Archive for Video
I hate nature
Posted by: | CommentsOK, I don’t actually hate nature, but my niece made me watch this video yesterday and I had to share. It’s not exactly new — it’s been around since late 2008 — but it made me laugh.
Warning: defiitely NSFW!
“This animal is bullshit!” Excellent.
Small Screen Stakeout: Feb 5, 2009 (Episode 4)
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Click the red play button to listen to the podcast now, or subscribe to it by clicking the “download” button.
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Topics we discuss this week: Christina’s emotional speech on Grey’s Anatomy, Olivia and Peter’s “date” on Fringe, Michael’s reaction to the changes on The Office, Lisbon’s compromising situation(s) on The Mentalist, and why we like The Good Wife.
Plus, this new Funny or Die parody video starring Nicol Paone:
We’ll be taking a month or so off, partly due to the Olympics, so look for a new episode on March 12.
“Some people are getting kittens.” Love it.
Small Screen Stakeout: Jan 29, 2010 (Episode 3)
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Veronica and Linda team up to fight the power on Better Off Ted, Bones calls Booth out on his relationship with his brother on Bones, and the American Idol auditions include an awkward scene in which Ryan Seacrest gets pissed off at a guy hitting on him.
Lori and I discuss all this and more — including our thoughts on the iPad — in this week’s episode of Small Screen Stakeout.
We also review The Dirty Bomb Diaries, a low-key but effective 16-episode series chronicling the experiences of a young woman (played by Misty Van Cleve) in the aftermath of disaster: If you were trapped in a city after a radioactive Dirty Bomb detonated, what would you be willing to do? Who would you become? Witness the conflict through the eyes of a single woman struggling at Ground Zero with no supplies, sporadic phone service, a lack of police support and a city ready to tear itself apart. We discuss the making of the series and tell the story of how we survived the great Seattle earthquake of 2001.
You can watch the first two episodes below, and the rest on Clicker.com.
Small Screen Stakeout: January 22, 2010 (Episode 2)
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This week on Small Screen Stakeout, Lori and I cover the JFK conspiracy on Bones, Better Off Ted’s bagel-throwing contest, the latest American Idol auditions, Sarah Paulson’s terrific performance on last week’s Law and Order: SVU, the Samantha Bee/sexual harassment episode of the last Law and Order, Callie and Arizona’s “hot” makeout session on Grey’s Anatomy, the flashbacks on The Office, and the premiere of the new ABC legal drama The Deep End — which needs a lot more depth. Plus, Defying Gravity, Caprica, and Sofia Vergara on Ellen.
The web series we’re discussing this week is last summer’s high-profile web series Foreign Body, a 50-episode prequel leading up to the release of Robin Cook’s new medical thriller of the same name.
Here’s a compilation of the first four episodes (they’re only two minutes long each). If you’re a glutton for punishment, you can watch the rest of the episodes on the series’ official site.
To say Foreign Body is a parade of sexist and cultural stereotypes is an understatement — not to mention the plot is confusing and the acting sub-par. It’s all especially appalling when you consider that it was backed by Michael Eisner, sponsored by Honda, and cost $10,000 an episode to make. But more about that in the podcast!
Add your thoughts on this and the rest of this week’s topics in the comments.
Small Screen Stakeout: January 15, 2010 (Episode 1)
Posted by: | CommentsClick the red play button to listen to the podcast now, or subscribe to it by clicking the “download” button.
To subscribe to the rss feed for this podcast, paste http://sarahwarn.com/podcasts/small-screen-podcast.rss in your RSS reader (we don’t yet have it in iTunes).
Lori and I spend so much time discussing the TV shows we watch, we decided to launch a weekly podcast so you all can share in the fun/arguments. This week we cover Bones, Better Off Ted, American Idol, Fringe, Law and Order: SVU, Grey’s Anatomy, Modern Family, and my personal favorite, The Good Wife, as well as two two new web series/videos which I’ve embedded below so you can watch them before listening, if you want to.
This being our first audio podcast, it’s a little on the long side, and includes a lot of rambling asides — from six degrees of Sanaa Lathan, to the benefits of marathoning TV shows, to why we hated the latest Twilight movie New Moon. It clocks in at around an hour and half, so you may want to multi-task while you listen.
Hope you enjoy it, and let me know in the comments if you agree/disagree with our take on a show or episode.
