Gogglebox: UK TV at its … finest?
Here’s an idea…
Choose about a dozen absolutely normal people out there – couples or families, married folks or siblings or best friends – and you don’t bring them into the studio, and you don’t interview them on camera. No. You go to their houses and you install what I assume to be a small, unobtrusive and non-intrusive camera right near their TV. One that it only on a few hours a day, when they’re watching specific programs that you producer-type have chosen for them in that week. Then you take all the footage from all those dozen or more groups, ou stitch the base parts of their comments and reactions to the shows – not reviews, at all, but their experience of watching these shows – and you send it back out to the world in one hour of almost found footage. Think it’s work? It already does. Gogglebox is a huge hit in the UK and has been for years. You’ll need a VPN and a little initiative to grab it here in the States. but it’s not only entertaining; it offers some real insight into what Normal People the world round think of ‘us’ these days. And it’s not pretty…
Kennie JD: One of the Best Things About YouTube
YouTube has become too huge to truly comprehend, and most of the ‘tubers that built their base from YT have either moved on, retreated, or sunk into scandal. But once in a while you stumble overcome with long-form content that is charming and insightful about its unabashed affection for crap — bad movies, reality TV, straight-to-streaming disasters. So what’s not to love about Kennie J.D.
Kennie’s in her late twenties – just had a birthday, in fact — Happy Birthday, Kennie JD! — and she’s wry and funny and extremely smart. She started by doing, of all things, make-up tutorials with commentary – an interesting choice for a good-sized color from Detroit. But they caught on. And she was just getting started. Kennie’s a songwriter and musician as well – you can hear her work on YouTube, and on Spotify – but I caught up after all that was well underway — more than a year ago through just one of her channels, her Saturday show, Bad Movies and a Beat, where she watches a really awful movie – the kinds I love the most, of course – and then makes a ten or twenty or even thirty-minute video about it, laughin’ and swearin’ and carryin’ on through a blow-by-blow recap and analysis – and surprising, sophisticated and thoughtful analyses. It’s enough to make you want to come back every week. Hey, her take on Saltburn alone was worth looking at, and she’s in there pitching almost every Saturday.
These days she has a lot of channels and she’d doing a lot of stuff In fact she’s co-hosting a new entertainment interview podcast as well, Connect the Dots, with music executive Shawn Pecas Costner. Anyway: the easiest way to learn about her is just to search out her channel on YouTube – that’s Kennie with an IE, and J.D. as in Jane Darcy – no, that’s not her name, I have no idea what her name is. If you like bold, brassy, big laughers with something to say and almost no filter at all, you’ll enjoy her, in at least one – or more! — of her many incarnations.. Kennie J.D. In fact, it bein’ Friday and all, she’ll probably have something new up on her feed tomorrow, so .. .check it out.
This Wretched Valley: survival horror with great promise … and something missing
I just finished Jenny Kiefer’s This Wretched Valley, by first-time novelist Jenny Kiefer … and I almost liked it. But there was something missing… and I wonder if anyone else felt it, too.
You remember the podcast, Talking Scared, that I reviewed a while back? They had Jennie Kiefer on as a guest recently, and I was really intrigued by her story – and her, she’s smart and worked hard to get this right. But I was especially interested because This Wretched Valley is a novel of ‘survival horror,’ which is a kind of subgenre of horror in general: when people get caught in a horrible ‘natural’ disaster, where some horrific element is introduced, or maybe simply madness, and evil – supernatural or psychotic – intervene. Dan Simmons’ The Terror, based on the historical event of two sailing ships frozen in the ice during a really stupid attempt at finding Northwest Passage, and Alma Katsu’s The Hunger, a horrific re-telling of the Donner Party, Nick Cutter’s The Troop, about a Boy Scout camping trip that goes terribly, cannibalistically wrong, Gregoire Courtois’ The Laws of the Skies, which does horrible things to an entirely different group of young campers, are all great examples. In fact, Stephen King even got into the game with The Girl Who Loves Tom Gordon, about a girl lost in the forest and maybe pursued by a monstrous bear… thing. And probably the best known – and one that was mentioned in the interview with Jenny Kiefer’s interview, is Scott Smith’s The Ruins, which was made into a pretty damn good movie way back in 2008 – about a tumble of ancient, overgrown buildings in the jungle that literally eat up some unsuspecting hikers.
And yeah, This Wretched Valley bears a superficial resemblance to The Ruins. This time it’s a huge shelf of rock in the middle of the Kentucky Wilderness and a small group of rock climbers who want to be the first to conquer it that are… well, consumed? Haunted? Eaten? By a clearly malevolent nature with an especially bloody history.
Now I liked the Ruins. Even Stephen King called it the best horror novel of the new century – though hey, admittedly, the century was only a couple of years old at that point. The gradual desperation and madness of the characters was just … hypnotic – and it’s way more brutal in the printed form than the movie. And I was hoping for much the same in Wretched Valley.
