My friend John Wendel really ought to have a media blog. He emailed me a link to an article in the New York Times about

Little question: Why does mainstream American TV refuse to run English-language comedy from England? I’m not going to say British comedy is the best in the world, or that no American comedy is good… though, of late, most anything I’ve seen that is funny has come out of Britain, not America. And I really, really have a hard time imagining any

Unlike Tithonius, I am not really into the old Loony Toons. I never enjoyed them that much, rales of the Road Runner aside. Still, I can’t help but be put off by the fact that when Warner Brothers needs to make a few hit shows, it decides to give “a new look” to Bugs Bunny and his friends. I mean, what happened, did everyone creative die in 1972 or something? Really, come on! Does everything have to be a remake, reenvisioning, reimagining… a re-hash? It’s not as if they couldn’t come up with a killer cartoon, with new characters, after …

I’ve watched three movies lately worth mentioning here: 똥개 (“Ddongkae”, which was given the English title “Strayed Doggy”—yes, doggy.) This movie was quite a strange one, chock full of all kinds of acknowledgments of things that you don’t see widely acknowledged in public, like that even a family man and a relatively “good” cop with a conscience can be on the take, or that being a dabang girl is a gateway to be a massage parlor girl (which means being a prostitute). Yet the film isn’t a political one, not really. The politics of it, actually, seems to be “simple …

Last night, I watched a Japanese/Polish-made SFD film directed by Mamoru Oshii called Avalon. A bit dated, the film was made in 2001, but anyway, it was new to me. I don’t know quite what I think of it: it certainly doesn’t live up to anything like The Matrix in terms of SF-action, but then I don’t think it was supposed to be that kind of a film. As some of the commenters on the IMDB message boards have noted, it’s very Tarkovskian, slow and full of empty silences, beautiful mundanities, and a kind of weaving of “mythic” materials with …