Word: mads
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...parents, one of the more fascinating facets of AMC's period advertising drama Mad Men is its picture of child rearing in pre-childproofed, pre-co-sleeping 1960. There is a sense here that parents and kids have separate lives, and the kids' lives seem as alien, independent and dangerous as in caveman times: they ride in cars un-seat-belted, play with dry-cleaning bags and get sent off to shoot BB guns while the grownups have cocktails...
Like the adult characters' smoking and sexism, this is not model behavior. But does it make you a terrible parent to pine, just a little, for a time when the job was less all consuming? Contrast Mad Men with HBO's couples-therapy drama Tell Me You Love Me, in which, despite the buzz over its explicit sex scenes, the most interesting couple is the pair who never have sex. Dave (Tim DeKay) and Katie (Ally Walker) are devoted parents who haven't been intimate in a year--in part, simply because of the exhaustion of everyday chores and staying...
...great fan of chess," Pichuzkin told the police as he handed over his diary to the police. Indeed, his neighbors and friends confirm he was good at resolving problems on a chessboard, a talent to boast about of in chess-mad Russia. But he turned into bloodsport what a Nabokov character saw as an existential revelation. In The Defense the novelist wrote of one chess-obsessed character's epiphany: "...he had seen something unbearably awesome, the full horror of the abysmal depths of chess. He glanced at the chessboard and his brain wilted from hitherto unprecedented weariness. But the chessmen...
...also suspect that the portrait of his mother is partly fanciful. She has the melodramatic sulfur of the mad mom in one of David Sedaris' "memoir" stories, the domineering vindictiveness of a shrew-mother from 40s movies. In fact, she's played in the film by none other than Ann Savage, the virulent megabitch Vera in Edgar G. Ulmer's cheapo noir classic Detour. That was 62 years ago, and now, at 86, she is the icy Queen Maddin, standing in for all the city's overbearing women. (As narrator, he says, "Never underestimate the tenacity of a Winnipeg mother...
...hard to imagine today that a half-century ago, TV was essentially the Internet: a wicked-cool invention that experimentalists would toy with just to see what crazy stuff they could make it do. Ernie Kovacs was the most innovative of TV's early mad scientists, using his comedy hour to spoof such then new creations as newscasts and ads and employing visual effects like upside-down pictures and tilted sets to appear to defy gravity. Comedy is lying done amusingly, and Kovacs knew that TV--which purported to show all but hid everything beyond the outline...