In the 'quality' era, there is respite in 'The Bachelor,' the most honest show on TV:
"The Bachelor," now in its sixteenth season, offers things you won't find elsewhere these days.
Bio: Ben Parker is a doctoral student of English literature at Columbia University. His Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation (Which He Never Meant to Publish on Any Account) also appear on his blog They Call Them Millions and on Twitter.
Monstrously antifeminist, corny, and bloated (each episode is two hours long), it has all the intuitive appeal of the Holy Roman Empire. I've watched every minute of the last few seasons, including the spin-off "The Bachelorette"—even if this is only a little toe dipped into the sea of their twenty-three combined seasons. The show’s appeal is that most other reality TV offers up lives and locales (tattoo parlors, fashion designers, the mega-rich, the mega-fat, teen moms) that are hyperspecific and alien to most of us—while "The Bachelor," presenting head-on a dime-store romance set in exotic locales, lets slip through the High Definition cracks the grinding banality and burning humiliation of sharing oneself with another person. We all know these feelings. More
Posted on February 27th, 2012 1:26pm
“Film noir” is an awkward genre. On one hand, its stylistic features are easily codified—a morally ambiguous hero caught in a bind, a femme fatale, labyrinthine flashbacks, and high-contrast black-and-white photography—prompting any number of homages and parodies, from Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid. On the other hand, film noir is also something of a parasite, an atmosphere that invades otherwise innocent films and bends them to its generic will. Otto Preminger's Laura (1944) is one of the most beloved film noirs, not least because of its self-consciousness about the genre: is it a noir or a noir-ification of a gothic melodrama? More
Posted on January 3rd, 2012 9:37am
