Tag Archives: everybody’s a critic

As it turns out

I’m not the only person who has problems with “The Bridge.” This guy goes into some greater length about the background to the series, and its problems, then viciously dissects a particularly egregious example that prompted me to start writing the post below. It turns out that “The Bridge” can be seen as less a TV drama and more as a rhetorical exercise by a particularly notorious figure in Canadian policing history — background I was wholly unaware of when I wrote my own review. So when I wondered whether “the producers [had] created this world through inattention and laziness — that it came about by accident, rather than because they wanted a framework to explore complex issues,” it turns out that my charitable explanation of laziness and stupidity was exactly that — charitable — and that the venality of the whole show is probably deliberate.

As one of the linked posts puts it:

But I’m quite confident in saying there’s barely anything in “The Bridge” that ever really happened — except to some guy with his own private movie playing in his head.

The entire series operates on a level of paranoia and self-delusion that beggars belief. Leo and his fellow officers are downtrodden and abused by all those of higher rank. Every Captain and Deputy Chief practically sneers with venality while twisting their Snidely Whiplash moustaches — and those are just the women!

Do read the whole thing; it made me feel much better. One should not get into the habit of changing a review based on information received after the fact, but this is particularly bad, so F– is now the new score for “The Bridge.”

I watched so you didn't have to

The “I Spent More Time Thinking About This Than The Guys Who Made It” Review of “The Bridge”

Back in the late 1990s and the early part of 2000s, I had a part time job as a TV critic. It was an interesting thing, inasmuch as I made a few strange acquaintances, and I discovered that fans have a lot invested in their favorite shows. It started as a labor of — well, maybe not love, but certainly as an enjoyable hobby, but because my team and I started right around the point where things started to go downhill, it quickly turned into a weekly slogfest. Things got so bad at one point where I stopped reviewing actual episodes at all, and pre-emptively wrote my snide, acerbic commentary ahead of time. (“It probably sucked, so… fuckit” was our motto towards the end.) Inevitably, we drifted away from the project — it had become too much like work-work, rather than fun-work, and life’s too short to spend doing Internet projects that cause you agony.

This may be why I have a difficult time forming attachments to television these days, and why my TV watching is almost entirely opportunistic, save for a couple of UK shows that get stolen on a regular basis.

One of the best pieces of TV I’ve seen in the past couple of years was “Battlestar Galactica,” so when I learned that Chief TyrolAaron Douglas was going to be playing a Serpico-esque cop in a new CTV series, “The Bridge,” I naturally thought I should pay attention. The pilot episode was somewhat promising, and the premise itself certainly holds a lot of potential: cop plans to clean up the department, the city, and the world, at some considerable risk to his/her own life. Yeah!

Only, you know, not so much. I’ve now watched all 11 episodes that have run on CTV this spring, and I have some… issues… with the show.

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Looks great; sucks ass

Ouch:

Kahney’s review [of the Zune] is positive for pretty much one reason: he’s a Mac dweeb, and the Zune actually beats the iPod on the sole criterion–design–that is relevant to Mac dweebs. He hates most everything about the performance characteristics of the device but loves its fashionable brown colour, its interface, and the “rubbery” feel of its scratch-resistant case. What’s ironic is that this tells us, more clearly than any negative review could, that the Zune is for yuppies who want their technology to come in the form of slick fashion totems.

Oh, snap.

How is this news?! Part II

From page A02 of today’s Victoria Times Colonist..

Postal worker taken to hospital after being attacked by squirrel:

OIL CITY, Pa. (AP) — Letter carriers occasionally have to deal with angry dogs or maybe even a spider’s nest in a mailbox, but a mean squirrel?

Barb Dougherty, 30, a U.S. Postal Service employee, said she was attacked and bitten Monday by a squirrel while delivering mail in Oil City, about 121 kilometres north of Pittsburgh.

“I saw it there on the porch, put the mail in the box and turned to walk away and it jumped on me,” Dougherty told the Derrick newspaper, who said the animal then ran up her leg and onto her back.”I eventually got a hold of the tail and pulled it off me. No one was home at the house where I was delivering the mail, but the neighbour lady heard me screaming and came over.”

An ambulance took Dougherty to a hospital, where she was treated for cuts and scratches. The squirrel was killed.

’cause god knows we couldn’t think of anything else to put on the second page of the paper…

How is this news?!

I’d have a lot less trouble taking journalism seriously if it stopped putting idiotic things in my newspaper:

BERLIN (Reuters) — Two German women complaining on office e-mail about their partners’ poor sex drive found the details of their private lives broadcast to thousands after one of them hit the wrong button, Bild newspaper reported Saturday.

“Everyone stares at us now and whispers behind our backs,” Anica G., a 21-year-old worker at the Federal Labour Office, told Bild.

The e-mails between Anica and colleague Christina S., with descriptions on how the women try but fail to arouse their partners, were first sent by accident to other colleagues in their department at the labour office.

They were then forwarded to thousands throughout the office and other government agencies and widely distributed across Germany.

That’s the story in its entirety. Private e-mail ends up suddenly public; two unknown and pseudonymous individuals suffer red faces as a result. Goddamn film at friggin’ 11. I know it’s a slow news day, and that it’s been a slow news cycle, but couldn’t you have filled that space with, I dunno, an ad?

IT'S SO NOT A FASHION ACCESSORY.

If I had to think of a single sentence that summed up my antipathy towards BoingBoing generally and Xeni Jardin in particular, I doubt I could do better than this:

Full disclosure: Heck, I have nearly 1,000 old cellphones (some with batteries separated) in my desk drawer. But my last name is not Muhareb, and I don’t drive a minivan. Ergo, I am not a terrorist.

No, it makes you a dillho–wait a minute. You have nearly 1,000 old cellphones? What the fuck?!

Warning: Do not try to unpack this statement or determine how much of it is hyperbole. You will make blood shoot out of your nose. And nobody wants that.