reality tv: too little of a bad thing

Yesterday I finally got around to a great piece by Andrea Seigel in the New York Times Magazine. It's a really incisive analysis of reality TV and deserves to be read.

As with many things, when I complain about reality TV, I feel obliged to complain about it in an entirely new, fresh way. Sensing that this may be impossible, I have to make due with complaining in a way that's merely unusual.

Anyway, my complaint runs like this: The problem with the little reality TV I've seen is not that it's too cheap or tawdry. It's that it isn't tawdry enough.

a story of failure, a complete success

People often say a movie is made three times: once when it's written, again when it's actually filmed, and finally once more when it's edited.

When I first heard this, I didn't realize that with time and consideration, it would have a strange duel effect on me. On the one hand, it seems so incontrovertible that it's almost common sense, which is the effect so many old saws have. They begin to seem obvious and so lose their power.

the l.a. times on the cinema history of lincoln

From the past couple of days comes this piece by Susan King, writing for the L.A. Times about the portrayal of Abraham Lincoln along the history of cinema. It's timed, of course, to the release of Steven Spielberg's new Lincoln.

I find I have mixed feelings about a drama of this sort, based on a figure of real historical weight. The real Lincoln is a figure whose image will always be too prominent to be kneaded safely into a fictionalized universe; the real person is always a possibility in the mind of the viewer — well, at least in my mind — and further investigation always promises the possibility of getting to the real man behind the representation of the filmic lie.