NBC may not be King of the Nielsen Ratings just yet, but we know good television when we see it, and the Peacock has returned in full force with a dominating presence that includes the top three shows and five of the top six. HBO, on the other hand, is experiencing the opposite, with the departure of “The Sopranos,” “Deadwood” and “Rome.” Add to that the fact that our list features a whopping 10 new entries — five of which are freshmen — and you’ve got one heck of a Power Rankings shakeup. Much of this has to do with so many shows being on hiatus until next year, but whatever the cause, it’s nice to see some much-needed change to a usually familiar lineup. And, hey, don’t miss the list of our favorite shows which are currently on hiatus (and are therefore ineligible for the Top-20), our farewell to “The Sopranos,” and our stable of Honorable Mentions.
Check out the list here, then come back and let us know how we did…or if we missed any of your favorites!
Okay, maybe that’s a good thing for fans of the show. Fair enough.
What I find most interesting about Fox’s revised January schedule, however, is that they have so much faith in the new Parker Posey sitcom that they’ve buried it on Friday nights and teamed it with re-runs of “‘Til Death.”
Wow. That good, huh?
I didn’t love the pilot, but, still, I was keeping my hopes up because it’s coming from the Paladino camp, a.k.a. the home of “Gilmore Girls.” Now, though, I’m starting to get worried…
It’s taken a long, long time for me to finally realize that I enjoy a good Western, and, frankly, I blame “Star Wars.” When I was a kid, my world was one of people flying around the galaxy in starships and getting involved in laser battles…and when you’re a kid, you just can’t wrap your head around what the hell your dad’s talking about when he tries to explain how what you’re watching is just a hi-tech version of the cowboys he watched when he was a kid.
Yeah, okay, now I get it: my starships were his horses, my laser blasters were his six-shooters, and so on. But back then, I was just, like, “Okay, whatever, dad: that stuff is in black and white, and that means it’s old.” And to his credit, he was never one of those dads who’d try to assure me that if I’d really enjoy Westerns if I’d just sit down and give them a try…which is a little ironic, given that that’s pretty much my stock maneuver when I’m trying to sway people to check out unheralded stuff. But, y’know, if he’d force-fed me the stuff, I would’ve probably walked away never wanting to see another Western ever again, whereas having found them of my own accord at a time when I was actually able to appreciate them, I’m now finding that I really dig them.
Ironically, though, I think I probably would’ve found myself delving into Westerns several years earlier if I’d paid more attention to the stuff my uncle Charlie – my mom’s brother – was talking up when I was a kid. While Charlie and my dad were both of the same generation, with Charlie actually being a few years older, I distinctly remember that my uncle was a big fan of Clint Eastwood’s Westerns as well. These were the so-called “Spaghetti Westerns,” and they sounded vaguely intriguing even back in my youth… possibly just because I always thought my uncle Charlie was really cool, but, even so, the memory has stuck with me for all these years.
My dad, however, had always been a card-carrying member of the John Wayne / Gene Autry style of Western, and in the world of Westerns, that’s the equivalent of…well, I’m not sure in this case who would be Elvis and who would be The Beatles, but whatever the case, my dad’s allegiance to the kinder, gentler, and less graphic Western was clear. Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with this, especially since I’ve yet to see a John Wayne / John Ford collaboration that I didn’t enjoy, but after watching “The Spaghetti West,” an IFC original documentary on the genre, I can only say this:
Man, I have been missing out!
For years, I’d always thought that the term “Spaghetti Western” was intended as a disparaging term, to imply that the films that fell under this banner were nothing more than sub-par foreign rip-offs of the far superior American films which had inspired them. (U.S.A.! U.S.A.!) Gradually, though, I began to learn a little bit more about the genre, saw that these films were starring highly-respected actors like Eastwood, Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson, and Jack Palance, and began to realize that maybe I hadn’t been reading this thing quite right. If you enjoy Westerns but you’ve also spent time in this confused camp (and please say if you have, because I don’t want to believe I’m the only one who thought this), then “The Spaghetti West” will serve as a grand illumination for you.
