http://wharper.tumblr.com/

longer clip here

The Coens’ new movie’s trailer is online now.

I assume this is only routed through the iTunes store because this is a ‘Red Band Trailer’, resulting in a far more accurate age-verification restriction on this.  I’m sure there’s a lesser quality version floating out there in Interweb land, if you’re not on a Quicktime-friendly system.

While Tracy Morgan’s Weekend Update pro-Obama rebuttal to Tina Fey’s previous Hillary defense was great, it was the absurd SNL Digital Short “The Mirror” (2:40) that I thought deserved some attention on here.

Sadly, the site’s Embed feature isn’t playing well with WordPress right now, so please excuse the linking. I tried.

(inital heads-up via DaringFireball)

http://twitter.com/wharper

“He had this wonderful system for doing the garlic. He used a razor and he used to slice it so thin that it would liquefy in the pan with just a little oil. It was a very good system.”

Somehow I’m guessing that they didn’t manage to show this sequence before the movie started, sadly.

[via]

Apparently the song was sung by the Pointer Sisters. (wikipedia)

[via]

While Dickensian may be an appropriate description, I far prefer David Simon’s description of his series/tv-novel from this conversation with Nick Hornby for the Believer (via kottke – whose original post I’m pretty much copying here, honestly – the quote is so good, though, it bears repeating):

Another reason the show may feel different than a lot of television: our model is not quite so Shakespearean as other high-end HBO fare. The Sopranos and Deadwood—two shows that I do admire—offer a good deal of Macbeth or Richard III or Hamlet in their focus on the angst and machinations of the central characters (Tony Soprano, Al Swearingen). Much of our modern theater seems rooted in the Shakespearean discovery of the modern mind. We’re stealing instead from an earlier, less-traveled construct—the Greeks—lifting our thematic stance wholesale from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides to create doomed and fated protagonists who confront a rigged game and their own mortality. The modern mind—particularly those of us in the West—finds such fatalism ancient and discomfiting, I think. We are a pretty self-actualized, self-worshipping crowd of postmoderns and the idea that for all of our wherewithal and discretionary income and leisure, we’re still fated by indifferent gods, feels to us antiquated and superstitious. We don’t accept our gods on such terms anymore; by and large, with the exception of the fundamentalists among us, we don’t even grant Yahweh himself that kind of unbridled, interventionist authority.

But instead of the old gods, The Wire is a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces. It’s the police department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomic forces that are throwing the lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no decent reason. In much of television, and in a good deal of our stage drama, individuals are often portrayed as rising above institutions to achieve catharsis. In this drama, the institutions always prove larger, and those characters with hubris enough to challenge the postmodern construct of American empire are invariably mocked, marginalized, or crushed. Greek tragedy for the new millennium, so to speak. Because so much of television is about providing catharsis and redemption and the triumph of character, a drama in which postmodern institutions trump individuality and morality and justice seems different in some ways, I think.