Robot Chicken: Star Wars
All four chapters of Robot Chicken: Star Wars are online at Adult Swim. For all Star Wars fans, this is essential viewing. You will laugh. You will cry (from laughing so much). And it is better than Cats.
Did you hear me? Essential viewing. Go now. Leave. Go watch it.
Wachovia savings commercial
Hazel directed, Raza co-directed and animated, and Chris shot this entry for a Wachovia TV commercial contest around savings (all classmates of mine from film school). Check it out and vote.
Mad Men
Watching Mad Men gives me an irresistible urge to smoke herbal cigarettes (yes, that's what they're smoking instead of actual cigarettes, something I learned from the recent NYTimes Magazine profile).
The show is packed with smart, if stylized, dialogue. I wonder if ad agency employees watch the show with the same concealed pride with which invesmtent bankers watch American Psycho.
Dream portrait assignment
If I were Annie Leibovitz, or Richard Avedon, or some other photographer to the stars, and I was offered the opportunity to shoot any TV characters, I'd want to photograph Jamie Hector, Gbenga Akinnagbe, and Felicia Pearson, AKA Marlo Stanfield, Chris Partlow, and Snoop from The Wire.
Just three fantastic faces.
R.I.P. Tim Russert
I read the news as I was waiting to board my flight to Chicago today, and it felt as if a beloved uncle had passed away.
The truth tickles
Jon Stewart contemplates Obama's health record.
As Chris Rock said about McCain, "How can you make decisions about the future if you aren't going to be there?"
More Stewart..."Nobody joins the Marines because they think they're going to fight fire monsters."
The media writes that young people get more of their news from The Daily Show than regular news channels, and the note that with a tone of disapproval, but who keeps the politicians more honest than the court jester? The Daily Show is our news outlet of choice because it, more than any other news show, says what we think, and does it with style and humor.
Go Speed Racer
One of the catchier theme songs around...
The first season is up at Hulu, with the rest following closely behind, all 52 or so episodes. I have fond memories of watching this some lazy summer afternoons as a child. At an early age, I had gadget envy, what with the Mach 5 having a bunch of buttons on its steering wheel, each of which would activate some whiz-bang function.
Hulu also now has Versus' weekly cycling recap show Cyclysm Sundays. Now that I'm felled by my torn Achilles tendon, watching or hearing about any sport is like grapefruit juice in my eye, but I do have fond memories of cycling as the sport that brought me back to a mental and physical whole after blowing out my knee back in 1998.
Last, another good new add: the 2008 National Heads-Up Poker Championship. Hulu now has all the full episodes of this year's tournament. This episode has Phil Ivey heads up against Johnny Chan.
Smoking
David Sedaris on smoking in this week's New Yorker.
When I started smoking myself, I realized that a lit cigarette acted as a kind of beacon, drawing in any freeloader who happened to see or smell it. It was like standing on a street corner and jiggling a palmful of quarters. “Spare change?
Recommended
Chris Rock's latest standup tour - Last night I caught Chris Rock's latest standup show with some coworkers. I have to let it soak in over a few weeks (during which I will dutifully, as a male, repeat his jokes to many of my coworkers and friends with a substantially substandard delivery that will deflate 85% of the humor of the routines), but with the performance fresh in my mind I'm convinced it's his best standup performance yet. I was in tears a couple of times. The Presidential election, race relations, differences between men and women, marriage, sex, steroids...he ranged over all the topics I was hoping he'd hit. If he's coming to your town, get yourself a ticket.
There's nothing like seeing good standup live; you can watch the inevitable HBO special, but you won't have the energy from thousands of people laughing to feed off of (the flipside is probably also true, that seeing bad standup live is exponentially more uncomfortable than seeing it on TV).
I last saw him live in Seattle some four years ago, during his Never Scared tour. Of all the standup comedians I've seen live (not a huge list, but includes folks like Dennis Miller, Seinfeld, Russell Peters), Chris Rock is my favorite. I saw Seinfeld twice in a four year span, and he repeated a great deal of his material. Though Rock covers similar themes in each show, I've never heard him use the same joke twice.