In addition to exploring the work of the legendary Sergio Leone, who all but invented the genre with “A Fistful of Dollars” (and its subsequent sequels, “For A Few Dollars More” and “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly”), the documentary explores other key figures in the movement, including Sergio Corbucci and Sergio Sollima. That’s right: they’re the Three Sergios, and if you included nothing but their films, you’d still have a pretty damned effective look at the best of the Spaghetti Westerns. Corbucci proved to be a tremendous influence on Quentin Tarantino, if only for a particularly notorious scene in Corbucci’s “Django,” where this poor bastard gets his ear cut off. (When Tarantino saw the film for the first time, I wonder if his fellow theatergoers were distracted by the lightbulb that must’ve immediately appeared above his head.) We get a good exploration of the three ages of the Spaghetti Western: the straight films which originated the genre, the political-themed versions which came about as things began to get too predictable (a.k.a. the Zapata Westerns), and the comedy or parody takes on the genre – like, say, the “Trinity,” starring Terrence Hill – which prove so inevitable when a genre becomes embraced by the mainstream. Leone, it should be noted, hated the third age (he didn’t think they were funny), but he still ended up providing a post-script to the movement as a whole with “My Name Is Nobody,” which teamed Hill with Henry Fonda and served the final Western of Fonda’s career.
Even those who are well versed in the world of Spaghetti Westerns will love this documentary, which interviews many of the major players, all the way up to Eastwood himself, including several of the directors and actors, as well as Leone’s go-to guy for music, Ennio Morricone. Don’t be surprised if you walk away from this thing with a checklist of new movies for your Netflix queue.
Unfortunately, there’s no trailer for “The Spaghetti West” available, so, in lieu of that, I present the trailer for the film that left me the most curious: Sergio Corbucci’s “Django.” Damn, screw renting; I may just have to buy this thing outright…
Post-Script: I called my dad and told him about having just finished watching this documentary, and his exact quote – following a laugh – was, “Well, I don’t think you’ve just gotten finished watching anything that I care much about!” I mentioned to him how I’d remembered how Charlie had been a fan of some of the Spaghetti Westerns, and he backed me up on that, but then he admitted that half the reason that he’d never liked Spaghetti Westerns himself lay in his rail fandom. (Translated, that means he’s a retired railroad man who’s loved trains all his life.) “I’d see the trains in those movies that were so clearly Italian, with their big ol’ cowcatchers, but they’d’ve painted ‘Santa Fe’ on them or whatever, and I’d just be, like, ‘Give me a break.'” He added, though, that the dubbing from Italian into English always drove him up the wall, too. “I don’t think I ever saw one where they didn’t seem to be at least a syllable behind!” I hereby declare these both to be highly valid reasons.
Whether you’re a casual TV viewer or a full-fledged couch potato, you probably know about the WGA writer’s strike that’s currently gripping the entertainment industry. Even at the risk of having both my livelihood and my viewing habits upset, as a writer myself (albeit not of scripts, although I do have a few projects I’ve been working on), I’m unequivocally on the side of the Writer’s Guild members in this battle; I’d prefer that it come to a conclusion sooner than later, of course, but when it comes right down to it, I want it to last until the writers get a decent share of the profits from the material they’ve worked so hard on. Besides, like I don’t have enough TV-DVD sets to hold me over ’til it reaches an agreeable conclusion…?
If you don’t really know what’s going on, there are plenty of places to get the scoop from a journalistic perspective, but I think you’ll get much more insight if you take info straight from the horse’s mouth, i.e. from some of the individuals who are actually doing the striking, and the best place to start is at at Mark Evanier’s blog. I don’t think I’ve seen a more succinct explanation anywhere as to why the striking writers are, well, in the right.
For the latest and greatest (or most depressing) updates on how things are going, check out DeadlineHollywoodDaily.com, where Nikki Finke provides about the best coverage that the ‘net has to offer. For alternate blog coverage, there’s also “Scribe Vibe” (Variety) and The Huffington Post.
I can still remember when I was first introduced to the music of Syd Barrett. I was hanging out with my buddy Bobby Fulford – he and I had been comrades in arms behind the grill at McDonald’s – and it wasn’t long after he’d begun to teach me the wonders of Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians when he said, “Well, if you like Robyn Hitchcock, you ought to love this guy, because he’s where Hitchcock got his sound from.” I’d never really been a big Pink Floyd fan (given how little album rock I’d listened to at the time, I probably didn’t know much more than “Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. 2”), but, still, I was surprised at the sounds I heard when Bob spun me efforts from Barrett’s pair of solo efforts, The Madcap Laughs and Barrett. The first album I ever got by Syd, however, was Opel, a collection of outtakes and alternate versions of songs from those two albums; in theory, it shouldn’t have been the best indoctrination to the man’s work, given its disjointed nature and the rawness of some of the tracks, but all I know is that I fell love with it in a big, big way…like, to the point where I actually had a poster for it adorning the wall of my college dorm room.
