At the risk of biting the service that gives me the chance to post a blog: I wonder what kind of snarky conversations take place at the AOL headquarters in Virginia or New York or wherever the decisions to put triviabites on the Welcome page are made.
It does seem like dubious celeb behavior and endless lists of "we-consider-this-tacky" rule the day far more than when I first became a subscriber in 1997.
And it's probably a blessing that Time Warner doesn't own the rights to the old BEAUTY AND THE BEAST series (a favorite of my wife Valarie), otherwise we'd be seeing all sorts of supersnarky links to reruns of the show.
The new model for female-driven romance-and-uplift would have to be Diablo Cody's script for JUNO (which I liked overall), where there's half a movie of ornate comic dialogue (expertly delivered by Ellen Page and Olivia Thirlby, among others) and distance-yourself-from-feeling "attitude" before the other half of the movie arrives with squishy sentiment, TV-esque resolutions (particularly involving the characters played by Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner) and director Jason Reitman falling into the cliche of pulling the camera slowly away from sad or happy moments instead of just cutting away to the next scene.
In short, once the WGA strike ends, you're more likely to see a semi-sanitized JUNO TV series than the hybrid of Harlequin romance/New Age message/dollops of literature/occasional "action" of BEAUTY AND THE BEAST--a relic of an age when some members of the mass audience placed a high value on entertainment depicting non-ironic sincerity.
Was this blog post really necessary? I mean the man just died. geeze.
ReplyDelete