theworstbuddhist

It was not unusual for Really Big Events on TV to have extra commercial time sold. I remember that was the case with the TV premiere of Star Wars, which they padded out to something like 3 hours by adding a bunch of interviews and stuff that you would normally find now in the special features of a DVD. I think it was fairly common practice with big miniseries as well like The Winds of War or The Thorn Birds. Brian's song was just a regular TV movie originally but as their wiki points out, it was crazy successful and went on to a theatrical rerelease and life on home video. The running times of TV movies did vary wildly (you can find some good captures of them on Youtube) but in this case I wouldn't be surprised if some of that time was filled with a nonfiction video package giving background on the players. It's also possible that the time slot was designed to end five or ten minutes before the top of the hour, giving a lead-in to whatever was on afterward - that was something they used to do with The Tonight Show, Saturday Night live, some local newscasts and the like.

That's curious. My MP3 that I downloaded at the time (via Firefox in MacOS) seems to still work. I don't use iTunes, I played it in VLC when I listened, so I don't know if that circumvents some kind of DRM.

No worries, hope you feel better soon

Some comics adjacent news: check out the trailer for the new Marvel/Disney+ series called 616, it’s a series of mini documentaries about different aspects of comics and Paul Scheer is in one of them!

Haha, ok, I tried to give Gigi time to step in but she must be busy so I will go ahead with my pick, which was inspired by the recent Emmy wins for the wonderful Canadian sitcom Schitt's Creek. It's the fourth of the right honourable Lord Haden-Guest's mockumentary films, starring many of the same repertory cast as his previous and later ones, but this one is about the subculture of American folk music. It features the great Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara as Mitch and Mickey as well as Bob Balaban, Jane Lynch, Fred Willard, Parker Posey and many more. We're watching: It should be available for rent in a variety of outlets as near as I can tell and it may be on Prime as well. Enjoy!

I'm good either way so if you want to suggest something @gigi-tastic, go for it and I'll do next time and then I think we're caught up. If there's been no suggestion by tomorrow afternoon or something, I'll drop mine in.

I thought @gigi-tastic was going to do the one she missed? No?

Grohl just ..uh.. loves rock & roll. Did you see the series he did where he travelled around the USA and met different legendary musicians in every city and recorded a track with them? That was fun.

I'm really torn. I'd like to do the live episode but I fucking hate Cats (the musical, love the animal). And I really hate the look of that film.

Yeah, I’ve read speculation that they will introduce the FF by having them emerge from the multiverse and/or microverse after being in there for one of Reed’s experiments having missed decades of time, the way Ant-Man misses all of “the snap”. Maybe instead of “no more mutants” they have Wanda say “hey, where’s all the mutants?”

Listening now. Paul has a pretty amazing revelation about his relationship to this movie after the interview with the Bays. Edit: and Jason too! Wild. Since I'm editing this post and since they talk about it some in the episode, does anyone here actually like Michael Bay's movies? Bad Boys 2 is honestly one of the worst, most depressing films I have ever seen.

Yeah. I love how weird Marvel gets sometimes. The Vision comic series written by King is pretty amazing and dark. Apparently they're also doing a Hawkeye series based on the excellent Fraction/Aja series.

*grits teeth* Welcome to the forum. Just kidding, welcome. If you are indeed the disturbed person who has been sending DVDs to Paul all this time, congratulations I guess? For those who don't get the text messages from Paul, the Transformers episode is available NOW! In exchange for a $5 donation to an organization that supports voting rights in the USA. I have paid my $6.92 Canadian and am about to spin it up. Paul also announced in the text that the upcoming live streaming episode is NOT for Transformers, as we suspected here, it's for CATS! Which is so much worse. Anyway you can get all the details, including how to get the charity episode, at hdtgm.com.

The Pacifier starring Vin Diesel. Torque starring Adam Scott (ok, he's not the star exactly, but who is?) Next of Kin starring Swayze, Liam Neeson, and Helen Hunt!

Indeed. As I think I've mentioned before, I don't have a lot of respect for rock music, I think it is largely far too self-important and frankly laughable a lot of the time. I listen to a lot of jazz and some classical (and classical-adjacent stuff like film scores). In those worlds, pretty much all bands are manufactured; a conductor or bandleader does auditions and puts together bands for concerts, touring, recording, whatever the need. The idea of rock bands being "manufactured" comes I think largely from the transition from the 50s to the 60s, when bands went from a frontman like Little Richard or Elvis to bands like The Beatles or solo auteurs like Dylan, and the new kind of "thoughtful" romanticizing music journalism that grew up around it. Branding and capitalism put in their two cents as well of course, trying to make selling points out of things that are promoted as "authentic" - analog recording vs digital, vinyl vs CD, whatever. I remember laughing my ass off in college when I read the liner notes for a friend's copy of a new album by the band Boston (ugh) in which they bragged about how they had recorded everything analog and used source tapes that were so old that parts of them were stuck together. Chumps. Anyway, as Frank Zappa observed, "all you rock and roll writers are the worst kinds of sleaze / selling punk like some kind of English disease / is that the wave of the future? Oh spare me, please."

