God bless the goddamn Onion

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeqwDLsZJn8

Well played chaps http://www.theonion.com/articles/new-study-finds-the-onion-has-never-been-more-popu,31505/

Did anyone see the Onion movie? That was hilarious!

i never really visit av club but ya random roles & stuff like that is p cool

random roles is my shit

Risky Business (1983)—“Barry”

Bronson Pinchot: We didn’t know it was going to be a big hit. We thought Tom [Cruise] was the biggest bore on the face of the Earth. He had spent some formative time with Sean Penn—we were all very young at the time, Tom was 20, I was 23. Tom had picked up this knack of calling everyone by their character names, because that would probably make your performance better, and I don’t agree with that. I think that acting is acting, and the rest of the time, you should be you, but he called us all by our character names. He was tense and made constant, constant unrelated homophobic comments, like, “You want some ice cream, in case there are no gay people there?” I mean, his lingo was larded with the most… There was no basis for it. It was like, “It’s a nice day, I’m glad there are no gay people standing here.” Very, very strange.

i like commentary of the damned too, and sometimes my year of flops. i rarely bother with their normal reviews tho

http://www.avclub.com/articles/the-boondock-saints-ii-all-saints-day-2009,43714/

In the solo half of the second commentary, Duffy talks a lot about how the real test of a good sequel is whether it “throws a curveball” at the audience by putting a twist on the first film instead of just repeating it. He goes on to describe practically everything in BS2 as a curveball. The FBI investigator is female rather than male this time? Curveball. This one focuses on her crime scenes by putting in earplugs instead of listening to music? Curveball! A third Boondock Saint who is Hispanic? Also a curveball! Delving into Il Duce’s history instead of leaving it entirely unexplored? Total curveball. That said, he seems to be pretty sure his audience isn’t bright enough to handle all these curveballs, particularly during the flashback scenes:

“The reason I was concerned is because it’s so foreign to Boondock fans. To suddenly be in 1958 New York where everything’s different. It was another curveball that we were throwin’ atcha, yes, but this time, it was visual. And it was sound, and every—you could just take these out of this movie and put them in some other movie that was a period piece, and it would look, y’know. It was something Boondock fans were not used to, suddenly being thrown back 50 years into the past. So I was extraordinarily concerned about that.” But the fans really wanted to know about Il Duce’s past, he says: “That’s another cue I took from the fan base, and another curveball that they provided for me, sort of free of charge.”

those Random Roles interviews are some of my favorite on the internet, but the TV coverage...Jesus. the Community reviews especially, I looked at one lately and it seemed like the writer was trying to get it all out before he burst into tears at the loss of Dan Harmon

The TV coverage is all awful and all in desperate need of harder length limits IMO. Or just an editor demanding that you have something to say rather than systematically listing every joke in an episode of the Simpsons and explaining why it proves that it was the most cutting-edge show on TV at the time or whatever.

yeah, the 'classic tv' pieces i've read there are pretty useless.

I will make an exception there and say they had a couple pieces on old Sopranos episodes that were pretty good, but yeah by and large it's just so superfluous, especially for the 20-minute comedy shows they spend so much word length on. kinda think Todd Van Der Werff is one of the worst writers on the internet

boring recaps are really the bread and butter of online entertainment journo these days tho.

very true. fucking sepinwall

The TV reviews are all just larded with these horrible space-filling J-school personal journalism intros. I don't read Pitchfork, but I assume that's an influence?

Random Roles is fun but i hate the intro paragraph that always says "The catch: They don’t know beforehand what roles we’ll ask them to talk about" like it's not going to be their 4 most famous roles plus one obscurity from their imdb page that has a funny title or character name

that's not really true.

I think it's frequently "We've heard you have a great story about this film" and frankly I'm fine with that. The Johnathan Rhys-Davies one is great at giving the impression that you would not regret an evening in the pub with him.

xp yeah, there's 25+ separate roles in the JRD interview.

i'm just saying, it's not like the thing where they put their iPod on shuffle and any of thousands of possibilities could pop up, you can generally guess what roles they're gonna talk about with one or two wild cards

the template is the same in that they always open with whatever the actor is promoting and then proceed semi-chronologically through their career while getting in at least one iconic role along the way, but theres been a lot of them where i havent even heard of the majority of the stuff they talk about

ehh ime they cover every iconic/famous role, unless the actor's got too many to fit

If only there was some link to hand that we (or you) compare your experience to...

there's been a bunch of instances where they skip some of the actor's biggest parts, usually because they were saving them for the end and they ran out of time

People who complain about the AVClub layout clearly have not seen Pitchfork lately, which looks like several layers of subway posters in various states of peeling decay arrayed in the most unreadable format possible. Maybe it's a generational divide, and if I were 16 it make perfect sense, like Raygun at the time, but I find it so user unfriendly it's ridiculous. AVC is a model of restraint and organization in comparison, esp. considering it is constantly being updated with useful content.

the funniest AV Club Community fan support club thing was the listicle of "shows that recovered from bad seasons" that didn't say anything about Community but was totally like implicitly 'look guys it might be ok!'

tv writing these days is really pretty bad, particularly "recap culture," which i find kind of odious for some reason

the funniest AV Club Community fan support club thing was the listicle of "shows that recovered from bad seasons" that didn't say anything about Community but was totally like implicitly 'look guys it might be ok!'

