TV Premiere Week, First Review

I've been parked in front of the TV all week, just for you dear reader! I want to make sure everyone is getting the most bang for their tv buck, and a lot seems to be changing in prime time.

Here are my initial reactions:

1) The Amazing Race. This show won the Emmy for best reality show, and since I've never seen it, I watched the kickoff last Sunday night. I really liked this show, and expect to keep tuning in. Although we all agree that reality tv is crap, that doesn't mean that any of us can resist it, and I thought this show is one of the better concepts I've seen. In the first episode, the contestants hustled from Seattle to Beijing, doing scavenger hunt-style activities in interesting places like the Forbidden City and the Great Wall. I thought it was a creative way to see another part of the world, and watch the ups and downs of people really working their buns off.

2) Speaking of buns, I watched the first episode of The Biggest Loser, a reality contest to see who can drop the most weight, and get the most fit in a short amount of time. Although this show tended toward the middle of the road (I thought they covered about 30 minutes of tv in a 2 hour show), it did work for me emotionally, it's really inspiring to see people who want to change their lives, and are putting their money where their mouth is. Speaking of money...

3) Deal or No Deal -- is hilarious. Game shows are another guilty addiction, and although the show was kind of ridiculous, it was pretty compelling once you start watching. The concept is that you have a set of briefcases with various dollar amounts represented, and you want to eliminate the low-value cases to increase your odds of a big payoff. And every once in a while the "banker" will offer you a deal that correlates to the probability of your winning big. The theatrics on this show are pretty funny, and it's a good show if you don't have anything else to do.

4) Justice -- This is a more obscure show on Fox, Wednesdays. It's a Law and Order - style procedural, but told from the side of the pricey defense attorneys instead of the prosecutor. What gives this show a hook is that at the end, after the trial, they show how the crime really happened! For me that's nice closure to the mystery, I'll keep checking on this show.

5) The New Adventures of Old Christine -- This is a comedy with Julia Louis-Dreyfus, of Seinfeld acclaim. This sitcom won an Emmy this year, so I decided to record an episode. I thought it was pretty funny, and was pleasantly surprised to find Blair Underwood on it as well. I don't think I'll watch it every week, but it was cute.

6) Til Death -- Another relationship sitcom, this one with Brad Garrett from Everybody Loves Raymond. Robert was my favorite character on that show, but I didn't think this new vehicle was anything special for him.

7) Greg Behrendt Show -- This is a daytime talk show with one of my favorite comedians, Greg Behrendt, who also wrote He's Just Not That Into You. He's great, but this concept is spread very thin, and I thought the show was extremely frivolous.

8) Studio 60 -- I am a huge Matthew Perry fan, particularly the movie The Whole Nine Yards. I'm looking forward to seeing how this show progresses. I thought it was very sharp writing, although definitely a mix of drama with the comedy. Apparently this show is written by the same guy from the West Wing, and in my opinion, the quality shows.

9) Oprah -- Same as ever. A funny premiere about a road trip with her friend Gayle. I usually enjoy about 25% of her shows, but it's worth recording for those, the ones about health, finances, books, and the occasional celebrity interview that I can't resist.

10) And finally, my favorite show, The Office. The third season kicked off better than ever, they never cease to impress me. The love triangle tension is amazingly prolonged, and I was laughing loud for so long my stomach hurt by the end of the episode. It's a golden age my friends.

More to come...

Stacey and Chad

Stacey and I are old friends from college. We've been in and out of touch over the last ten years, but the last two have been great fun together. She's a friend that I always feel proud to have, and excited to see.

Chad, Stacey and I had a class together in college, although I was not particularly conscious of their chemistry at the time. They also had a relationship that was in and out of touch over many years. But they've been together for the last three or so here in Denver, and I've gotten to know Chad as a fun and charming man in his own right.

I'm so excited that they just tied the knot yesterday! The wedding was perfect, Stacey was gorgeous, their families were warm and welcoming, Chad's speech was funny and touching. It really couldn't have been more of a pleasure.

And we learned at the reception that an alarming number of the group has a hidden talent for rap. Who knew?

By the way, the other photo is from Stacey's bachelorette party a couple weeks ago. This is at the Milagro Taco Bar. We ended up at the Cowboy Lounge later, but you'll just have to use your imagination!

