Tag: Television

David Milch's new gig

One of many articles out in the last few weeks about the new show from David Milch, the man who brought us the glorious Deadwood.
David Milch mines his imperfect past in ‘John From Cincinnati’ – Los Angeles Times

Milch was quite a mess, according to him, for about 30 years, but then got above it. I liked this quote:

Milch got sober 8 years ago through “God’s grace,” he said. “To me, sobriety is taking the world as I find it. Trying to glorify it in its complexity, its reality, its beauty, its horror, and not try to judge it.”

It’s not just a great way to define sobriety; to me it sounds like the best definition of Faith I’ve possibly ever heard.

I’m not a fan of surfing movies or shows, I hate beaches, and “surf-noir” sounds like, I dunno, Beach Boys in a minor key? But I’m going to give “John” a chance — after all, before Deadwood, I never thought I’d watch another TV Western.

SCIFI.COM | The Lost Room

lostroom

I don’t know if anyone else is watching SCIFI.COM | The Lost Room, but it’s occurring to me how much like a game experience this show is. I’ve played Silent Hill a good bit (with the help of online walkthroughs, since I have no patience for wandering these games endlessly) and there are similarities there. But in general, it has a sort of game logic — there’s someone to rescue, and in order to do so, you have to go through difficult tasks to accumulate special objects. There’s an internal logic to it all, rules to the game, that are discovered as you go. And there’s a narrative arc keeping it all tied together.

I know it’s not the first movie or tv experience to do those things to some degree, but this is the purest example I can recall that seems to have been almost completely inspired by adventure-game mechanics. It makes me wonder how much digital games are going to continue to inspire and shape traditional media and storytelling.

Space 1999 as design showcase

I ran across a link to The World Of Kane today, and it’s really cool. Lots of design examples from the 60s-70s. And lo and behold, there were a bunch of stills from my favorite show as a kid, Space 1999. The caption says this is a “Sorella lamp by Studio Technico Harvey.”

Space 1999 designer lamp

Such a jolt of deja-vu. I haven’t seen an episode of this series in years. I may have to rent them soon, now. Especially now that I realize there’s so much cool design to look at … it did something for me as a kid (of 8 or 9) though, I’ll admit. But at the time it just felt *cool*…

But then again, anything looks cool with Zienia Merton standing in front of it. (I’ll confess, I think I had a tiny crush on her even when I was 9.)

via Boing Boing