O Holy Night

I’m putting the blog on ice for a bit while I do not cook a turkey for Christmas dinner, and desperately try to get closer to meeting my Goodreads challenge for the year than my current abysmal standing.

Talking Movies proper will return in January with a Top 10 Films of 2021, and previews of 2022′s best and worst films.

The blog has been far more sporadic this year than previously, for various reasons, not least of which was the continuing nightmare for morale of COVID-19. I don’t make any promises that things will improve on the writing front next year, but I do have some hope that normality will ebb back into our lives, and for that reason let us revisit Sorkin Christmas: Part Two.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Roll on Omicron and endemicity.

Miscellaneous Movie Musings: Part XLIII

As the title suggests, so forth.

Lynch After Lynch

A strange thought came to mind the other week as I was listening to the sound of the wind whistling thru tall trees, a favourite sound of David Lynch. Is Lynch, like 1990s Tarantino, a dead-end, or, more accurately, such a singular creative explosion that while he at first might appear liberating and invite people to join him in his explorations he actually leaves a Tunguska-like blast radius around him which nobody else can ever enter. Can you make a film that has surreal elements and escape being called Lynchian? Can you use dream logic or corny dialogue mixed with extreme violence and weird sexuality and not have everyone start writing up their Lynchian comparisons? Can David Lynch even escape his own shadow at this point? I’m not comparing The Nice Guys to the work of David Lynch, but Lynch’s description of how to write a screenplay; hoard ideas like a squirrel collecting acorns, and when you have forty conceits that’s the guts of an eighty minut movie; seems to be oddly applicable to Shane Black’s screenplay.

Any Other Business: Part LXXI

As the title suggests, so forth.

Ladies and gentlemen, to whom it may concern, it’s the Tonight Show

I was recently reading Woody Allen’s Apropos of Nothing and was surprised to find he wrote for Herb Shriner’s TV show. Which I know about purely from a DVD extra showing an episode Orson Welles appeared on that, apart from Welles, had some serious Conan O’Brien vibes – as if America nailed the format in the 1950s and never changed. This started me wondering why nobody ever really attempted that kind of late night comedy talk show here. (Let us not mention Craig Doyle) I mean, besides the obvious – we would run out of guests needed to populate a show every night. Or would we? Suppose you broke apart the Late Late Show, that unwieldy illogical near three hour behemoth, into three shows a week. Put in an opening monologue making fun of the news a la Johnny Carson every night, and then had a guest and a musical slot, maybe some recurring bits, and two long ad breaks. Couldn’t that work in a 50 minute slot?