But… it falls a little flat. Kiefer’s writing style is very good, very polished. Her action sequences, her imagery, her attention to detail – this is the kind of thing you look for in a book, right? But as much as I wanted it, the story just never grabbed me, never convinced me, and ultimately the problems I found in the logic of its backstory, the reason for all this horror, just didn’t convince me or affect me.
And I’m really sorry.
So… here’s the puzzle? Why didn’t it work? It’s a good idea. It’s a strong, if small, subgenre that really can grab you by the nads =– all the books I mention managed it. And I went through a similar ‘reality meets the monstrous” in my recent there-book set, The Rain Triptych, where it was creatures coming out of the rain to murder completely normal people in the must awful ways. So I get it. I want it.
So why didn’t it work?
I’m thinking… it was the characters. I think the real horror, the real emotion that survival horror affords you isn’t from – or at least not only from – the imagery or the tension. I think you have to believe in these people, you have to think you know them. Not like them or ‘identify’ with them – stupid term, almost never applicable – but you have to have enough details and background, even if it’s offered only in dribs and drabs, even if it’s as much from dialogue or dreams as it is from info-dump narration – actually, not info-dump narration, thank you. Because if the people that all this horrendous stuf is happening to aren’t real … then all that horrendous stuff doesn’t matter.
And that’s what I couldn’t find in This Wretched Valley. Two of the main characters were supposed to be boyfriend and girlfriend. They were supposed to love each other. But I don’t recall any scenes, especially pre-horror, that really made us feel that connection. One of the characters was absolutely focused, even obsessed, with being a famous climber. An internet influencer. But we never got a sense of why this was so important to her, who drove her to do some of the truly crazy stuff she did. One of the climbers was truly dedicated to his dog, who seemed to fall victim to the wild evil of the woods first… and look, I’m a huge dog person, there’s a Staffordshire doing at my feet right now. But what made this guy so focused on, so obsessed with his dog, to the point that he was more important than the other humans or the money or … well, anything else?
That was the problem for me. The characters that I was supposed to care about – that I had to care about – were shallow little bowls, when what I needed were deep wells… especially if I was going to follow them all the way into the dark woods and see them fall, one by one… and feel terrified WITH them.
So .. what you you guys think? If any of you have read This Wretched Valley or listened to the audiobook –which isn’t bad! — Drop me a note and tell me if it worked for you… and if it didn’t, why you think it didn’t?
Meanwhile, I’ll tell you this much: I really am looking for to what Ljenny Kiefer does next. She’s got real talent, and good stories to tell. But this one … but didn’t work for me
Links to all the versions, as well as a bunch of other survival horror – including mine! — in the show notes. Dive on in. Let me know what you think.
Henry Thomas and the sequel to E.T. (no, really)
Here, come on down the rabbit hole with me. I went looking for some background on Henry Thomas for a review of The Fall of the House of Usher… and found an entirely different little gem: a very short, very special sequel to E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, posing as an Xfinity commercial from four years ago.
Seriously.
Of course you know that Henry Thomas was Elliott in Stephen Spielberg’s sappy and still wonderful classic fantasy film E.T. It’s hard to imagine that it hit theaters for the first time more than forty years ago, and since it was made, Spielberg – quite rightly – has resisted the constant pressure to do a sequel of some kind.
Except … he did Or at least he gave permission to somebody else to do it.
Back in 2020, when the world still made a little sense, the cable company called Xfinity actually made a Chrstimas ad that aired on Sky TV in the UK – I’m not sure it ever played here in America – that is a real, live sequel to the original film, with ET coming back to visit a full-grown Elliot and his own family. And it’s just … wonderful.
Click this link or just search it out on YouTube yourself, but either way: take a look. If you’re anything like me, you’ll weep a couple of happy tears, at how this tiny little short recaptures the movie from 1982 almost perfectly.
Truth be told, it never got made. There’s even a “making of” video on YouTube – here’s the link – and nobody was more surprised than Henry Thomas himself. He was amazed that Spielberg signed off on it – but he did. And Lance Acord – who’s been directing fancy commercials or the big boys for years, and who’s won BAFTA awards and so much more for his work as a cinematographer and director of photography – put together a team of actors and special effects folks who did just about everything right.
E.T. isn’t reduced to a squeegy little CGI character here. He – it – they? — were created by puppeteers, then enhanced with CGI, and it works perfectly. And it doesn’t stop there. The two kids who play Elliot’s children really do look like him. His wife, who doesn’t have a single spoken line, looks enough like Elliott’s own Mom from the original film to be a little spooky. And Henry Thomas as Eliot manages to be Eliot all grown up. He plays the whole new encounter perfectly. And on top of that, the filmmakers worked hard to put as many references from the original film into the short to make it even more fasciating. It just … works.
It’s a little late for Christmas, but if you want to get a tiny slice of the original sense of wonder that ET gave us 40-some years ago, go watch this thing, hiding in a corner of YouTube. I hope it makes you as unreasonably happy as it did me
How to Solve the Problems with the Emmies, Oscars, and All the Awards: Burn Them to the Ground
Let’s face it: all the entertainment awards shows, from the Oscars and the Emmies to the execrable Golden Globes are a terrible mess. Such a mess, in fact, the only decision might be simply to burn them all down and start over.
