Ever wish you could travel back in time to see how our presidential and vice-presidential candidates were represented online—before they became household names? Well, thanks to Google, your wish has come true.
In celebration of its tenth year, the quintessential search engine now allows users to surf the Web like it’s January 2001. Plug in the individual names and you get the results circa 01/01. If this were golf, guess who’d be the big winner in terms of hits? Give up? It’s Sarah Palin.
Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 failed in ousting the Bush administration from the White House in 2004. Slacker Uprising, the new film by Moore documenting the 2004 tour of the same name, gives him one more chance to proclaim, “Mission accomplished,†and be correct this time. (On a personal note, I don’t see how this film could fail in getting rid of Bush.)
Or, Keeping Up with the Walshes
If there’s anything the TV industry trusts, it’s precedent, which has brought us a parade of Judge Wapner impersonators, provided sixty-seven variations on CSI and Law and Order, and given Chevy Chase the opportunity to have a late-night talkshow. In other words, precedent is responsible for some of the great travesties in televisual history. Following suit, the new 90210 is monopolizing on the uberhip ’90s original Beverly Hills 90210 and it’s all about being up-to-date.*
Airing on the illustrious FOX network, Do Not Disturb, at first blush, seems to get its name from the fact that it’s set in a hotel. But I discovered, too late, that it had been named by my TV Guide, warning me not to mess with this show because I wasn’t going to like what I saw.
With a chic New York City hotel as its backdrop, this half-hour sitcom centers a lot of its action in the bowels of a hotel, expelling awful things from its back-office mise-en-scène.
Ethan and Joel Coen (not to be confused with Etan Cohen, cowriter of Tropic Thunder, and Joe Colen, my porn name)Â put the audience in a privileged position with Burn After Reading. So much so, in fact, we feel that we are in cahoots with the brotherly duo.
This dark comedy oozes tragic irony, which the Sarcasm Society, if they can be believed, defines as the “form of irony [in which] the words and actions of the characters, unbeknownst to them, betray the real situation, which the spectators fully realize.” We know more than the characters and sit uncomfortably at times, and elatedly at others, as bits of information are misunderstood or imperceptibly slip by the characters in an intolerably cruel way.