Book Report

Last time I posted about books, I was having a boring book year. But I've been making some progress. As I've mentioned before, I started Harry Potter after that list of books, and in addition to that wonderful series that I couldn't recommend more, I've finished fourteen others...

• Confessions of a Shopaholic -- a re-read of one of the all time great chick lit books. It's a Bridget Jones-flavored story of a British girl who writes for a finance journal, but out of the office she can't seem to keep her credit card put away. Of course a hunky guy mixes into the story, and although this set up sounds pretty contrived, the turns of the plot are genuinely unique and fun.
• A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail -- A memoir about something I have absolutely no person interest in doing, and all the more worth recommending that it still drew me in. In fact it's one of my favorites of the year. It never occurred to me that hiking the Appalachian trail is such a rich experience of our country, or how difficult it must be. This book is written with wit and charm by a regular guy.
• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius -- Another memoir, this time a man who must raise his younger brother living in recent San Francisco. Interesting story, and very high on the quirk factor, but overall didn't do too much for me.
• Freakonomics -- A fantastic non-fiction book about data analysis. Really. The concept is that financial markets are the most boring application of economic tools, but there are some much more interesting uses for them. How to find out if there is cheating in sumo wrestling. Whether your realtor is getting you the best deal on your house. How the money works in an inner city crack gang. Try it, you'll like it.
• The World According to Garp -- The story from beginning to end of an unusual man named T.S. Garp. Definitely some work to get started, but grew on me through the very last page.
• In the Land of Second Chances -- A book club pick that I wouldn't necessarily recommend. It's fiction, but is an easily apparently framework for the author to argue that the existence of God can be surmised by logical conclusion. I didn't really buy it.
• The Devil Wears Prada -- In my view, the set up of the book is the entire book. The main character works as a personal assistant to a horrible but powerful boss in the fashion industry. I found myself reading the entire book just to see how it resolved, which was ok.
• The Other Side -- A very obscure book recommended to me by a strange friend! The story of a man who is invited by a childhood friend to move to a remote part of the world, and join a very odd country of people. The country seems deranged, and eventually implodes. Maybe this book was magical realism, but more likely the result of an author with colorful passtimes.
• The Jane Austen Book Club -- Decent, but it probably would have made more sense to just read Jane Austen. Her books were the topics I liked best, the women in the book club were hard to like for me.
• The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole -- very charming (fiction) diary of a young English teenager, and the random and funny observations of his life.
• Animal Farm -- What can I say about this? Masterpiece. Strange after the books I've read on Communist China to think that this book preceded all the events that happened there.
• Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil -- If you can make it through the first half of the book, which feels like a series of short stories about residents of Savannah, the heart of the book is a very interesting criminal case.
  
• The Penelopiad -- A short story by Margaret Atwood, re-telling the legend of Odysseus through the eyes of his wife, who stayed behind during the Trojan War.
• Saturday -- A good novel about a day in the life of a British neurosurgeon, with some discussion of the war in Iraq thrown in. Very interesting, although to make it to 300 pages, a day gets drawn in very minute detail, so be warned.

Right now I'm reading The Historian, some kind of vampire book which I like very much and am looking forward to the remaining 540 pages! Happy reading to you.

Ye Olde Camry

Video Music Awards

As a strange contrast to the Emmys, I watched the MTV Video Music Awards over the last week. I have to say that although MTV does try hard to stay current and interesting, I've confirmed the reports in the press that the show was a pretty big bomb.

Worth watching:

Justin Timberlake opening the show. That man can dance.

Beyonce's performance. She looked great in a floor length trenchcoat and black patent leather underneath, the song was catchy and she has an amazing voice.

A band I've never heard of, called Ok Go, did a great performance (sans instruments) on a set of eight adjacent treadmills. It was really creative and fun to watch -- what MTV should be all about. Apparently this band put a video on the web that cost nothing, and it's been downloaded 3 million times. You should go find it, it's good.

I also saw commercials for School For Scoundrels, and Employee of the Month, both of which look fun. Even an ad for Jackass 2 got a laugh out of me.

Mistakes:

Jack Black was a really weak host, which surprised me. It just didn't seem polished, and the jokes fell flat.

Beyonce won best R&B video for Check On It, against Mary J. Blige's Without You, which is a complete laugh -- Beyonce's video is just her strutting around in various pink outfits for 3 minutes, and Blige's video is a tiny film that includes Terrence Howard!

Pink won Best Pop Video, which was a masterpiece of satire, but when she accepted her award she was either incredibly drunk or playing very stupid. Her smart interview on Oprah was completely contradicted.

Honestly the rest was so marginal that my fast fowarding gained momentum through the program. I do like watching award shows, but this 3+ hour program had about 20 minutes of interesting stuff. Better luck next year.

But at least I recoginized more than half the bands, and even a respectable percentage of the videos considering MTV doesn't actual air them anymore!

Labor Day Movies

This is typically the weekend I head to the Telluride Film Festival, for a weekend of movies no one's ever heard of. As you may have noticed from previous posts, I don't have much vacation time to spare this year, so I'm still in Denver for a lazy weekend instead.

Yesterday Dave and I watched two movies, and I like to think they were in homage to Telluride. The first one was just as dark and disturbing as anything I see there. (Although with a lot less shooting and stabbing -- Telluride loves to keep you on pins and needles. It's worth observing here that Edmund has not yet been released to the public.)

The movie was Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth. I can't believe it's taken me this long to see it, and in fact the reason we went is because it may be close to leaving theaters. As I had hoped and expected, this was an incredibly powerful thing to see, and it really moved me. The environment, like eating right and working out, is one of those topics that people would rather be ignorant of, so they don't have to feel guilty on a conscious level. But I hope that we are becoming more advanced than that. Apparently the movie has been attended by about 2.5 million people, so that must be a good sign. And although it was SHOCKING to learn about what is happening to the earth while we've been looking the other way, it's also very empowering to find out that we can still turn things around.

For me, the most meaningful part of the movie was when Gore talks about what will happen to the world when we allow the ice caps to continue melting to a certain threshold. He projects that the sea level will rise 20 feet. And that doesn't sound like too big of a deal until you realize how many people will be displaced -- New Orleans will look like a joke. When you combine the coastlines of China and India alone, we are talking about 100 million people with no home. Closer to our own hearts, the site of the World Trade Center will be under water. How's that for a little painful irony?

He also mentioned the Pine Beetle, which has become a sad topic around Colorado. These beetles, which used to be prevented by cooler temperatures, are killing many of the trees in our mountains. It's terrible to see the increasing mix of brown with green, but even worse is imagining the fires of these dead trees that are surely inevitable.

The website promoted at the end of the film is a great one. One of the more interesting features is a calculator to tell you your personal impact on the planet's CO2 level. I took it, and am sorry to tell you that I am contributing about 18,000 pounds of CO2 per year.

This movie has been on my mind since I saw it, and I've been reflecting a lot on how to talk to people about something I believe in so strongly. Why is it that conversations about health, finances, smoking, and the environment *gasp* make people squirm? If I tried to convince a friend with a sports utility that a Prius has merits worth considering, it's possible that someone could even get offended. But why is it so sensitive, when they know in their hearts that it's true? Maybe because we all prefer to get away with convenience, instead of a responsible -- even moral -- choice. It's more comfortable to eat fries at McDonalds than to have a salad, who knows that better than me? But I would never argue that it's the right thing to do. So now I am asking all my loved ones to be moral and responsible! Be accountable for your decisions, be proud of them, have a backbone, and go see this movie.

Personally, I've set some new goals for myself. I've been pretty slack on the carpooling, and I'm going to make an effort to carpool 1-2 times a week. I also need to start riding my bike to work every once in a while. And when the lightrail starts up this fall, I definitely want to experiment with that.

This week I also want to test drive a Prius. Why not?

Ok, after we got home, we decided something lighter would be nice, so we picked another documentary -- Mad Hot Ballroom. This is about a program for nine year olds in the NYC area that started 12 years ago, and now includes 6,000 school children. It's a dance class that culminates in a city wide competition, and the kids' drive to practice and win was amazing. The movie was alternately hilarious and touching, I completely loved it. How amazing to see these children -- mostly poor and from tough family situations -- learning the tango, rumba, foxtrot and swing.

So one movie on how to save the planet, and one movie on why. It was a great day.