Emuling TV and movies…

Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time working on things: working on my ghost story, working on camp stuff, testing students, and marking essays. So after days full of these things, I feel like watching some shorter things than movies. Let alone Bollywood movies, even standard Hollywood or Korean movies are long for me at 2 hours.

Of course, I’ve watched a few films lately; notably, the Bollywood movie Devdas, starring Shah Rukh Khan, Aishwarya Rai, and Madhuri Dixit—a great movie, though it’s really, really long, and quite miserable at the end. Why do true lovers sometimes fail so miserably? Is this kind of story a warning against believing too much in love when the world does not always cooperate with love? I don’t know. I don’t know why the singing and dancing in Indian movies doesn’t bug the hell out of me like it does with Western musicals—maybe it’s because the dancing often has more to do with the story and even the nature of the characters, or so it seems to me—but I liked this movie, and I’m glad it was on one of the DVDs Ritu recommended to me. I also downloaded and watched the Japanese anime Oh My Goddess!, which was not a brilliant movie but it was fun enough as a diversion… I can’t say I’m crazy about Japanese animation, but I’m checking it out anyway, these days. Perhaps the darker series, like Hellsing, might be more my style, we’ll see.

The thing is, as I’ve mentioned, I don’t usually feel up to such long diversions. So I’ve been downloading and watching some TV shows. I haven’t managed to (or tried to) download my regular older TV shows, 24 and Six Feet Under, though I do intend to get back into those series at some point. I have been trying out new shows, or old shows I’ve not seen in a while, instead. Some of the highlights have been, with links to a portal where you, too, can download them using Emule:

• Gareth Marenghi’s Darkplace, which is demented. It’s kind of a fake 80s TV-horror program that, fictionally, has been dug up and released for the present day. It uses all the bad production you can imagine to create something that is really quite funny, and as a bonus there are interviews with the main “actors”. Really good BBC spooofery.
• Red Dwarf, another funny BBC show that is now quite old. I used to catch the odd episode on American PBS but never got to see all the episodes in sequence. I’m trying to watch them in order now. It’s great, great great stuff.
• House, a show that Marvin mentioned on his blog. A misanthropic diagnostician working at a hospital. Interesting medico-sleuthing aside, the characters have some sharpness to them, some depth and so on, at least, there was the potential for that, in the pilot I watched. I plan on seeing more.
• Dead Like Me is a wonderful TV show about, well, what it’s like to get stuck with the job of being a Grim Reaper in the modern world. The best thing about this show is how much development the characters get, and how quirky it is. The last episode I watched had a Grim Reaper, who is technically dead and cannot be harmed seriously, smuggling drugs to make money. A condom of drugs broken in his rectum and while he didn’t die, his sickness was a riot to watch. It’s a great show.