***
Lays ketchup flavored potato chips - one of my coworkers brought a bag back from Toronto. Apparently this flavor is a specialty north of the border. In America we love ketchup with our french fries, so why hasn't this flavor of chips caught on here? Whatever the reason, to satiate my fix I may have to resort to bidding on eBay.
***
State of Play - the British just seem to be able to crank out great political thrillers and police procedurals (I'm still a huge fan of Spooks, or MI-5 as they rebrand it for BBC America). This six-part miniseries stars the always fantastic Bill Nighy and a young Kelly MacDonald and James McAvoy, to name a few actors more recognized this side of the pond. It starts, as these things often do, with a dead body. When the press, government, industry, and police all tug on the thread, the plot unravels at a healthy clip.
Feed Our Kids Well?
The long lost first episode of The Dana Carvey Show is now available on Hulu, featuring, yes, the infamous "Bill Clinton breastfeeding puppies" sketch. Timely satire, perhaps, given this election season?
In one of those inadvertent and bizarre coincidences, the ad campaign on this skit happened to be Ragu's Feed Our Kids Well campaign, leading to the the unplanned visual convergence below (click for a larger view; you won't fully understand unless you've seen the skit).
What do you see?
One of yesterday's hot Internet stories was this photo from the White House website which appeared to show Dick Cheney leering at a nude female sunbather.
In a bit of PR control, and perhaps as evidence that we see what we want to see, the powers that be released a larger version of the photo which reveals that the reflection in his sunglasses was nothing more than a hand holding a fishing rod. [via popurls]
***
A plug to watch Arrested Development on Hulu via Airbag's Longboard: "Thanks to Hulu, the world no longer has an excuse for not watching Arrested Development. Sometimes the Internet just gives and gives and gives."
Another fun place I found a Hulu embedded video: in Sasha Frere-Jones New Yorker blog.
***
PicLens, a cool browser plugin I often use to show people photos on Flickr, has a beta version that supports YouTube video browsing in Firefox, including Firefox 3b5, and IE. I couldn't get any videos to actually start playing, but I saw it working in a demo. Select a video and it starts playing right there within PicLens' 3-D wall.
Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip on Hulu
If you missed Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip the first time around, when it aired on TV, or, if you're like me and never caught up with the accumulated episodes on his DVR before having to return it to DirecTV, you can now catch up on every episode on Hulu, starting with this one...
Who's the Star?
In this week's New Yorker, Joan Acocella surveys Dancing with the Stars.
What can you learn from “Dancing with the Stars
Bad Idea Jeans
An old classic.
"He That Believeth In Me"
I've had so little free time recently that I haven't been able to try out Battlestar Galactica. Season 1 is bubbling up in my Netflix queue, but I've had the same three discs at home for a month now, the weight of the carrying costs outweighed by the (a) ambition, (b) guilt, (c) busy schedule, (d) all of the above (Ikiru? Berlin Alexanderplatz? Anyone?)
But I know how passionate the fans are and wonder if I shouldn't be trying to catch up with a greater sense of urgency. Season 4 tipped off last night...
What the...?
Bizarre moment from the minisode of the pilot of Sheena. It's hard to go wrong with a man in a gorilla suit.
***
Kanye West launches a travel site: Kanye Travel Ventures. It's not clear to me what the Kanye twist on this is, but then I could never figure out what Paul Newman had to do with tomato sauce either. [via Thrillist]
Odds and Ends
Oh, I'll just set aside my $80 for this now.
Kevin Love, making like Lebron James in that Powerade commercial.
Friday Night Lights greenlit for Season 3, but only in a unique deal in which it airs on DirecTV first, starting in October, then moves over to NBC in 2009?
Howard Shore scoring, Guillermo del Toro directing...The Hobbit sounds promising.
The sometimes bizarre effects of scarcity: a used copy of the CD of the score to The Transformers is running, at a minimum, $89.99 on Amazon.com.