Popular Media

« Older Entries | Newer Entries »

TV Commercial Withdrawal: Why I’m A Trunk Monkey Junky

[ 3 Comments ]Posted on January 7, 2010 by admin in Popular Media

Thursday, January 7th, 2010

It’s odd that the only thing I miss since cancelling my cable service is the commercials, and now I can’t find any good ones. Have a fave you’d care to share?


This spot for Cullman Liquidation
is hands-down a fave for me

With the annual hubbub about the Superbowl ad spots starting to simmer (here are last year’s top 10), I’m reminded of the only thing I miss about television since shutting off my cable service back in 2003: the commercials. It’s more than a little odd that I miss them; when I was exposed to them on a regular basis, I had two PTSD-like reflexes to their sudden appearance: 1.) Hit the mute button and pointedly avoid looking at them, or 2.) Play a game of “distill the message”, in which my friends and I would take a beer commercial for instance, and distill it down to the message it was conveying. An example being “although you’re male and act like an idiot, chicks will dig you if you drink our beer“. So in my pining for a commercial to watch, I figured that with the advent of YouTube and the fact that even grandma has a blog these days, it would be easy to find a roundup of the best commercials of the last few years. How wrong I was. Try searching yourself; this tends to be a heavily-targeted keyword, so you’ll keep encountering things like this old European condom commercial, and the title on the clip is almost always something like “FUNNIEST COMMERCIAL EV-AR”. There’s also the added weird “meta” effect of TV programs that are actually devoted to filling the spaces between the commercials with commercials. So although I found some interesting clips to share, I realized I’ll have to come back with a “Part II” after doing a more themed, focused search. Something like the offensive car ads we rounded up last year. Below is a quick roundup of some of the quirkier things I found; feel free to share any goodies of your own. Read the rest of this entry »

2010 The Year Is Bound To Be Better Than 2010 The Movie

[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 1, 2010 by admin in Popular Media

Friday, January 1st, 2010

But don’t let that stop you from watching it as you nurse your hangover on the sofa.

Since one of America’s traditional New Year’s Day pastimes is vegetating on the sofa and watching really bad movies as you recover from a brutal night of partying, this New Year, consider tracking down a copy of 2010, the movie. Sure, you can watch the world end in 2012 in 2010 (March 2nd, to be precise), but why not watch a world begin when a movie ends now? Those last few sentences will make total sense if you watch the movie. I experienced a profound disappointment when 2001 rolled around, and we weren’t using e-ink to read magazines or riding Pan Am shuttles to an orbiting Hilton as depicted in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but I’ve since adjusted. But I was a little curious as to how the movie 2010 had depicted the future. To their credit, they got a couple of things right (mostly by avoiding showing many everyday devices) but in other ways they were way off. Yes, Jupiter’s moon Europa may have life, and governments still lie and cheat and manipulate scientists’ gullibility, but in the film they still have the US and Russia in a cold war, teetering on the edge of nuclear conflict because of a blockade on Honduras. Who’d have guessed that just five years after the movie was made, the Berlin Wall would come down, and an era of Glasnost would begin? The everyday technology they *did show in the film was a little hit or miss in terms of accuracy. The laptop Roy Scheider’s character uses on the beach isn’t too far off, but the only desktop monitors in the film look sort of like bulky 70′s TV’s that have been restyled by Apple (which is, in fact, probably what they are). The arrival of a thinking, talking computer is still years away in real life (except our artificial intelligence program here on Dissociated Press) so it was perhaps appropriate that the one in the film is the size of an antique china buffet. And it was a little preposterous that the scientist in the movie rebooted the original HAL 9000 in minutes; I’ve spent longer waiting for XP to boot after a crash! All in all, the film is a mixed bag, with some decent acting, scripting, and shooting (although the cinematography looks almost childish in comparison to Kubrick’s 2001) that suffers a bit from 80′s overtones. The counterpart computer to HAL, for instance, is a girl named SAL; scientist Heywood Floyd’s house has dolphins swimming around in indoor pools, and there’s an overall feeling of having borrowed props from the Alien set. But this is just the perfect thing to watch on the sofa with a screaming hangover! Read the rest of this entry »

Best & Worst Of The Best & Worst Of 2009

[ 1 Comment ]Posted on December 21, 2009 by admin in Best Of 2009, Popular Media

Monday, December 21st, 2009

Do we really care what Tim Gunn’s favorite red carpet looks are? Are aporkalypse and Chimerica really buzzwords?

