Wednesday, November 17, 2004

THE WINNER OF THE WORST SCRIPT OF ANY KIND EVER WRITTEN IN THE HISTORY OF MANKIND CONTEST.....

... has a new winner: The just aired two part mini-series CATEGORY 6: DAY OF DESTRUCTION. While there is often a reverse correlation between the quality of special affects and the quality of a writing in a film, there has never, and I mean never... been as delightfully wide a gap as just witnessed on CBS.

For true appreciators of really, really, really bad writing - this was a feast beyond compare. It was hard to even find a single line that could imaginably be spoken by a real human being - and that was only the start.

We had 'characters' watching the world end around them while they acted as if they were discussing the finer points of needlepoint, an often total disconnect between what was going on and what people were saying and, as a special treat, jaw-dropping, heavy-handed moralizing that had some of the funniest lines of dialogue anyone has ever had the pleasure to hear. In fact, it is impossible to imagine that all the political point making was not intended as wonderfully subversive low comedy since the awfulness of it was so deliciously over the top... awful.

So while I had been tempted to turn off the sound five minutes into the first episode and just look up from working to watch the special affects, I would have missed the joy of fully appreciating the biggest turkey ever to grace the nation's Thanksgiving season.

Tuesday, November 09, 2004

GETTY MUSEUM - 0 METROPOLITAN MUSEUM - 1

While it was no surprise that one of the greatest works by the first master of Western Art - Duccio di Buoninsegna - was just acquired by the Metropolitan Museum, what was at least a small surprise was that when the Metropolitan spoke of their competition to purchase the painting - they mentioned the Louvre, but not the Getty Museum.