Tynan's Anger

• Mark Ravenhill, the Angry Gay Man of the '90s who once committed Tynan's Anger blasphemy by lambasting the Angry Young Men of the '50s, comes out with a pretty interesting argument against playwrights reading their plays aloud as good editing practice. Playwrights, Ravenhill says, understand dialogue better in their head, and reading it aloud makes dialogue sound worse than with an actor reading it. That is if you're a good playwright, but you don't have enough clout to have actors read it offhand, and you are as neurotic a reader as I am. I guess it makes sense, though it may just be Ravenhill's attempt to counter what every playwriting teacher teaches just cause he can. How provocative!
• Sarah Palin and McCain have started a disturbing trend by equating science funding with earmark spending. With McCain, this tend is probably just macho military hatred of nerds. But according to Slate, in Palin's case, it's a sign of her anti-intellectualism and Fundamentalist Christianity. While it still must seem ridiculous to the rest of the world that this approach has any legitimacy in the U.S., the good thing is that it seems to be on the way out. The evangelical/Fundamentalist Christian hatred of science, which just 4 years ago seemed like half the country, now seems like a smallish minority. Of course, as Richard Hofstadter would tell you, that should change back to anti-intellectualism in the next 20 years—maybe twice.
• Kenneth Turan is now the only full-time film critic at the Los Angeles Times. Carina Chocano announced that she was one of the staffers canned in the latest editorial purge. Now, at the major paper in the capital of the American film industry, there's only one full-time critic and a bunch of freelancers. True, the L.A. Times has got perhaps America's best critic in Turan, but this is a depressing development all the same.
• Tracy Morgan is a human roller coaster, but it's worth it for the material he produces on 30 Rock. At this point, all Morgan has to say is "Liz Lemon" and I'll burst out laughing. Other than the schmaltzy ending, my only major complaint about Thursday's 30 Rock premiere was that they didn't find more time for the Tracy and his porn video game subplot. The More Mozart/Salieri parallels, the better.
  
• Please, please, please, Sam Mendes, don't screw up Preacher. One of the best comic book series of the last 25 years, the one that got me into comic books in the first place, is finally hitting the big screen after a failed attempt at an HBO series. Mendes's Road to Perdition adaptation remains underrated, which particularly upsetting when you consider how ridiculously overrated American Beauty was. Preacher was a more comic book-y comic book than Perdition, so there's a lot of room for Mendes to either grow as a director or fail fantastically. But hey, it's less impossible of an adaptation than Watchman...
• The DMCA turned 10 years old this week. Everyone admits that the Clinton administration bill has shaped digital media to what it is today, just as everyone admits how infuriating and controversial the bill's details have been over the last 10 years. If I'm right, history will judge the DMCA to be as important as something like the GI Bill or the Homestead Act. Some day there will be an entire genre of a new arts media about the flame wars in the Old Web. Can Second Life be considered a 51st state?
  

Labels: 30 rock, angry young man, comic book movies, dmca, film criticism, los angeles times, mark ravenhill, preacher, sam mendes, science wars, tracey morgan