Inside Television 578
Publication date: 11-11-11
By: Hubert O’Hearn
Just to classy up the joint a bit, let’s start with a limerick tweeted in three parts by Salman Rushdie:
The marriage of poor Kim Kardashian
Was krushed like a kar in a krashian
Her Kris kried, ‘Not fair! Why kan’t I keep my share?’
But Kardashian fell klean outa fashian.
So it’s not just me who found the whole Kardashian-Humphries marriage and divorce an outrageous scam that even made the zoned-out public scream (or at least mutter) in outrage at having been taken for a public relations ride; one of the most brilliant men in modern literature commented on it. It’s always nice to know that one’s opinions are shared by the right sort of circles. Enough said about that however.
I’m reading a wonderful book just now. If you’re looking for the perfect Christmas gift for a movie buff, do pick up ‘Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark.’ Kael was the lead movie critic for The New Yorker for 20 years, she could write with savage wit laced with passion and as much vulgarity as she could sneak past editor William Shawn. Here’s a bit of her writing, about the movies of the 1930s:
“(The best comedies of the time) suggested an element of lunacy and confusion in the world; the heroes and heroines rolled with the punches and laughed at disasters. Love became slightly surreal; it became stylized - lovers talked back to each other, and fast. Comedy became the new romance, and trading wisecracks was the new courtship rite. The cheerful, washed-out heroes and heroines had abandoned sanity; they were a little crazy, and that’s what they liked in each other. They were like the wisecracking soldiers in service comedies: if you were swapping quips, you were alive - you hadn’t gone under.”
Needless (albeit depressing) to say, they don’t write ‘em like that any more; either reviews or movies themselves. The grounding of comedy in reality while expressing it in words that the audience wishes it was smart enough to think of itself is a lost art. Damn it. This is why I think I rather shocked a friend of mine when we were chatting a week or two ago when I came out with the statement, ‘I don’t like movies.’
Good seats still available for '72 Skidoo - The Kim Kardashian Story' |
Of course it’s shocking. Nobody ever says they don’t like movies. It’s the cultural equivalent of telling Mom her apple pie is crap, or feeding Mickey Mouse strychnine poisoned cheese. I’m starting to suspect I’m not alone in this. Box office receipts are still just fine, so there is no evidence in those numbers. So long as 16 year old boys need a dark space in which to glom a hand on a 15 year old breast there will always be vibrant movie theatres. No, I’m reading between the lines of a little news story that emerged from movie critic Roger Ebert’s blog on Sunday.
At the Movies will be canceled at the end of this calendar year unless someone agrees to fund it. Ebert and his wife Chazz have been paying for its production out of pocket and television doesn’t come cheap - although I can’t imagine a cheaper show to produce than two people in chairs watching and discussing clips provided free by the studios. What does that tell you? Sponsors with their massive research departments are being told that people in the key demographics don’t care enough about movies to want to watch a show about them, even though At the Movies is still one of the highest-rated shows on PBS.
You need to learn to read tea leaves in this business and the signs for the movie industry are not good. Now if someone made a smart comedy maybe …
Be seeing you.
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