Andy Greenwald

You are currently browsing articles tagged Andy Greenwald.

“These Days, Transparency Is A Requirement For A Young Comedian”

March 6, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Andy Greenwald has a really good article at Grantland about comedy in the time of Twitter and Instagram, inspired by Jimmy Fallon’s attempt to be crowned the new King of Late Night, but I don’t know that I agree with his conclusion about contemporary comics being “transparent.” The long tail of distribution and the decentralization of media have made for more opportunities to pursue our dreams even if most of those positions pay far less or not at all. Comics, like anyone else in media, need to place advertisements for themselves on as many channels as possible. But I don’t think that means that we get to see the real person any more now than we have in the past, except for the rare slip-up. Ubiquity is one thing but reality another. And our so-called Reality TV era has very little to do with being real. It’s still scripted, just with worse writing.

Fallon seems to be a younger and handsomer version of Jay Leno: a machine-like dispenser of entertainment who reveals very little of his real self except for the aspects he wants to stress in order to connect with his audience. If anything, he’s smoother, not as rough around the edges, having knocked about less, never having been homeless and arrested for vagrancy the way Leno was when he was trying to make his way in the L.A. stand-up scene. That’s not an insult to Fallon. There’s nothing wrong with him creating an image for himself, but it never feels particularly revelatory on a personal level. We may see Fallon and his peers in the media constantly now, but constancy doesn’t necessarily reduce distance, and being more connected doesn’t really mean we’re any closer. From Greenwald:

“When Tina Fey was a guest on Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, she was friendly but reticent, wondering aloud how she’d continue to ‘stay opaque.’ But these days, transparency is a requirement for a young comedian. Audiences don’t want to be told jokes, they want to be in on them. Flubs and falls are endearing; seeing the cracks is what cracks people up. Jimmy Fallon has proven himself to be the ideal comedian for this moment because he understands that being funny is now a full-time gig, that oversharing is just another way of being generous. Forget leaving them wanting more: Fallon can’t ever leave them at all. He always has to be on, and so too does his show, tweeting out gags, offering up videos, and, with the help of the incomparable Roots, making Studio 6A feel like a madcap launching pad for creativity and joy, not just a destination for A-listers with projects to push. From across a generational divide and, for now at least, several tax brackets, Jerry Seinfeld and Jimmy Fallon seem to have reached the same conclusion at exactly the right moment. Comedy has a new mantra and it’s working like gangbusters: Always let them see you sweat.”

Tags: , ,

“Was I Consuming Media Or Was The Media Consuming Me?”

December 12, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

I’ve read a thing or two in the Hollywood trades that made the British anthology series, Black Mirror, sound like it’s right up my alley. Charlie Brooker’s Twilight Zone-ish program looks at the dark side of all things digital, which is a favorite topic of mine. (Though the bright side of technology is equally a fascination.) The first two paragraphs from Andy Greenwald’s wonderfully written Grantland consideration of the soul-shattering show and how we now live inside a series of screens, which seem like mirrors until we realize, perhaps too late, that they may be something else:

“Midway through ‘Be Right Back,’ the soul-cleaving fourth episode of the British anthology series Black Mirror, I sought refuge in a second screen. It happens sometimes when I watch TV, usually when things get too emotional, too painful, too intense. The mind can’t wander, so the hands do, fiddling with pens and scraps of paper, drumming on the desk. Eventually — inevitably — I found myself lifting up my iPhone, my thumb moving circles across its screen as if it were a rosary. The mindless swiping of Candy Crush Saga didn’t help me process my feelings about ‘Be Right Back,’ didn’t make it any easier to see Hayley Atwell’s face shattering like a dropped wine glass. But I guess it didn’t hurt much, either. Distancing myself made the experience of watching seem less passive. It restored a flickering feeling of control. I couldn’t handle what was coming at me, so I threw up a wall to stop it.

Modern life is full of little walls like that, tricks we can pull to blunt unwanted or unexpected impact. There’s always a game just a click away. Or a photo. Or a ‘friend.’ It’s actually what ‘Be Right Back’ is about. The episode begins by toying with our natural need to be distracted, placated, and protected from the world before demonstrating, in disturbing ways, how the world is increasingly designed to meet that need. It’s about how we’re willing to submerge ourselves in the comforting warmth of denial right up to the moment reality sidles up beside us and rips our hearts out of our chests. So was it ironic or inevitable the way I was idly crossing striped candies when Atwell yelled at Domnall Gleeson for not being fully present? (Gleeson played her boyfriend, or at least he had earlier in the episode. The specifics are both too confusing and too important to the overall experience to discuss here.) I was hovering on the edge of two screens, fully engaged in neither. Did that make me the viewer or the subject? Which one was the game and which was the drama? Was I consuming media or was the media consuming me?”•

__________________

The entire history of you:

Tags: ,

“Vampires And Dragons Are, After All, Far More Dependable Draws”

March 25, 2012 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

My favorite era of film runs from Easy Rider to The Man Who Fell To Earth, nearly a decade when auteurs were preeminent in Hollywood. So, my least favorite movies (though I recognize they aren’t bad movies) are Jaws and Star Wars, the blockbusters that marginalized personal films, that made the auteur the exception as opposed to the rule, that led to the dumbing down of not only mass movies but B films as well. For every Tarantino or Coen brother now, there are many Michael Bays. Not that Bay isn’t an auteur in his own way, but his vision is global and post-literate, democratic, yes, but only insofar as he seeks to titillate large audiences long enough to pick their pockets. His crass vision is particular to him not because of some great talent but because he’s the one who currently has control over the special-effects crews. It’s spectacle without a soul.

At Grantland, Andy Greenwald makes a compelling case that TV, which exploited the yawning opening in the auteur market, giving us brilliant, visionary shows like The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Curb Your Enthusiasm and Louie, among others, during a relatively short span, has likewise made a fatal shift toward the blockbuster. An excerpt:

“In a conversation last summer, Shawn Ryan, himself the creator of one of the Golden Age’s finer scriptures, The Shield, pegged the end of the era to the fall 2010 premiere of The Walking Dead. Not as any referendum on the zombie show’s quality but more of what it signified: by tripling the potential audience for a cable show and by doing so with genre spectacle, The Walking Dead was television’s Jaws moment. Like the flowering of American film in the ’70s, TV’s Golden Age was the product of new companies (or, in this case, channels) empowering creators because they didn’t know what else to do. The blockbuster success of The Walking Dead — along with Game of Thrones and True Blood — provided a way out, or at least around, the complicated power dynamic of the omnipotent showrunner. Vampires and dragons are, after all, far more dependable draws than David Simon’s cantankerous take on the social safety net. (To my mind, the Golden Age was also sunk by the rise of prestige simulacra, hollow shows like The Killing and Hell on Wheels that ganked the ponderous pacing and adult themes of contemporary critical darlings without any of the singular wit or perspective.)”

Tags: