin’ nickname is shows up on-screen.
The ad’s subtext is simple: “Buy this for your man, and he’ll be slightly more similar to Patrick Dempsey”. That’s fair enough–ads employ aspirational messages all the time. That doesn’t make the ad or the product line any less ridiculous. L’Oreal for Men? Seriously? This is one wrong-headed brand extension.
On the other hand, this excellent Old Spice commercial seems to intentionally spoof the Dempsey ads. And I think, given its mix of hunk and humour, it’s going to reach both people on the couch:
“If he stopped using lady-scented body wash, he could smell like he’s me.” Bonus points for the subtle reference to the SNL digital short, “I’m on a Boat” (rated PG for cuss words).
I’m an occasional listener to Stephen Fry’s excellent podcasts, and reader of his blog. I’ve always admired Fry. He’s a Renaissance man–a consummate orator, a great essayist, a skilled actor and he’s got one of the largest functional vocabularies I’ve ever heard. He brings a joyful curiosity and wit to every project on which he works.
One recent project is Stephen Fry in America. It’s a six-part BBC series in which Fry visits every one of the US’s fifty states. All six parts were scheduled in one day over the Christmas break, and I recorded them all. They’re quite enjoyable–it’s always entertaining to see the familiar through a foreigner’s eyes. I’m also learning the odd fact about US geography and history. They’re lightweight fare, but they’re beautifully shot and Fry makes a charismatic host. Here’s a promo:
In writing this post, I was reminded of two other projects involving Stephen Fry. He hosts a very British game show called QI, which stands for ‘Quite Interesting’. To call it a game show is a bit generous, as it’s really just a framework for five funny people to be funny. Here’s an example:
Fry was also involved in Last Chance to See, following in the footsteps of Douglas Adams’s best book of the same name. He accompanies Mark Carwardine, Douglas’s co-author, to re-visit six critically endangered species around the globe. My favourite, by far, is the kakapo. Here’s an enormously funny moment from Fry and Carwardine’s encounter with one of these very odd birds:
In the past, I’ve complained about a film and television trope that I call “can you clean that up a little?” It’s the moment in crime dramas and thrillers when, back at the lab, some nerdy technician spouts technical gobbledygook and uses some fancy version of Photoshop to improbably improve the quality of some grainy security footage.
Today Andy pointed out this great montage of these moments, created by this person:
Over the past week, I’ve been contacted about three new (or at least newish) web series. Vancouverites will recognize a bunch of locations in these first two. The first is a comedy called The Jim–here’s a teaser (rated PG for strong language):
The second is The Vetala, and seems to be a bit X-Files-esque. Aesthetically, this feels heavily influenced by Battlestar Galactica. Here’s the first episode:
The third is the slickest of the three, kind of a sci-fi show featuring a girl and her wolf entitled Riese. Again, the first episode–note the great costuming:
“Hung” is a new TV series from HBO starring Thomas Jane and Jane Adams. Thomas Jane stars as Ray Drecker, a down-on-his-luck, divorced Phys Ed teacher. As his ex-wife (played capably by Anne Heche) points out in a flashback scene, his one admirable attribute is that he’s well-endowed.
In an attempt to raise some money (to fix his house, to reclaim his children from his ex), he becomes a gigolo. Jane Adams plays Tanya, a sweaty, poor poet who becomes his pimp.
Fans of “Weeds” will recognize this premise: “Single parent in dire financial straits turns to socially unacceptable work and hilarity ensues”. Except that, in the case of “Hung”, hilarity definitely does not ensue. Its fatal flaw is that it’s simply not very funny. I watched the first episode of the newest season of “Weeds” last night, and there were more laughs in that show than four episodes of “Hung”. The writing isn’t particularly witty, and Thomas Jane doesn’t seem to be much of a comic actor.
The writing, I think, is at the core of the show’s problems. The characters are all caricatures: Jane plays a buffoon, Adams plays a hippy artist, Heche is the neurotic soccer man. “Weeds”, on the other hand, is populated with these nuanced, complex characters, and that’s often where the comedy stems from.
The writers also ask us to sympathize with Drecker, Jane’s character. This is tricky, because the protagonist is a jerk. Also, on a minor technical note, he’s depicted as pretty dimwitted. Yet in the second episode he uses the term ‘emasculated’ without missing a beat. This rang false to me.
There seems to be a fundamental law of television, that 80% of all potential greatness is locked inside 20% of the shows. That makes choosing what to watch easier, I suppose.
The other day, I watched two-part finale to season eight of Scrubs, cleverly entitled “My Finale, Part 1 and 2″. I assumed–and the episodes did nothing to dissuade me–that these were also the series finale. The final show was packed with the usual goodbyes and sentimentality that you expect from such last episodes. You can watch the last few minutes on YouTube.
