New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

Degrassi: The Next Generation (Season 1) - I tore through all 13 episodes in one weekend. I have a severe love for this Canadian teen drama in all its incarnations and hope to one day do a column on Degrassi Junior High. I keep collecting the new seasons as they come out on DVD, certain that at any moment they will finally stop making the show and I can watch the entire saga from start to finish. Which is another way of saying, I haven’t watched anything since the first season and they are now up to Season 10.

Melvin Goes to Dinner - Very rarely do I watch a film immediately after it ends. I watched Melvin three times in a row (granted, it is a short film). Kind of like My Dinner with Andre for Generation X, it’s foul-mouthed and feisty, but also unexpectedly tender. I still am not sure how director Bob Odenkirk kept this from spinning off axis into something resembling his and David Cross’ Mr. Show series, but his restraint is admirable and he gets wonderful cameo and uncredited work from himself and Cross, as well as Jack Black, Melora Walters, Fred Armisen, Maura Tierney, and Laura Kightlinger. With its themes of pushing back against the stasis in our lives, a need for something profound to fill a spiritual void, and the life-impacting effects of carrying on an affair with a married woman (which, I dunno, might have carried some resonance for me at the time), it winds up being more fulfilling than its deceptively simple parts would suggest.

The Office - Yes, I enjoyed the BBC series and cringed horribly every moment that Ricky Gervais so completely embodied the cluelessness, callousness, and overall venality of David Brent (i.e. all of them) but what sticks with me is the DVD menu screen from the (I believe) first series. It played ambient office sounds — background chatter, fluorescent lamps buzzing — in an eternal loop that I would swear never repeated. I left it on for days as a kind of white noise. It was oddly calming and soothing.

And I got better about watching on small screens. I would rent a portable DVD player for non-stop flights from Portland out to Long Island, during my stint as a corporate trainer for a mortgage and banking company. I would while away lonely evenings on the road in anonymous hotel rooms watching obscure foreign films or the Harry Potter series (for the first time) with a company loaner laptop.

I have never owed a flat-screen nor a home entertainment system, but the former now looms on the horizon as a distinct possibility and I realize that with the ability to play movies on gaming systems or to connect my computer to my television and stream off the web and watch on a much more appropriate-sized screen, that my narrative smacks of more than a little antiquated nostalgia. I certainly don’t see technology as the enemy, but neither have I ever felt the drive to own the newest, the flashiest, to stay on top of the latest “toys.”

Continued:       1       2       3       4       5