Talking Movies

April 5, 2013

Any Other Business: Part VI

What is one to do with thoughts that are far too long for Twitter but not nearly long enough for a proper blog post? Why round them up and turn them into a sixth portmanteau post on television of course!


CSI: NY’s Pure Cinema

Some timing is so uncanny that it’s best regarded as semi-magical. I’d just seen Rear Window in the IFI’s magnificent Hitchcock retrospective when an hour later CSI: NY’s ‘silent’ season 9 episode ‘Unspoken’ popped up on RTE 2. I had somehow never heard that top writer/producer Pam Veasey had celebrated her return to the show after trying to salvage Ringer from its own absurdities with a high concept episode. So it was a slow penny dropping as I realised that the cold open had been entirely dialogue free, and that the subsequent scenes instead of using dialogue were going to lean on Green Day songs to carry the emotions. And what was startling was how well this worked. The CSI franchise has always showcased montages of forensic science scored by pop music, in which the audience sees the clues processed and turned into leads, but this episode realised that, in addition to such basic visual narrative, Lindsay searching a crowd for her lost toddler or an assassin visiting a hospital ward to kill Lindsay could work equally well as wordless sequences. Hitchcock believed in constructing purely visual narrative in which sound and vision worked together to convey character moments and suspenseful action without needing dialogue; and watching this episode just after Rear Window, such Hitchcockian skill in using sound but not dialogue stood out. It’s odd this episode got such a critical cold shoulder, and you can’t help but feel that a HBO show tossing aside dialogue and doing half an episode with only music by Yo La Tengo would have been hailed to the skies; and such nonsense by critics should enrage anyone who doesn’t subscribe to the idea that the true mark of a quality TV show is that it carries an R rating.


48: Part II

Yes, it’s time for the second instalment of what is in grave danger of now becoming an almost annual ritualised bashing of 02’s MVNO yoof spin-off 48 and its omnipresent and evermore infuriating promotion. Last May I wrote of my annoyance at ever-present TV ads, endless promo voiceovers on Phantom FM, and posters at every bus stop based around the 48 TV spot of a burlesque-costumed orgy in a massive warehouse space. 18 to 22 year olds, you see, have access to vast party spaces that exist only somewhere between 1970s New York and the copywriter’s imagination, where they conduct ‘oh so daring’ bisexual experimentation; but only between girls because that’s titillating whereas say James Van Der Beek and Ian Somerhalder making out a la The Rules of Attraction wouldn’t be. And then there was the voiceover, in which Irish names like Emer were dropped into the middle of a monologue delivered in the neutral tones of the American Mid-West. But then 48 went one better, their next advertisement was of the type which Charlie Brooker rightly labels a Japanese advert for an incomprehensible product. As I was listening to Gwen Stefani’s Love Angel Music Baby at the time this bothered me less than it should have, as one of the featured actresses was a pretty decent Harajuku Girl approximation of Stefani’s 2004 look. But now 48 return with another campaign featuring debauched Westerners – this time apparently in some Tijuana locale. It’s not bad enough that Meteor wrote the book on value, and are apparently determined to read it to us a page at a time in an English accent, 02 can’t seem to decide what bloody continent they’re advertising 48 in, America or Asia. Can you imagine an equivalent American firm pushing Irish-centric advertising in America…?


Create a free website or blog at