As it turns out, there will apparently be another season of the quirky medical show. Wikipedia offers this explanation:
On June 19, 2009, it was announced that the reformatted ninth season of Scrubs would “shift from the hospital to the classroom and make med-school professors of John C. McGinley’s Dr. Cox and Donald Faison’s Turk.” According to Lawrence, the ninth season will “be a lot like Paper Chase as a comedy,” with Cox’s and Turk’s students occasionally rotating through the halls of Sacred Heart and encountering former series regulars.
The other leads, Zack Braff and Sarah Chalke, have apparently signed on for guest appearances in six episodes each.
Regardless, Scrubs got me thinking about other final episodes that I remember. There actually aren’t that many:
I remember the final episode of M*A*S*H as a particular sobfest. “Goodbye, Farewell and Amen”, as it happens, is still the most watched American television broadcast in history.
Cheers had a really classy ending, with Sam adjusting a photo of Geronimo near the piano, which has been on the set since Coach’s (Nicholas Colasanto) death.
I only vaguely recall the final episode of Buffy, which, in truth, felt a little rushed and (typically, I’d say) quite unsentimental.
In talking about TV finales with others, I remembered that the cast of Family Tiestook a curtain call at the end of their final episode, which was a nice touch.
Last night we were watching an episode of “Scrubs”. It featured an anime-eyed, ukelele playing actress who I vaguely recognized. Here she is in a romantic duet with the hapless, sweaty lawyer Ted:
Apart from being an actress, I remembered that she was in a musical comedy duo. I couldn’t remember their name, but I did recall the title of one of their songs: “Pregnant Women Are Smug”. Depending upon your state of mind, that video may either anger or amuse you. Proceed at your own risk.
So I started to google “pregnant women are”, and was amused by the possible results that Google suggested:
What an odd set of suggestions, eh? The results raised a related question in my mind: why would somebody phrase their search as “pregnant women are hot” or “pregnant women are moody”? It seems way more natural to search for “hot pregnant women” or “why are pregnant women moody?”
It’s not often I feature cat fights from Spanish (or maybe Latin American?) soap operas on this site, but Richard sent this along and I couldn’t resist. You have to watch until about the 1:10 mark, when there’s a rather unexpected turn of events.
I think all that hair helps to cover up the lousy fight choreography. Hey, Spanish speakers, what are they fighting about? A man, no doubt.
Julie and I recently finished watching season four of “How I Met Your Mother”. It’s obviously just “Friends” 2.0, but I’ve grown to enjoy it. I like how the show gets very post-modern with plots and time lines. Plus, of course, Neil Patrick Harris is kind of a revelation.
This season both of the female leads, Alyson Hannigan and Cobie Smulders, were pregnant. In the second half of the season, I enjoyed watching the meta-show of “Conceal the Pregnancies”. The show’s producers devised all sorts of creative strategies to hide the actresses’ growing bumps.
You’ve got the clothing options, which the show deployed early on. There’s the big flowy scarf, the loose-fitting shirt and the big dressing gown:
Several variations of the big bag:
The rather unconvincing newspaper:
The cereal box:
Finally, if you’re looking for something really formidable, just have the actor stand behind something solid, like a cooler:
Or, she can carry something and stand behind something:
In what I’d imagine to be a nod to this issue, both actress’s characters make a joke about being pregnant in the final episodes of this season. I’m not sure what the thesis would be, but there’s surely a Women’s Studies essay in the metaphor of hiding these women’s pregnancies. What’s the opposite of ‘emasculated’?
We’ve been involved with some interesting client projects lately, and I’ve been meaning to share them:
ActiveState recently announced a public beta for Workspace (not to be confused with the excellent, local co-working space), something we’re calling ‘instant infrastructure for managing software development projects’. It’s a set of hosted, customized tools–source control, project management, issue tracking, wikis, blogs, and so forth–aimed at small teams and individual developers. In addition to the collective wisdom and experience that ActiveState brings to the project, Workspace promises to spare developers the pain of manual setup, integration and the apparent endless tweaking associated with managing tools of this sort.
Our longtime client Nitobi announced a couple of exciting bits of news this week: they sold their session recording tool RobotReplay and became shareholders in BookRiff. Nitobi built BookRiff (we’ve done some work with them as well), and it looks pretty sweet. They haven’t gone public with their tool yet, but we’re psyched about it.
In other Capulet news, our first social media marketing bootcamps in Victoria and Vancouver sold out. So we’ve added second sessions for both Vancouver (June 23 - just one spot left) and Victoria (June 4).