Santa isn’t the only one who’s makin’ a list and checkin’ it twice this time of year. With the end of the year and the end of the decade with no name upon us, every media operation in the western world is making some kind of “Best Of” or “Worst Of” list. One of the only ones I personally care about is Pitchfork Media’s 50 Best Albums of 2009; it helps me sort through the otherwise overwhelming barrage of amazing indy music that floods the market the past few years. Which highlights the problem with these lists: Ideally a list takes a lot of information and simplifies it to make it useful. But in a desperate attempt to capture web traffic, the lists you’re likely to find do just the opposite. Either you’ll find the same list “re-purposed” hundreds of times across the blogscape with titles like “10 Best Celebrity [Insert One: Meltdown, Rehab Story, Nipple Slip, Oops] of 2009″ or major media companies make lists so long that you need a list to sort out the best items on their list – as in the case of Time Magazine’s Top 10 Everything – or lists so contrived that you wonder who it is that really cares about – out of the hundreds and hundreds – which 10 Red Carpet Looks That Tim Gunn loves most. One list that usually manages to avoid these pitfalls is the incredibly comprehensive and well-categorized Fimoculous end-of-year list. I also personally find lists like the NYT end-of-the-year buzzword list fun, though I’m not so sure that the words “aporkalypse” and “Chimerica” hit the streets hard enough to be called “buzzwords”. So if you have any suggestions for best of and worst of lists, please share them with us. Until then I’ll be digging through the wasteland of lists like 10 Coolest Book Titles That Have ‘F***’ In Them (NSFW) or Nine of the Weirdest Restaurant Names in Existence or a good friend of mine’s personal favorite, The 22 Most Sensational Midgets Ever. Thank God someone finally came up with the short list on that one.

3 Weird Holiday Movies To Break Up Your Media Monotony

[ Comments Off ]Posted on December 13, 2009 by admin in Popular Media

Sunday, December 13th, 2009

Santa Claus Conquers the Martians Conquers My Criticism, The Hebrew Hammer Invents The Expl-oye!-tation Film, And The Star Wars Holiday Special Redefines Horror.

Tired of the same old holiday movie fare like “It’s A Wonderful Life”, “A Miracle On 34th Street” and “A Christmas Carol”? Well, beyond the cultish and clever movies like A Christmas Story, The Ref, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Rudolph (which we already touched on here), there’s another entire layer of holiday weirdness waiting for you, and we’re taking a quick look at three… Read the rest of this entry »

Rudolph: The Nightmare Before The Nightmare Before Christmas

[ 4 Comments ]Posted on December 7, 2009 by admin in Popular Media

Monday, December 7th, 2009

Is Hermey The Dentist Gay? Is Yukon Cornelius a bear? Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer is more than a Christmas story, it’s a macabre exploration of congenital deformities, parental shame, ethnic and class-based employment issues, and loneliness.

If you’re old enough, the annual broadcast television airing of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer might reside in a special place in your memory, that dark and macabre place also occupied by The Wizard of Oz, It’s a Wonderful Life, or the creepy skating scene music and Linus’ condescending biblical monologue in A Charlie Brown Christmas. If you grew up in that particular era, you felt emotionally barren somehow if you missed these broadcasts, and your psyche was perhaps mildly damaged for life if you didn’t. Which is why I love watching them as an adult. With hindsight, they’re all somehow more unsettling than a Hitchcock film. Especially Rudolph. Viewed as an adult, you can see how Tim Burton must have been influenced by this stuff, it’s creepy like BeetleJuice or The Nightmare Before Christmas without even trying to be. The Rankin Bass production seems clever and cheerful on the surface, but when you actually deconstruct it a little, it’s a surreal and disturbing tale of a child with a congenital deformity whose parents cower in shame, a child who can only find solace by running away from it all with a possibly gay, misfit elf that’s struggling with ethnic and class-based employment issues. I’m not exagerrating; it’s right there in the story. The shame about Rudolph’s nose is obvious, but the other parts are a little more subtle. Hermey the elf just wants to be a dentist, but no. His oppressive boss informs him in no uncertain terms that his race is incapable of bettering themselves, by screaming “Now listen you, you’re an elf, and elves make toys. Now get to work!” And is Hermey the Dentist gay? Well, speech patterns aside, there IS the scene where Rudolph, Yukon Cornelius, and Hermey sleep together under a pink blanket. For all we know, maybe Yukon is a bear. And we’ll just skip the whole bestiality angle. Then there’s the Island of Misfit Toys. Way before the tortured and misshapen toys in Toy Story, we had the deeper psychological torture of toys trapped in their own little Guantanamo, lorded over by a C.S. Lewisian lion. They had to get some kind of Christianity in there, you know; everything else in this supposed Christmas story is centered on animism, elfin magic, and nordic folklore. All in all, the Rudolph story’s journey from a Montgomery Ward ad campaign in the 30′s to its billion-plus viewership over time is quite remarkable. I’ll probably watch it one more time before the holidays are over. Have any stories of holiday movies that have scarred your psyche for life? Feel free to share. Read the rest of this entry »

« Older Entries | Newer Entries »