Someone took exception to the fact that my BAFTA picks reflected only the small variety of games I played last year. True, but the nuance is I don’t play games I don’t like; I don’t feel bound to play unenjoyable games out of professional duty. I only feel duty-bound to try to play them. As entertainment, they shouldn’t be work to consume.

This reminds me of something a friend once quipped to me: men will watch any sci-fi, good or bad, whilst women will only watch good sci-fi. Translation: depending on how you feel about a form of entertainment, you’ll have different thresholds of tolerance for them.

In film school, I prided myself on seeing every film that came out. This eventually broke down when I found myself obliged to consume upsetting or violent movies I really didn’t want to see. By then my career had veered away from film, professional duty no longer applied so I gave myself permission to avoid them. As a result, some notable greats are still in the limbo of the unseen, for various reasons: The Pianist, There Will Be Blood, American Gangster, 28 Days Later, Boys Don’t Cry.

I’m way more willing to see movies of questionable quality because I like them better than games, but also because they are much less of an investment. I haven’t lost as much time and money if I see an entire bad movie as I have if I play a bad game halfway through.

Still, even with respect to movies, my limbo of “ought to see movies” is uncomfortably crowded, and since I’m now trying to reorient my career towards film, those lost souls are coming back to haunt me. I’ll probably bite the bullet and consume all those depressing and unsettling greats in a fell swoop, perhaps interspersed with all the insubstantial Princess Diaries I’ve also (but rightly) skipped.

I’m curious: what do you do when you need to consume something you dislike because it’s required for your professional culture?

Watched the final episode ever of Six Feet Under last night. It’s worth watching the whole final season, nay, the whole series for that final episode. It’s so rare that television series end in a satisfying manner.

Watched the ending again this morning, and cried again. Beautiful.

I just finished watching the fourth season of Six Feet Under. I found it to be slow at first, with so much happening in the second half as to make it hard to suspend disbelief (even for a really good audience like me). Still, I couldn’t stop watching it.

I’m really glad I’m done with it. Although SFU isn’t particularly graphic, watching it gives me the worst nightmares, stuff I can’t believe comes from my own subconscious. Amputations, severed heads crying and talking, concentration camp stuff. Usually starring beautiful people.

Here’s to watching fluff.

When you leave the TV off all evening.

You cook your meals for the whole week, from three different world cuisines.
You take the dog for a run.
You do the groceries and cleaning.
You play the guitar.
You read.
You catch up with non-blogger friends.
You get to bed at a reasonable hour.

An afterthought: I know I should never feed her human food, but if I reward myself for the run with a little Cherry Garcia, shouldn’t Comet, for whom the run was probably four times as long, get some too?

Did anyone tape The Amazing Race?

Rumsfeld gets majorly burned on Face the Nation.

Watch the video.

(via Dr. Wank)

This is a website dedicated to one of the worst auditions ever seen at American Idol. Apparently the guy’s “positive attitude” made such an impression that he’s getting a lot of fan support, maybe even enough to return to the show as a wild card contestant.

Follow the “Click here to see William Hung’s American Idol audition video” link, it’s worth it.

(Merci T)

I caught part of the new show Nip/Tuck on CTV the other night.

You know when you watch a show that used to be popular in the early eighties, and you wonder how you could ever have thought it good, how you could ever have taken it seriously (cf. Lance et Compte)? Well, that’s exactly what this show is like, but contemporary. Add gratuitous T&A, swearing and graphic surgery scenes and there you have it. I heartily agree with Dr. Wank’s assessment:

Basically just another “doctors in love” series, but focussing on plastic surgeons. So we get some nice exploitation shots of people with problems: A woman who has lost 200 lbs. and now has huge waddles of flesh hanging off her arms and back, a woman who’s had a complete double mastectomy (we get a nice close-up of her flat, scarred chest), etc. We get fat, dissatisfied people killing themselves. We get absolutely gorgeous people having sex with the plastic surgeons all over the place. The shots of the surgery itself are quite graphic, very much along the lines of TLC “documentaries”: big hunks of human tissues going into sterile silver bowls, bloody used instruments piling up, etc. But these guys do it Tarantino style with funky music and quick-cut editing and stuff. Intriguing, but just too voyeuristic for my tastes. I can’t help imagining the pitch “It’s ER plus those TLC documentaries, plus soap-opera bullshit a la L.A. Law!”

He forgot to mention the dumbass guy who gets asked to do a threesome with two cheerleaders and has some philosophical issues with it. At that point I just had to turn it off.

I have been watching all of the major HBO series on DVD. Renting them is much better than seeing them on TV; you don’t have to worry about missing an episode, you can see as many as you want in a row, and - this is especially nice - you don’t have to waste time at the video store wondering what to rent next. So far I’ve seen all the Sex and the City, some of Band of Brothers, all of The Sopranos, and are currently watching Six Feet Under. They are all excellent.

But Six Feet Under is that “something amazing” I’ve just discovered. I’m very hooked. It’s about two undertaker brothers, which may sound bizarre, but it’s an extremely entertaining series. I highly recommend it. It’s not only intelligent, but witty and often surreal (intelligently surreal, not Ally McBeal surreal), beautifully shot (you’ll know what I mean when you see the gorgeous opening credits). It’s hilarious, yet touching, the characters have depth and are wonderfully cast and acted.

As to how it compares with the other major HBO series, it’s more consistently entertaining and far less predictable than Sex and the City (but in fairness I’ve only seen eight episodes of SFU so far), it’s easier to watch than (the truly excellent and also beautifully shot) Band of Brothers, and it’s also more sustained, easier to watch and easier to follow than the Sopranos.

I hope you soon discover it too. Rent the first DVD (three episodes) and give it a try.

Dave has recently written a very entertaining post about a bad date he once had. He was inspired by Nick’s own bad date stories. I too once wrote about my own bad dates here.

Anyway, Dave’s reminds me of all the things people are sometimes willing to do for a magnetic member of the opposite sex. This seems to be the main theme of the new reality show Cupid (it was late, after Ultimate, and I had just discovered (GASP!) that my home Internet didn’t work, so yes, I wound up in front of the boob tube, without the strength to resist this new gem of pop culture).

I have to say I was highly entertained. The premise: male contestants trying to seduce a hot millionnaire chick. The format: American Idol-like auditions are being run all over the country, to find appropriate contestants. The panel: the hot millionnaire chick and her two best friends.

Not an easy thing to do if you’re one of the male contestants. But still, you’d think people would have more of a clue of what the opposite sex likes. You know how on American Idol there are tons of would-be contestants that you can’t believe have never been told they can’t sing? Same here: I couldn’t believe the approaches these guys took, completely confident they would be fool-proof.

Many of them came in without a word, took off their shirts to reveal bulging pecs, and started doing push ups or stupid kung fu moves, only to be laughed out of the room. One came in backwards, sticking his butt upwards in the women’s faces and slapping it. Not in any funny self-deprecating way, either! One of them became very agitated and slightly aggressive when one of the women wanted to see his wooden aikido sword up close: “Nobody touches the sword. It might save my life in a fight one day”.

For all our Renaissance Man and Woman talk, Homme Rose and Femme Libérée, it seems to me the two genders are still quite different. But are they so out of touch with each other, that they can’t even put themselves in the shoes of the other? I mean, had these guys ever spoken to a woman?