I’m not usually an extreme kind of guy. To each his own, live and let live. As my own high school English teacher Mr. Bell used to say, over and over, “de gustibus non disputandem est,” and all that … stuff.
But we all have our limits.
A few decades back, I was involved with a battle with a Southern California school district, trying to get services for special needs kids – back in the early days of that movement, in the 90’s – and I got so wrapped up in it, and so notorious on a very small scale, that a reporter from a local paper asked me, “If you could fix the School District tomorrow, all by yourself, what would you do?” and without thinking about it for two seconds, I said, “I would burn it to the ground and sow the earth with salt.”
As I saw it at the time, it was just … too broken to fix. It was badly needed, of course. It was essential. But the District, as it stood, couldn’t be fixed. It had to be reinvented.
That’s where we are with the Oscars and Emmies and the rest. They don’t have to be reformed and tinkered with or revamped – did you know that word is almost 200 years old, and it referred to someone who fixed old clothes? Anyway … No. None of the above.
Erase erase erase and… begin again.
Making movies shouldn’t be a competitive process. The financial pie, the size of the marketplace, is not finite and irreplaceable. This year’s Barbie and Oppenheimer phenomenon is a perfect example. You can like them both, hate one or the other, whatever, but here we have two entirely different movies, with entirely different intents, that happen to come out simultaneously… and they both make literally billions of dollars. There is no ‘pie’. There is only ‘sky.’ One didn’t ‘steal’ the audience from the other. There was no ‘competition.’ And we don’t need to treat it that way –- in fact, it’s demonstrably destructive to treat it that way.
The ancient separation of films or TV shows into categories is equally outdated. Are superhero movies ‘dramas’? In the same category as deep psychological art films, or historical epics, or three-person docudramas? No. … but we find them slammed into the same category every damn year. Apples and oranges. And are there always just five great, say, comedies in a given year? Sometimes there aren’t nearly that many, so stunningly mediocre movies or TV shows get included, and even win, while in other years, undeniably great stuff gets ignored or snubbed because there can only be five spots on the ballot.
This year’s Emmies made that embarrassingly clear. The Bear was great writing, great acting, a great production all the way around… but it won for best comedy? So again: truly exemplary work gets shut out entirely because there just aren’t enough slots. Or maybe money gets slung around. What other reason could there be for Better Call Saul NOT winning anything? Or of any movie, even Barbia, to be nominated for Best Picture but not for Best Director? And it happens over and over. Simply because of the arbitrary, downright silly structure of the awards themselves.
But not all hope is lost. There’s a time-tested, well-respected model for honoring the best of what we put in theatres or on streams – on screen anywhere, in any form – which has everything to do with quality, rather than popularity, politics, or marketing millions.
Have you ever heard of the McArthur Fellowships? Created way back in the early 80s – more than forty years ago now – by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. They give out between 20 and 30 grants every year – notice that, general numbers, depending on who they think deserves them that year. The grants are up to $800,000, paid out over a five-year period, and they’re given to, “ support “creative people, effective institutions, and influential networks building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world.”
What’s more, you can’t nominate people for a MacArthur Fellowship. They find you. The whole nominating process is secret – who the nominators are, their deliberations and their criteria are all anonymous and serve for a limited time. Their job is to go out and find remarkable people who are doing remarkable things and honor them… and then they move on. And they do it again the next year. For all new people.
The list of people that have received McAethur Grants over the years is slightly amazing. Scientists, writers, political activists, artists– hell, even The Amazing Randi got one. The grant gave each of them financial help, of course, but more importantly, it gave them the recognition that they deserved, and we were all the richer for it.
So how about we go that way with the Emmties and Oscars and even the execrable Golden Globes (if, in fact, the damnable Globes are needed at all).. Let’s make the process secret. Let’s not tell anybody who’s under consideration, and let’s pay no attention at all to “For Your Consideration” ads in the trades or internet love-bombs. Just find the people – the directors, and actors, the writers, the technicians – who are doing incredible work … and recognize them. As many as deserve it. Every damn year.
And no more categories. No more “dramas” versus “comedies,” no more “mini-series” versus “variety specials.” And who cares if it was first on Peacock or CBS or in theaters or on Shudder or found in the dark corners of friggin’ YouTube. It doesn’t matter. And you’re not allowed to even mention box office revenue or ratings. The only real question: was it good? Did it change or enrich lives? Will it withstand the test of time? Okay, that last one’s hard, but you get the idea. Did the work matter,, and should everyone know that and appreciate it?
Because if we did it that way, mediocre pablum like The Tourist wouldn’t ever get mentioned, and years of consistently brilliant work like Better Call Saul would get the recognition it deserved.
All we have to do is burn it all down and reinvent it … working from the ground up.
Slightly older but no less fascinating posts
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