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Aha! I can link to the excellent James Bond retrospective I mentioned the other day:
All right, 007, listen carefully: I want you to go and meet a gentleman named Lee. Ang Lee. Born in Taiwan but now, as far as we can gather, working for the Americans. Take him a copy of this novel, Casino Royale. It may look like an ordinary paperback, but concealed within is an array of clever tricks, some of them, I don't mind telling you, on the dodgy side, and—here's the thing—nobody seems to have put it to proper use. There was once a joke version, but that doesn't count. Be a good chap and tell our Mr. Lee to turn the book into a period drama, would you? You know the form: convertible Bentley for you, conical bras for the ladies. Got that?
And while I'm sharing excellent New Yorker articles, here is the best article I've read to date on the master mind behind The Simpsons (no, it's not Matt Groening). I love his take on the decline of the modern sitcom:
When you and I were kids, the average TV comedy was about a witch, or a Martian, or a goofy frontier fort, or a comical Nazi prisoner-of-war camp. That was the mainstream. Now the average comedy is about a bunch of people who hang around in some generic urban setting having conversations and sniping at each other. I remember watching, in the sixties, an episode of Get Smart in which some angry Indians were aiming a sixty-foot arrow at Washington, and Max said something like "That's the second-biggest arrow I've ever seen!" and I thought, Oh, great, shows are just going to keep getting nuttier and nuttier. I never dreamed that television comedy would turn in such a dreary direction, so that all you would see is people in living rooms putting each other down.
All right, 007, listen carefully: I want you to go and meet a gentleman named Lee. Ang Lee. Born in Taiwan but now, as far as we can gather, working for the Americans. Take him a copy of this novel, Casino Royale. It may look like an ordinary paperback, but concealed within is an array of clever tricks, some of them, I don't mind telling you, on the dodgy side, and—here's the thing—nobody seems to have put it to proper use. There was once a joke version, but that doesn't count. Be a good chap and tell our Mr. Lee to turn the book into a period drama, would you? You know the form: convertible Bentley for you, conical bras for the ladies. Got that?
And while I'm sharing excellent New Yorker articles, here is the best article I've read to date on the master mind behind The Simpsons (no, it's not Matt Groening). I love his take on the decline of the modern sitcom:
When you and I were kids, the average TV comedy was about a witch, or a Martian, or a goofy frontier fort, or a comical Nazi prisoner-of-war camp. That was the mainstream. Now the average comedy is about a bunch of people who hang around in some generic urban setting having conversations and sniping at each other. I remember watching, in the sixties, an episode of Get Smart in which some angry Indians were aiming a sixty-foot arrow at Washington, and Max said something like "That's the second-biggest arrow I've ever seen!" and I thought, Oh, great, shows are just going to keep getting nuttier and nuttier. I never dreamed that television comedy would turn in such a dreary direction, so that all you would see is people in living rooms putting each other down.
