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Watching TV : Feb06 Edition

Even though February still lives, I feel it necessary to mention a few interesting items that I’ve watched recently in the realm of visual stimuli. First of all, it appears that my satellite provider decided to upgrade my service for free, so I have been able to catch a few new shows of interest. For the first few days of the upgrade I was able to once again catch the O’Reilly Factor and I must say that Mr. Bill once again never failed to entertain. Love him or hate him, you gotta admit that he’s stumbled on an interesting formula. Sadly, (or gladly, depending on how you look at it) the inclusion of the Fox News Network was pulled from the extended station listing and is no longer available. However, one channel of interest remains; the Documentary Channel. In the show time that I have been watching DOC I have been able to catch The Pixies: Gouge, The Clash: Westway to the World (of whom I like better as subjects of documentaries moreso than as mucisians), Rasputin, Haack: The King of Techno, and Bob Marley… pretty good for the first month of service. Yuki and I have finally finished watching the final episodes of the Sopranos (season 5) and I personally was pleasantly surprised by the twists in the final two episodes. That is to say, they were twists to me, but I tend to never see movie twists during the course of watching a film. I watched the pilot of Six Feet Under… in a word… pretty good. I will continue to the next episode soon.

On the films of cinema front, I did get around to finally watching Audition (Odishon) by Takashi Miike. Overall it was quite slow, but the acting was pretty good. There were a few truly gut-wrentching scenes, but as a horror movie aficionado they were perhaps a bit soft on me. That’s not to say that they should be viewed by the squeamish however. I did watch a documentary called American Movie about a small-town director named Mark Borchardt trying to get his low-budget film Coven made. It was about dreams and trials and smalltown living and the desperation to be more than is expected of you and the lighter side of a dark soul and all that crap, but really the best part was that Mark Borchardt reminds me of this guy Psycho Drummer John (I don’t think that was his real name) that I was in a band with just after high school. If I had just the audio of this film on hand then I would have bet the mortgage that it was a movie about PDJ. Creepy. Even without the nostalgic elements as a factor, I would recommend watching it.

That’s really all for me this month.
-m