― Shuwopley (some dude), Tuesday, March 5, 2013 9:23 AM (52 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha when i saw that pop up on twitter i assumed it would be somehow hopefully pegged to community, hilarious that it turned out to be the structuring absence of the piece

hahahahahaha that. when exactly DID the AV Club become Community's biggest supporter/fanbase source? it didn't seem that way early on and then seemingly overnight it was everywhere on there

Somewhere in the indeterminate future, Walter White has a full head of hair (or a wig?) and a beard. He’s got a New Hampshire driver’s license in the name of Lambert. He may not have come from New Hampshire, but he’s solid enough in his backstory that he doesn’t hesitate when asked the driving time—30 hours. (It’s about 2200 miles from NH to ABQ, so that’s pretty close if you stipulate 70 mph highway driving.) He idly arranges his bacon in a mirror-image S pattern...

update: sharp-eyed commenters with long memories point out that this is a 52, indicating that it has been two years since Walt's 50th birthday in the pilot

tv writing these days is really pretty bad, particularly "recap culture," which i find kind of odious for some reason

― zero dark (s1ocki), Tuesday, March 5, 2013 10:15 AM (10 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i raise you amateur behind-the-scenes-ism

haha pp

tv writing these days is really pretty bad, particularly "recap culture," which i find kind of odious for some reason

― zero dark (s1ocki), Tuesday, March 5, 2013 10:15 AM (10 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i raise you amateur behind-the-scenes-ism

― lag∞n, Tuesday, March 5, 2013 9:14 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, 100%. i think u said something about that on some other thread, basically i long for the days before people knew the term "show runner"

I'm pretty broken up abt Dan Harmon t wd, not sure things will ever be the same

I feel like the attention and analysis can have a debilitating effect on some shows too, like suddenly they become gripped with a certain self consciousness, like they're playing to the recap seats.

any examples of that? I see it more with playing to show's fanbases, like there's definitely been lots of scenes on Parks & Rec in particular that seem made for tumblr gifsets and whatnot

(and, of course, Community, but that's par for the course I guess)

tv writing these days is really pretty bad, particularly "recap culture," which i find kind of odious for some reason

― zero dark (s1ocki), Tuesday, March 5, 2013 10:15 AM (10 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i raise you amateur behind-the-scenes-ism

― lag∞n, Tuesday, March 5, 2013 9:14 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, 100%. i think u said something about that on some other thread, basically i long for the days before people knew the term "show runner"

― zero dark (s1ocki), Wednesday, March 6, 2013 1:17 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

its really weird how people are so into how the sausage gets made, this amateur professionalism, like if thats your job or youd like it to be fine, otherwise youre just ruining the magic

and its always on a very hack level, like whos the audience surrogate here folks whats this characters arc, not that quality professionals dont think about those things, but you have to have artistry along w the craft, and thats not so easy to express as screenwriting for dummies

The TV coverage is all awful and all in desperate need of harder length limits IMO. Or just an editor demanding that you have something to say rather than systematically listing every joke in an episode of the Simpsons and explaining why it proves that it was the most cutting-edge show on TV at the time or whatever.

― Doctor Casino, Monday, March 4, 2013 11:45 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol rabin doesn't even do that much with the simpsons reviews! they're so drab and shallow and it sounds like he really doesn't want to do it

i hear u lag**n except for 'ruining the magic', bc thats kinda bs plus it supposes that there's a magic to ruin, they're just sitcoms

i've come to really despise van der werff, who i think heads their TV coverage and just, at some point, decided to go ALL IN on the tv-recaps-are-a-super-important-art-form business. like i think he said to himself "this is your life now, this is what it will always be, you must become the greatest of all time (at tv ep recaps)". and he actually seems very knowledgeable about the history of television. if you want to know why there's no limit on their length, it's cause he's in charge of the thing and his recaps are always like a bare minimum of 2k words.

and yet i can't say the tv reviews are any less necessary than the movie/book/music reviews. those just spend a lot less time being totally pointless.

(his recaps are also horseshit, forgot to mention)

i haven't studied on it much - would mean reading recaps - but i've always had the sense that 'recap culture' happened because no one knows how to write about tv.

at least back when recapping was more the province of shippers and fanfic readers/writers, the recappers were self-consciously DOING something with the shows, relating to them in certain ways. now it's more like a pure joyless consumerist time-filler.

suspect recap culture is a late symptom of generation-limbo-style credentialized compulsory 'middle class' college education. hunger for INTERPRETATION of culture-consumables. somehow tv-recaps are like the worst version of it, worse than yelp.

it would be easier to deal with television writing if the standard for pop culture crit in general weren't so strict

everything has to be on the right schedule, can only write about thngs right after they come out or end of year, etc

i was previously unaware of recap culture, sounds like that's a good thing, cd somebody explain roughly what it is?

culture of recaps

now right now, but we can put up a stub until a full recap is ready

so it is just telling people what the plot of an ep was, like it sounds?

jfc