Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Monday, April 26, 2010

The Oranges Are Still Not The Only Fruit Post.

Barbados is the most easterly of the Caribbean islands, and it's often referred to by a lot of the locals as "Little England." Said locals apparently have a Daily Mail mentality based on the two main newspapers, the Barbados Advocate and the Nation. The latter's running a three-part series about that evil activity, same-sex feelings between girls. 

The second part, about how the subject of the story "reformed" through the Church, is here. Now I do not believe that same-sex love = irredeemably wicked, so this is sad to read (especially given the first article in the series, which you can find on the site - I can't bring myself to link to it); my distaste for this piece is really brought out by a lot of the comments below. It seems that a lot of people haven't noticed that it's not the 19th century any longer - true, you get homophobia all over the planet, but in a country that likes to trumpet itself as being a developed place it's like "WTF?"

If Nicole Hinkson (that's her name) is happy the way she is, then good for her. But you have to feel for those lesbians (and gay men, let us not forget) who still have to hide.

For fuck's sake, grow up.

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

The Did They Mention The Music? Post.

The TV Academy has put the final nail in the TV theme song coffin, quoth Variety.
Now that the once vibrant slice of pop culture -- who doesn't still know the words to the themes from Gilligan's Island or The Brady Bunch? -- has mostly disappeared from primetime, the Emmy category honoring main title songs is following suit.
The Academy announced Monday that the main title theme category would be eliminated effective next year, and replaced by the new "music composition for a non-fiction program" award.
"This change was made due to the decreasing number of traditional television main title theme music," the org said.
Indeed, TV themes virtually disappeared in the late 1990s, as networks experimented with ways to keep viewers from flipping channels. Just as they squeezed out closing credits, played with start and stop times (like last week's 9:28 p.m. scheduling of Glee) and worked to seamlessly blend from one show to the next, webheads also dramatically reduced opening credit segments -- or got rid of them all together.
The main title theme category ax was one of several rules changes announced by the Academy. But...


...the one with the music is the one under the spotlight here. To be honest, this isn't terribly surprising - increasing contempt for openings aside, the Emmys have had difficulties with theme tunes for a long time (ever since ATAS was founded, in fact) - in the book Inside Star Trek Robert H. Justman and Herbert F. Solow relate how the 1967 Emmys decided that Lalo Schifrin's work on Mission: Impossible wasn't worthy of a statuette (although Schifrin has won an Emmy, it wasn't for this), and indeed
they didn't even give awards out for themes until 1993! So in "honour" of this occasion, and as another lament for the time when network TV shows had decent opening and closing tunes (it was not uncommon, for instance, for The A-Team to give Mike Post and Pete Carpenter's theme a lengthy workout, and the next time the pilot for Moonlighting is shown have a look at how the end credits give you a chance to hear the whole song!), all the Emmy-winning themes so far. I only wish The Simpsons or Twin Peaks could have been among the following...

1993: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (Dennis McCarthy)



1994: seaQuest DSV (John Debney)



1995: Star Trek: Voyager (Jerry Goldsmith, his fifth and final Emmy)



1996: Murder One (Mike Post, his only Emmy to date - and why this is set to scenes of Gillian Anderson, I don't know)



1997: EZ Streets (Mark Isham - his end title music doesn't seem to be online anywhere, dammit)



1998: Fame L.A. (Robbie Buchanan, Maribeth Derry, Richard Barton Lewis and Tom Snow)



1999: Trinity (Martin Davich - no video available, apparently)

2000: The West Wing (W.G. Snuffy Walden)



2001: Gideon's Crossing (James Newton Howard)



2002: Six Feet Under (Thomas Newman)



2003: Monk (Jeff Beal)



2004: Monk, again (Randy Newman) - yes, this won for both its themes. Amazing.



2005: Desperate Housewives (Danny Elfman)



2006: Masters of Horror (Edward Shearmur)



2007: The Tudors (Trevor Morris)



2008: Pirate Master (Russ Landau)



2009: Great Performances (John Williams)

Monday, April 19, 2010

The V Post.

Maybe it's not fair to judge something based on two episodes, but improved effects aside the new V is pretty weak compared to the two miniseries (and arguably the followup TV series).

That said, Laura "never saw her on Smallville because I never watch the thing" Vandervoort... Holy shit.

Sunday, April 04, 2010

The To Complete Or Not To Complete? Post.

While wondering if Brenda "Hang on, let me just get out my soapbox" Hampton has noticed that teen TV shows have moved on significantly since the 1950s (this is in response to The Secret Life Of The American Teenager starting tonight on MTV in the UK. You heard me, MTV. Although that said, at least it's more enticing than, well, all their other shows), on to the subject of this post.

Sequel soundtracks.

And more to the point, owning them.

What brought it up was adding soundtrack info to the Wiki entry for Die Hard With A Vengeance the other day; I've got a CD-R dub of the OOP Varese Sarabande CD Club release of Michael Kamen's score for the first one, which'll be welcome until I can get an actual copy of the album (ha!), and I've got a cassette of Kamen's Die Hard 2. But I don't have the soundtrack for the third film and I haven't got Marco Beltrami's CD for Live Free Or Die Hard yet; I've got all three Howard Shore albums for The Lord of the Rings AND the expanded ones (thanks, Zeta!), and I've got the Jerry Goldsmith Rambo soundtracks (and their expanded ones) and am open to the one from Brian Tyler. But... but I don't know whether or not to get the other two Die Hards.

On the one hand, I'd like to complete the set. On the other hand, in addition to the movie having had a lot of music from Die Hard 2 tracked in (sadly, it's not the only time a sequel's had a predecessor's music put in - see also Rambo III and the two Spider-man sequels), the Die Hard With A Vengeance soundtrack has been complained about for a) leaving off lots of good material (which I can certainly believe based on previous Kamen albums), b) giving up far too much space to rap music and classical covers, and c) not including "When Johnny Comes Marching Home." So... I'm stuck.

Of course, I'll probably get it just to complete the set. Eventually. And now to post this and get back to The Secret Life Of The American Teenager. Thank goodness the girls are cute.