‘The Brothers Bloom’ Arrives, ‘Chuck’ Struggles, Celebrity Twitters
By brian longtin • May 9th, 2009 • Category: side notes • Popularity: 13%
The long-awaited follow-up to ‘Brick’ finally comes to theatres, fans rally to save a failing show, and good and bad tweets from famous people.
Where has this movie been hiding? I remember finding a link to a trailer for The Brothers Bloom way back last fall, and thinking, “Oh, the next movie by the guy who made Brick, I loved that movie. Count me in.” I was saving up to write about it, had the link sitting in my drafts folder for weeks, but the film seemed to hang in limbo for so long I sort of gave up. I thought maybe it had a small release and vanished, but I was wrong. It’s finally getting a proper run via a phased roll out starting next weekend in NY and LA and expanding from there.
If you still hadn’t heard of it, you can catch the trailer and watch a full scene over at Apple trailers.
Turns out there was nothing wrong with the movie, they just moved it back for time slot reasons, giving it a better chance to pick up steam. Personally, I’ve been hearing great buzz about this one and can’t wait to finally see it after months of wondering. Brick came in second on my best of 2006 list behind only The Departed, mostly for so fiercely sticking to its guns. What could have been gimmicky — combining crime noir and high school drama — only worked because it went all out and followed through on its ideas. The story was tight, the shots were beautiful, and it felt like a very complete film. Brothers Bloom may be more lighthearted, but after the twisting conspiracy of Brick, I fully trust writer/director Rian Johnson to construct a satisfying con movie: equally exciting double-backs, only this time with bigger-budget sets and more jokes. Plus, Mark Ruffalo and Rachel Weisz are always adorable, aren’t they? Maybe a decent performance by Adrian Brody can even pay me back for sitting through The Darjeeling Limited.
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NBC’s Chuck is a pretty good show. It’s not the best thing on TV, but it’s certainly not the worst. It’s extremely watchable and well made, even if it isn’t the deepest story; of course sometimes that’s good, because it’s one of the few shows that can wrap up a basic plot on a weekly basis. Overall, it’s just a flat-out fun piece of entertainment. In fact, as other series get less fun to watch (sorry Heroes, you’re really losing steam at this point), I found I’d pick Chuck over a lot of other choices. Unfortunately, it just never reached the critical mass it needed to ensure its future.
Now that the season’s over and the show’s on the bubble for cancellation, the campaign to save Chuck has been getting an awful lot of attention
I love these grassroots efforts to rescue struggling shows, because it shows TV executives that there is still an audience for quality scripted programming. These people are donating money to charities in the name of the show, organizing big trips to Subway (a primary sponsor), and sending Nerds candy to the network to make their numbers known. CNN is even giving the movement news coverage. Does anyone do that for reality shows that may go off the air? I’m guessing not.
It’s fascinating that entertainment business models are so complicated, something with this passionate a fan base still might not find some way to sustain itself. There’s a tension between people watching shows in new ways that are more convenient to them, but which also hurt the ratings those shows depend on, and cases like Chuck should be the perfect opportunity to try out some new experiments in monetizing — online ad views, co-marketing deals, shorter seasons, anything. Instead, what’ll probably happen is they’ll bring it back, it’ll struggle again for half a season, and fade away nine months later instead of this spring. How much longer until we figure out something that works better?
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A quick rant, if you don’t mind, to wrap up. New technology is interesting, but only in how it’s used. It happened with blogs, with Facebook, now in an embarrassing way with Twitter. Yes, it’s new, but there’s no need to constantly talk about it. People can have Twitter accounts, and use them, but how many news articles and special segments and goofy analysis of ‘the phenomenon’ can we bear? It’s like there’s a competition to be the most Twittery newscaster or media personality alive (don’t get me started on the sad tendency of fading stars to use it to prolong their fizzling post-70’s Show careers). I promise this will be the only time we write about Twitter here, and only for the specific reason of seconding a specific recommendation. There is a Twitter feed on the sidebar, and if you find it interesting, please participate, enjoy, whatever. If not, you’re still a fine person.
Anyway, this specific list of top celebrity twitters from TV Guide is somewhat interesting.
Mainly, because it puts my favorite person to follow, Michael Ian Black, at number two. This guy does it right; everything he writes is either a random joke, or a joke semi-related to what he’s currently doing, and he’s one of the only people whose updates regularly make me laugh. It’s also increased my interest in his new post-Stella show, Michael and Michael Have Issues coming this summer. (Not mentioned in the article, Eugene Mirman would be on my list, but he writes less frequently and is less famous).
But how do extremely clever comedians make it on the same list as boring overly-famous airheads like Kim Kardashian and Heidi Montag? I’m sorry, Heidi, but using three exclamation points is a waste in a character-limited format, as are most things that escape into the world either through your fingers, vocal chords, or any other organ (eww, little Montags are probably heading our way). Also, ghost-written Twitter accounts, even if they’re hilarious, are incredibly lame. As The Real Shaq said in a NY Times article on the matter, “It’s 140 characters. It’s so few characters. If you need a ghostwriter for that, I feel sorry for you.”
brian longtin hopes no one is annoyed by my hypocrisy in writing about being annoyed by writing about Twitter.
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