Archive for August, 2008
Link: Can Violence be Funny (Pineapple Express)
Posted by Nirav | Filed under Movies
My new friend Allie hit my problem with Pineapple Express on the nose, and I didn’t even know what it was until I read her post. After a careful background of her love for Judd Apatow films, she continues:
I offer all of this as a preface because I’m feeling kind of lukewarm about Pineapple Express, and I’m not entirely sure why. It’s not that the movie isn’t funny — I laughed out loud during it, many times in fact. I’m just not sure that its overall subject matter is necessarily something that should be mined for humor. Yes, it’s about stoners, but after its first third, the movie isn’t really about pot at all. It’s an action movie, and a pretty violent one at that.
And of course, she’s absolutely right. I really was expecting this to be stoner movie, and that’s a movie that I would have enjoyed. But then it transitioned to being a pseudo-realistic action movie, and I just lost interest. I like action, but not gratuitous violence and death.
Being a comedy, I’d expect the action sequences to at least be funny, like the horrifyingly nervous-giggle-inducing Very Bad Things. But instead, as Allie concludes:
I don’t have a lot of taboos in my brain, and I enjoyed the hell out of every single one that Team Apatow has broken, but violence seems to just be something that isn’t really rife with humor for me.
She does yet hold out hope for “Team Apatow”, and tentatively, I do too. It remains to be seen where his movies are going; I hope it’s not in the direction of Pineapple Express.
Via, of course, Allie on biggest mirror.
Video: Jerry Seinfeld Returns to Stand-Up
Posted by Nirav | Filed under Miscellaneous
Sometime in 2007. The best comedians always bring it back to the beginning at the end.
Small Talk with a Web Designer
Posted by Nirav | Filed under Miscellaneous, Movies
Found this gem on Digg, on MONSTER-MUNCH, which is definitely going into my feedreader.
Video: It’s the Cloooouuuuud!
Posted by Nirav | Filed under Web Design
Web “Two-Oh” starts, gets chased off by Cloud Computing.
If the service goes down, you don’t even have to worry about it anymore. You just blame it on the clooouuuuud.
Via CenterNetworks, via Hacker News.
Again, They Almost Get It
Posted by Nirav | Filed under Miscellaneous
But not quite. Boris writes about the lack of Olympics video embedding:
I wanted to embed some videos of Olympic events on my blog, but unfortunately NBC has been shutting down videos all across the Internet for copyright infringement. Instead of making content embeddable everywhere, they choose to keep it in their silo. I should be able to easily share any piece of Olympic content to my friends on Facebook or on my blog. I should be able to find any Olympic video quickly on YouTube. Unfortunately that’s also not possible.
This seems like such an obvious thing to enable that I wonder if they fired the person who decided to put the Olympics online in the first place (a Very Good Idea). Not only that, but they’re shutting down any other Olympics videos on YouTube or similar sites for copyright infringement; i.e., there’s no possible way to legally share the Olympics. Even branded Olympics!