Hmmm…now that I think about it, this could be why no-one ever believed me when I told them I’d never done drugs.
In the wake of Syd Barrett’s death in 2006, there proved to be a considerable renaissance of interest in his work, both in the Floyd and as a solo artist, but he’d always maintained a consistent cult following. DVD efforts like “Syd Barrett: Up Close and Personal” and “Syd Barrett: Under Review” tried and failed to serve as definitive efforts of his life, times, and musical legacy; with “The Pink Floyd and Syd Barrett Story,” however, we come pretty darned close…or, at least, far closer than we’ve ever come before. In addition to new interviews with the four other members of Pink Floyd – Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Rick Wright, and Nick Mason – we also receive insight from former Humble Pie drummer Jerry Shirley, who sat behind the kit for Barrett’s solo albums, and we get a tour of Barrett’s old apartment from former roommate Duggie Fields. (Fields has lived there for years; in fact, it’s the very same apartment where the cover shot for The Madcap Laughs was taken.)
Bill Hicks once observed that “the musicians that made all that great music that’s enhanced your lives throughout the years were rrreal fucking high on drugs,” and while the documentary takes us on a trip from Barrett’s birth through his musical career to his final years, it ultimately serves as a cautionary tale of the effects of L.S.D. on the human brain. But since Barrett’s abuse led to him offering up some of the most creative, inspired music of the 1960s, I sometime find myself of mixed emotions when listening to it. Given how much I love his work, does that mean that I’m secretly glad that he fried his brain? That’s a road best not traveled, I suspect.
If you’re a longtime Floyd and Barrett fan, you’ll have heard many of these stories before, but it doesn’t make them any less fascinating, amusing, or depressing, such as when Roger Waters tells the tale of Barrett’s maddening “composition” that changed every time Barrett tried to teach it to him. (Its title: “Have You Got It Yet?”) We about the damage the drugs did on Barrett’s mood and how it affected his actions, about the excruciating appearance the band made on Pat Boone’s show, where Syd just sat there and stared at Pat, and, most importantly, about the day that the other members of Pink Floyd made the group decision to kick Syd out of the band by, uh, just not going to pick him up for their next show. As ever, though, the most disconcerting story comes when the band discusses how, while they were in the midst of recording a song which had been inspired by Syd (“Wish You Were Here”), they turned to discover that the man himself was at the back of the studio; it was the first time any of them had seen him in years, and he’d gained weight and shaved both his head and his eyebrows.
It proved to be the last time most of them ever saw him.
In addition to the documentary proper, there are extended versions of interviews with Waters and Gilmour. In particular, there’s a brilliant moment where Gilmour is discussing “Wish You Were Here,” then looks around the room and mutters something like, “If I could find the guitar, I’d play it for you.” But it’s obvious that he’s not looking terribly hard for it, and you can all but hear the twitch in the interviewer’s voice as he sits there, trying to say outright, “Um…if you want to look for it, I can wait!” (Thankfully, Gilmour does succeed in finding the guitar and playing a bit of the song.) Also included amongst the special features are a trio of highly enjoyable acoustic performances of Barrett compositions from Robyn Hitchcock and Graham Coxon; Hitchcock’s takes on “Dominoes” and “It Is Obvious” only serve to emphasize how much of his sound was borrowed from Syd in the first place, but Coxon’s “Love You” proves downright revelatory, bringing to light how much Blur’s “Parklife” actually sounded like an early Pink Floyd track.
If you’re a fan of Pink Floyd’s album rock standards, like The Wall and Dark Side of the Moon, but you’re not familiar with how the band got their start, you owe it to yourself to get an education via “The Pink Floyd and Syd Barrett Story.” You might not enjoy the music from the Syd Barrett era as much as the stuff that’s gotten played ad nauseum for all these years, but it might surprise you how much the band’s changed since their original songwriter “retired.” (If you do enjoy it, however, you might want to hunt down the extended version of this film, which contains far more extended interviews.)
