Via Mobius comes news that the downtown Manhattan Film Forum
is spending money on new, presumably more comfy, seats. This is great
news — even if your ass is smaller than mine — considering that Film
Forum commonly shows hard-to-see stuff on the scale of the forthcoming
six-hour-long The Best of Youth. It also reminds me that I need to get off my ass and see Notre Musique
this week.
Memo to movie theater employees: If you’re starting
clean-up work while movie-nerd types are still in their seats watching
the credits roll, kindly SHUT THE FUCK UP until they’re done. Thanks.
Notice a lot of recent press lately about how the FCC is cracking
down on “indecency” over broadcast television and radio? Read about how
enforcement has been spurred by record highs in complaints about said
“indecent” material from the heartland? Well, according to the FCC’s own estimate,
more than 99 percent of those complaints — which totalled nearly a
quarter of a million last year — have come from a single source: the
Parents Television Council. Mouthpieces for the group say it shouldn’t
matter that all the complaints come from the same place as long as they
highlight actual indecency on the airwaves, an argument that
conveniently neglects to take into account the fact that decisions on
the “indecency” of a given broadcast hinge in part on “contemporary community standards”.
If it’s only a tiny, tiny proportion of the “community” as a whole
that’s complaining about any given broadcast, what does that say about
the relative “decency” of that broadcast? What should rankle wannabe
moral guardians the most is the fact that ordinary Americans want to watch Married by America
and listen to Howard Stern; most of them probably didn’t mind a split
second of quality time with Janet Jackson’s boobie, and I have yet to
hear compelling evidence that a naked tit is somehow more damaging to
America’s precious youngsters than is a three-hour gridiron match-up
permeated by grunting aggression and punctuated by bone-cracking
violence.
Gift-giving note: those terrific “Director’s Series” DVDs
from Palm Pictures are now available in convenient boxed-set form,
with an extra disc featuring more recent material not included in the
original releases. (This latter development had me cursing under my
breath in the aisle at Best Buy until I checked out the contents of
that fourth disc and convinced myself that the only must-have is the
Spike Jonze video for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Y Control,” which is
already available as a bonus on that group’s swell concert DVD, Tell Me Which Rockers to Swallow.)
Also, Palm has announced release dates for the next four (!) discs in
the Directors Series, which I’m hoping will include a Mark Romanek
volume before such a thing becomes obsolete — the great video for
“Hurt” was released as a DVD double-pack in specially labeled copies of
Johnny Cash’s last Rick Rubin-produced album, “Little Trouble Girl” was
released on Sonic Youth’s Corporate Ghost DVD, and “Closer” is available on the new Dual Disc (one CD, one DVD) reissue of The Downward Spiral,
which also includes surround-sound versions of the album in its
entirety in both Dolby Digital and DVD-Audio formats.
Speaking of
Romanek, you can check out a superior two-minute version of his
iPod-themed commercial for U2’s “Vertigo” (wait, I mean his U2-themed
commercial for Apple’s iPod) by opening up iTunes and going to the main
U2 page.
Yes, new reviews are coming. I’m working on them. More
later.