Posts by Craig Ranapia
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Muse: TV Review: Night in the Garden of Pain, in reply to Simon Bennett,
And it really isn’t a fantasy show. There are fantasy elements, but it’s quite unlike anything else, I think.
*cough* When a large chunk of your cast are incarnations of Norse Gods (or something) living and rooting round the corner from Cheryl West, of course it bloody is – and you’re in very fine company at that. (Series one of Misfits was a pleasant surprise last year, and what I've seen of series two just keeps getting better.)
Don’t worry, I won’t out you guys. :) Still, many thanks for suggesting a hook for a post next week.
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Hard News: Only what we would expect a…, in reply to Kumara Republic,
If anyone asks Phil Goff where the money’s going to come from, here’s a good start.
I'd much rather he just put up costings that don't have large holes to be filled with handwavium at some unspecified date. You can have a serious argument about the merits of the policy, but the only thing that's even more indefensible than the costings is the way Goff and Cunlffe got away with it.
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OnPoint: Election 2011: GO!, in reply to Danyl Mclauchlan,
Brian Fallow – Granny’s Economics Editor – isn’t impressed with what passes for economic policy from either main party.
And Fallow is exactly right. If I was David Cunliffe, I’d be pissing my pants with glee at getting away with tax policy that’s being paid for with New Zealand’s generous handwavium reserves.
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Muse: TV Review: Night in the Garden of Pain, in reply to David Herkt,
I think that perhaps as New Zealanders we can’t do ‘drama’ because ‘let’s pretend’ doesn’t work for our allegedly practical history.
I suspect James Griffin and Rachel Lang would beg to differ. I've noticed the publicity is straining not to use the f-word (that's fantasy) but I'm cautiously optimistic The Almighty Johnsons (link contains spoilers for the pilot) will turn out more Misfits than Heroes. And, honestly, Outrageous Fortune wasn't exactly kitchen sink social realism.
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Hard News: Only what we would expect a…, in reply to BenWilson,
This is the issue Labour should be jumping on, right now, real hard, and keep hammering it.
God knows that they’ll need the distraction if they keep putting out policies with costings that look like they’ve been done by Mark Hotchin during a long liquid lunch.
No, but making it more expensive doesn't help a business for which electricity is one of their main costs.
So, any party got a policy that they'll scale back the dividend demands from state-owned generation companies? Or is gouging consumers to plump your own bottom line only bad when dirty dirty foreigners and rich pricks do it?
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Muse: TV Review: Night in the Garden of Pain, in reply to Andre Alessi,
Is it possible to parody Go Girls, badly or otherwise?
Well, yes. Go Girls isn't my cup of tea, but as guilty pleasure tosh it does the job with a modicum of style and intelligence. It's good bad television, if that makes any sense.
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Muse: TV Review: Night in the Garden of Pain, in reply to Michael Stevens,
Maybe if they’d got a gay man invloved in the production it would have come across as less po-faced and patronising.
For that utterly naive statement, you will be tied to a chair and forced to watch Sex and the City 2 (which I mentally acronymize as “SCAT TOO”) Clockwork Orange-style. Forever. Having a gay writer-director on that pile of crap didn’t prevent the unedifying spectacle of Carrie and Charlotte’s pet fags getting hitched. I’ll hand off to Salon’s Andrew O-Heihr for the ghaslty details:
Our central foursome, with various partners and offspring in tow, reunite at the beginning of “Sex and the City 2” for the Connecticut wedding of ol’ pals Anthony (Mario Cantone) and Stanford (Willie Garson). As Carrie tells a Bergdorf clerk, “Just when you think your friends are too old to get married, here come the gays!” In staging this long and often mind-boggling wedding sequence as a combination of Broadway musical and teenage-girl ballet fantasia, and dressing his extras in caricatured Fire Island get-ups, King seems to be posing the rhetorical question: Can a gay-wedding scene staged by a gay director still be homophobic and offensive? I think I’m voting for yes, especially since Stanford and Anthony disappear from the movie right after their nuptials and play no role in what happens later. (Spoiler alert! Liza Minnelli dance number Liza Minnelli dance number Liza Minnelli dance number! OMG scary!)
To be fair, SCAT Too is gleefully contemptuous towards straight men, women and the rest of the human race that isn’t lucky enough to be privilege-denying American dudettes. I’m just not so sure that an out gay director proving he can be as big an arsehole as anyone else is much of an advance.
ETA: For that matter, I don't care how much dick Ryan Murphy and Alan Ball suck Coach Beaste (geddit!) on Glee and the nasty treatment of Tara on True Blood is still epic #ladyhatefail.
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Does Yoda dye his ears?
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Muse: Linky Love, in reply to Matthew Littlewood,
Yep, that’s it. What struck me about the US version of the Office is that it didn’t really seem like that bad a place to work in.
True enoiugh. But after the non-troversy over Ricky Gervais at the Golden Globes, here’s another question: How would the delicate petals handle an American Office that was twenty six episodes of relentless, cringe-making humiliation like the original? I’m probably going to get slapped for another ridiculous generalisation, but there’s a reason why shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm, Arrested Development and The Larry Sanders Show are cults in no risk of becoming a major religion.
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Muse: Linky Love, in reply to Gareth Ward,
And with the marketing and hype backing of Puff Daddy I thought it might get big, but I wonder if he doesn’t know what to do with actual bona fide talent.
To be fair, he could have forced her to ditch the tux and go for a more obviously "commercial" sound and image. What I really love about The Arch Android is the kind of fearless "fuck you" to genre boundaries that made Prince at his prime so thrilling. Is every track equally successful? No, but anyone who cites "Princess Leia's cinnamon buns hairstyle", Salvador Dali, Philip K. Dick, Mary Poppins, and Bob Marley's smile as inspirations is never boring.
And, yes, anyone who is going to invoke such an iconic moment as "getting caped" -- and pulling it off -- has serious chops.
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