Sites I like: Clicker.com
Posted by: | CommentsA tweet from Scribegrrrl tipped me off to Clicker.com, an interesting just-out-of-beta site that bills itself as “the complete guide to Internet Television.”
Started by “a passionate team of TV-loving freaks with search engine, media, data and content management backgrounds,” Clicker.com is “one part directory, one part search engine, one part wiki, one part entertainment guide, and one part DVR [and] contains more than 450,000 episodes, from over 6,000 shows, from over 1,200 networks, tens of thousands of movies, and 50,000 music videos from 20,000 artists.”
You can easily browse videos by type of content (TV, movies, web originals and music) as well as genre (drama, comedy, action, etc.). Some of the videos are embedded, but many listings link off to other sites (e.g. the Buffy the Vampire Slayer listing sends you to TheWB.com).
There are internet video sites like NewTeeVee.com and TubeFilter.com that review and/or feature original web series; sites like Hulu that only feature online video related to network TV content; and sites like YouTube that include all of the above as well as soft porn, fan videos, and video blogs.
But this is the first I’ve come across that focuses on aggregating all “television or television-quality” web video, regardless of who produced it, and it most likely won’t be the last.
A site like Clicker.com would seem to be at a significant competitive disadvantage to popular and well-funded sites like Hulu and YouTube. But the diversity and huge volume of videos on YouTube is both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness (it’s easy to get overwhelmed when searching for something, and the increasing number of spam videos are annoying), and as popular as Hulu is, they’re held hostage by Hollywood’s profitable but confusing to consumers windowing strategy which makes content available on Hulu only at certain times (Hulu includes some independent web series, but buries them beneath the studio content).
Hulu expects these windows to “converge over time,” but until then, there’s a gap to be filled by sites like Clicker.com.
And I’m on board with any site that helps me find ways to watch the web series Anyone But Me, a Feist music video, episodes of Lincoln Heights, and The Secret of NIMH.
Andrea’s high school reunion
Posted by: | CommentsA friend just tipped me off to this funny video called “I Remember Andrea,” about a woman named Andrea Wachner who hired a stripper to attend her high-school reunion in her place, basically to have some fun at her classmates’ expense.
The Real Andrea (Andrea Wachner)
Real Andrea rigged up a video camera at the event ahead of time, fed Fake Andrea info about each classmate through an ear piece, and then sat back and watched the resulting fun from a nearby hotel room, via a live feed on her laptop.
Fake Andrea
The resulting funny/awkward scenes include Fake Andrea asking one classmate “Am I only the only stripper in the class?” and asking a male (Republican) classmate, “are you straight or gay?” Sadly, Fake Andrea did not claim to have invented the Post It or quick-burning cigarettes, which would have made it even funnier, but I suppose that would have been tipping her hand too much.
“Andrea” chats up a former classmate
Naturally, Fake Andrea ends up stripping at the end of the evening, which finally tips off some of her classmates to the fact that everything might not be quite as it seems.
Watch it here:
The video kind of meanders at the end, but I love the effort and creativity that went into this. As one commenter said about it on YouTube said “you might have won the internet.”
“I Remember Andrea” is currently making the film festival rounds — you can read more about it on IRememberAndrea.com and its Facebook fan page.
“Riese”: a web series about a woman, a wolf, and a walk in the woods
Posted by: | CommentsThis weekend saw the debut of a new bi-monthly web series, Riese, about “A reluctant heroine [who] travels with her wolf through a collapsing world, outrunning a dangerous religious cult and piecing together her past.”
The heroine is played by Christine Chatelain (Sanctuary), sporting a Natty Gan-meets-Lena Headey as Sarah Connor look.
Here’s the first episode:
The pacing is a little slow — six minutes of running through the woods might work on a bigger screen, but gets boring quickly on a computer monitor (especially if you have buffering issues) — and not much happens in the first episode, but it’s nice to see a female-powered web series (and one with fairly high production values) getting so much promotion.
Women stripping to promote awareness of climate change? Not hot.
Posted by: | CommentsNon-profit 350.org is promoting their Global Day of Climate Action with a video ad of women stripping. Because nothing says the planet’s going to hell on a melting glacier like women in their underwear.
This sort of advertising from for-profit companies is de rigeur, as Huffington Post blogger Alex Leo outlines in “Five Sexist Trends the Advertising World Just Can’t Shake. Sites like Jezebel regularly track sexist ads, like this recent Reebok commercial:
And print ads for cars:
