Archive for February, 2007
Indie Volkswagens on Screens Big and Small
Michael Z. Newman, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, Dept. of Journalism and Mass Communication — February 27th, 2007|
Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris directed Little Miss Sunshine (2006), a film about an offbeat family in a Volkswagen. Produced independently of the Hollywood studios on a budget of $8 million, Little Miss Sunshine was cheered at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, where Fox Searchlight acquired its worldwide rights. It has grossed more than $90 million worldwide.
The VW bus in Little Miss Sunshine has an iconic quality that extends beyond its clever use in a running gag, having to be rolled [...]
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Too Much? The Reality of Real Estate
Shawn Shimpach, University of Massachusetts - Amherst — February 26th, 2007|
Although both are subject to the volatilities of the economic market, sometimes television production and labor constraints collide with the reality of actual people's lives. Sometimes all a cable outlet can do is pretend otherwise.
The U.S. cable channel HGTV continues to grow in popularity with a schedule of programs appealing to upscale viewers' voyeuristic house lust and fantasies of the real estate market as reliable and rewarding. Such programs are produced under great pressure as the [...]
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Previously on Buffy
Alan McKee, Queensland University of Technology — February 23rd, 2007|
This is a RFC (Request For Comment)*
In this recap - played before ‘The Gift’, the final episode of the fifth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer – Joss Whedon discovers, perfects and exhausts a brand new artform in 30 seconds. Give the man an Emmy.
* The RFC was the mode by which information was shared in the design of the Internet. Designers put out proposals, not claiming that they were the absolute truth, but offering them as suggestions, for others to agree, disagree, or use to t [...]
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So U Think U Can Dance?
Sharon Shahaf, University of Texas at Austin — February 22nd, 2007|
In this clip from Israel’s “So U Think U Can Dance”, two Israeli Hip-Hoppers, Shocko and Gitit get to choreograph their own routine. The duo use this gesture to settle a score with judge David Dvir, a representative of the Israeli “Ballet old-guard”. In part, this routine was the production’s way of recognizing the pair’s large fan-base, who had protested the program’s privileging of classically trained dancers over Hip-Hoppers -- not only for their particular technical skills, b [...]
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“Un- De- Re- classified”: Adel Hamad’s case goes to YouTube
Cynthia Fuchs, Director, Film & Media Studies, George Mason University — February 21st, 2007|
"Guantánamo unclassified" is, on its face, yet another homemadeish activist video, urging viewers to respond to a dire situation. But it is remarkable in a number of ways. Its challenge against the U.S. government's detention of Adel Hamad, a Sudanese national held at Guantánamo Bay since 2002, is at once profoundly simple and immensely complex.
Hamad's attorney, William Teesdale, introduces the case while standing on a desolate-seeming Cuban shore. He looks off to his left as if to ensure [...]
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The Sitcom’s Death, the Zero Degree of Style
Jeremy Butler, University of Alabama — February 20th, 2007|
Some say the sitcom is dead–killed off by reality TV and the YouTubian attention span of the few remaining television viewers.
The sitcom’s presumed death goes unexamined and unlamented as the genre is thought to represent the zero degree of television style: multiple cameras capturing a live performance in eye-level medium shots and medium close-ups under bland, high-key lighting; with shallow, unimaginative sets of living rooms indistinguishable from one another; and the bare minimum o [...]
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“But Does He Know How to Wind You Up?” Gwen Stefani Samples The Sound of Music
Jane Park, — February 19th, 2007|
A student emailed me a link to this video after I mentioned Stefani’s exoticization of the harajuku girls, her performatively submissive Japanese backup dancers, as an example of Orientalism in pop culture. Here we see them jerking about mechanically in blond wigs (in kawaii imitation of their leader), who literally “winds them up” with a huge key displaying the “G” symbol (presumably for “Gwen”), which recurs throughout – as wallpaper, guitar, cross, and faux-swastika. Like the [...]
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The Rest is Static: Jericho and the Politics of Nuclear War
Chuck Tryon, Fayetteville State University — February 16th, 2007|
The opening sequence of the pilot episode of the nuclear-war drama Jericho depicts Jake Green (Skeet Ulrich) returning to his hometown of Jericho, Kansas, after a five-year absence. Jake’s absence provides the show with one its ongoing puzzles, but it also establishes the show’s focus on the community of Jericho and the Green family in particular. While the show offers some stereotypical images of Middle America, the scene featuring the detonation of a nuclear weapon is one of the more com [...]
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Remembering Roseanne, Domestic Goddess
Laurie Ouellette, University of Minnesota — February 15th, 2007|
The glorification of the upscale “housewife” is hard to miss: From Desperate Housewives to the Real Housewives of Orange County to the attention bestowed upon Caitlin Flanagan’s bestselling tribute To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife, wealthy and glamorous women deeply ensconced in domestic identities and rituals are everywhere on television. While some of this is parody (think Bree’s obsessive-compulsive homemaking tics), the joke is on women. What’s mor [...]
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Beauty and the Boast
Sangita Gopal, University of Oregon — February 28th, 2007