Random, 10/2

Must Reads

More Supermarkets, Please by PostBourgie. An excellent example of a simple fact – getting access to decent groceries is not a given for many Americans.

We partially won over Karl Smith when it comes to vanilla products. Hooray!

Movies

The Baader Meinhof Complex almost beat out “The Hurt Locker” as my favorite movie the summer. Hitchen’s review of it is spot-on and makes an excellent pre-read I thought.

I really didn’t like Inglourious Basterds. I wasn’t necessarily sold on the idea that it was Tarantino’s Nazi Movie (as opposed to his “WWII Heroes Movie”, which it wasn’t at all), but I realized after seeing it that I suddenly wanted to read The Kindly Ones, as opposed to watch Hogan’s Heroes or anything like that, so maybe it was.

Television

It’s disappointing that “Community” isn’t clicking with me. I am really rooting for Joel McHale’s career. I understand there’s a pilot of the BBC’s “The IT Crowd” for American audiences, with Joel McHale, and Richard Ayoade (who also played Dean Learner on “Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace”) reprising his role. I can see that being a disaster, but the longer Richard Ayoade is kept from American audiences, the more needless suffering there will be.

The season opener of House was amazing.

When I was younger, some friends and I wrote out some scripts for a small serial called “Dictionary Red”, who would be an late 20s boozy former kid wonder detective (like “Encyclopedia Brown”) trying to get his game back. We never filmed it, but I always liked the idea. I think others like the idea too – it showed up in part in Joe Meno’sThe Boy Detective Fails (“presents former child sleuth Billy Argo at 30, having just finished a 10-year stint in a mental hospital, where he was confined after his teenage sister Caroline’s suicide. Unhappy, painfully shy and doped up on antianxiety drugs…”)

So I can’t describe to you how much I am loving HBO’s Bored to Death. Jason Schwartzman as an adrift writer trying to be a private detective, Zach Galifianakis, etc. The idea that a future episode will contain Patton Oswalt commenting on whether or not one needs night googles would make me tune in regardless of anything else. It all works for me, and I recommend you check it out.