Oh, Rush. I find it hard to respect or enjoy that band after I found out years ago that Peart (who wrote most of their lyrics) was a huge fan of Ayn Rand. They could certainly play their instruments well. I'll never understand what drives classically trained and/or musical prodigies to play shitty arena rock. Money and girls I guess. Do any of you know the Rheostatics? Arguably Canada's greatest rock band, certainly up there with the likes of The Tragically Hip and Sloan. One of the Rheos guitarists and songwriters, Martin Tielli, is known for playing a double necked guitar with a painting of our old flag on it. Their other guitarist/songwriter wrote a great book about the experience of touring back and forth across Canada called On A Cold Road, highly recommended if you can find it and are interested in Canadian music history from approximately 1985 to 2000. Also, just to close the circle on a couple other themes that keep coming up in this thread, one could argue that The Velvet Underground were a "manufactured" band, especially once Andy added Nico to the group. The 70s had its share of "supergroups" organized by studio musicians and producers - Steely Dan, the Eagles, Alan Parsons Project.

Definitely, stuff like Personal Shopper, Clouds of Sils Maria, Adventureland, all good stuff. I actually have a soft spot for the Twilight films and often enjoy getting baked and watching them once in a while - lots of great actors in those films wondering what the hell is going on. I even enjoyed the Charlie's Angels picture she was in.

This seems like an excellent week to mention that Penelope Spheeris' documentary about this period, "The Decline of Western Civilization", was on TCM recently and at least here in Canada is still available on demand. My memory of these years is hazy and I was too young to be a proper punk (I was 12 in 1980) but The Runaways definitely had an impact, especially on their female peers and other bands trying to make the same scene and trying to be more than a novelty act. You can't underestimate the impact that punk compilations and even mix tapes had on the fans and musicians who circulated them. You can draw a straight line from bands like The Runaways to bands like Hole or Bikini Kill. I do remember that when Joan Jett went solo and had big boring hits like "I Love Rock n' Roll", there was a lot of sellout-grumbling. Lita Ford was clearly happier pushing hair metal. I did see this biopic when it came out at a fancy theatre in Toronto and I mainly remember being impressed with K-Stew and realizing "oh, she's actually a very good actor."

I mostly hate Amazon as well and generally avoid Prime, but thanks to Covid there are times when it's easiest to use them to ship a gift to someone (for example). The last time I did this they gave me a month of Prime for free so I said what the hell and now I'm catching up on some stuff. The movie selection on Prime is pretty nuts if you like shitty old B-movies and have the patience to hunt for them. I wouldn't worry too much about being "pure" when it comes to supporting or not supporting something. All we can do is the best we can do with the information we have under the conditions we're in.

Sounds like a good way to get sued by Rotten Tomatoes, if nothing else.

I doubt that you're alone. Personally I like to have a mixture of big budget movies, straight to video or streaming, stuff I remember from Blockbuster, obscure weird shit that I have never seen elsewhere, etc. And a mix of live and studio shows for that matter, but the pandemic has thrown a lot of this out of whack. Not to mention Avril and whoever else picking the movies is trying to consider how available the movie is for listeners. So it's been a weird run lately between sifting through straight to streaming stuff and banked episodes and Swordfish and so on. There's still plenty of stuff in the suggestions forum that hasn't been picked that I think would make for a good show. Why don't they just do those? Who can say. I would pay an extra $5 to hear an episode with Adam Scott talking about Torque.

Sure, I will try to remember for next week.

Sorry, I missed this completely. Do we still need something? Edit: no. Thanks @AlmostAGhost, this is a good movie. And as luck would have it, the bass player for The Runaways was a contestant on Jeapordy not long ago and she did well.

I don't know how common it was but it certainly has been a thing in the past for directors to "distress" or otherwise interfere with unexposed film in order to "bake in" a special effect. I remember the commentary track for Pitch Black talked about taking a gamble on some kind of chemical bath that didn't work out the way they hoped. It would all be done in AfterEffects now, of course, at very little cost compared to working with film. That's what makes the opening joke about VFX coming extra funny to me - anyone with a Creative Cloud subscription, ie. every living filmmaker, should be able to create that effect with stock materials and filters. Not a movie quality result but no worse than the rest of this turd of a film.

I enjoyed all of this post but this in particular caught my fancy. Thank you.