Real sweet
Perhaps my favourite ritual this time of year is planning my television viewing, not just over Christmas, but for the months ahead.
In this year:
1. BBC Four documentaries – because they’re über-geeky and a good source of Flowfield material.
2. Lost – because I just need to know (particularly good Lost based comics can be found at Hijinks Ensue)
3. More films – I haven’t been watching as many as I’d like recently (the last really good one was Pan’s Labyrinth)
Out this year:
1. Reality TV – Fame hungry muppets doing the same old routine to annoy me.
2. ‘Celebrity’ editions – That’s right, the shows where normal everyday contestants have been replaced by ‘celebrities’… why is this happening to so many of my favourite quiz shows? Because TV producers find it easier to work with the already trained ‘celebrities’, plus they think that we really want to know how good a WAG is at playing Family Fortunes (US=Feud).
3. Self improvement TV – I’m not perfect, but I’ll be damned if television is going to tell me how to sort my life out.
Philip J Schadenfreude on 
Reality TV reminds me of watching mockumentories.
I like the dating ones (Blind Date, The Bachelor,
Beauty & The Geek) b/c they are so badass funny.
we don’t have a tv over here but i get my weekly, if not daily fix watching google video for awesome documentaries. or the archive.org for oldies but goldies. the internet is definitely my only source of entertainment and actual human interaction. i’m unsure if the latter is a good thing.
i think interaction with real live people is highly overrated.
I’d get a lot more done if we didn’t have a t.v.
*pokes* you are officially the third person i’ve interacted with today.
not counting the cat. :}
I’m also a non-possesor of a tv.
I interact with many ppl in my day tho, but I try and avoid the cats. Interacting with cats is some what illegal here.
It’s my impression one doesn’t interact
with cats; instead, they interact with you.
In Soviet Russia, cats interact with you!
The WGA strike is screwing up TV this year. Luckily I have the internet and can fill some of that void with downloaded TV shows.
If you liked Pan’s Labyrinth, may I recommend Mirrormask? http://imdb.com/title/tt0366780/
Perhaps you’ve already seen it, but if not, it’s among the most beautiful films I’ve seen.
Enjoy.
That one passed me by… which is suprising considering who wrote it, and who acts in it… Thanks, Mike, that one has definitely made the list.
Ah! Mirrormask is one of my all time favourite movies. And Gaiman with Dave McKean, and Ian Ballamy doing the sound track! That sound track is amazing by the way, even all by itself.
No problem. I’m always glad to spread the word about things I enjoy.
mirrormask, eh? i did enjoy quite pans labyrinth, except i couldnt look when his mouth was cut.
They’re more similar in their wonderful fantasy worlds than anything else, I think. As far as I can remember, there’s no really violent or scary parts in Mirrormask.
Being what time of year that it is, I am soooo glad that I don’t watch commercial tv, own a radio or regularly shop.
I have, unfortuently, heard some carols this year, tho non in full and non at loud volumes.
I would love to go a x-mas season with hearing a single one.
My ex almost walked out of her work cos the girl on the next desk was singing carols, I fully support her on any actions she takes for the purpose of avoiding carols.
My viewing for next year will be many more movies and hopefully alot of good doco’s. I love a doco.
I watch more documentary television than either episodic or reality TV. The writing is better.
I’ve really been wanting to see Pan’s Labyrinth. Everyone tells me it’s quite good. Maybe I’ll watch it sometime soon. I’m actually quite behind in my movie-viewing.
My friend and I always watch Gossip Girl while doing calculus: “Ohmigod, Blair’s going out with HIM?! Oh, she could do much better. And when is Serena’s mom going to sort herself out, I mean really. I adore Blair’s dress, though, simply gorgeous. Okay, so how do we integrate sine cubed four theta cosine squred theta times e to the (eight theta minus two)? Is that integration by parts? Yeah, I think it is, okay…”
It’s good fun.
Did anyone else think that the ending of Pan’s Labyrinth was a little discordant? I don’t want to give away the ending for people that haven’t seen the movie, but the ending made me wonder if they’d changed it to a more “pleasing” conclusion for the US audience, though I’ve never seen written anywhere that they did. There was just such dissonance between the two competing political positions. The symbolism didn’t match, if you get my meaning.
I did love the movie despite that though. It was well done indeed! And next to Spain is France: everyone’s seen Amelie, right?
When we went to see it, half of the people left the cinema thinking it had a happy ending and the others were weeping quietly to themselves… I think it all hangs on your perception of what is actually happening and whether you think escapism is directly proportional to personal horror.
OK, trying to be as vague about the story as possible I think I can say that if you look at the relationship between the ‘real world’ scenes and the ‘unreal’ ones you’ll notice a perverse symmetry, that events in one relate to events in the other… and that the end needs to be a conclusion in both.
Nah, I can’t really describe it without going into detail and I really wouldn’t want to spoil it.
As for Amelie, now there’s a christmas-family film… and I have witnesses that can prove that I worked out the ‘twist’ with the man in the photographs - one of my proudest moments.