Tag Archives: satire

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The Onion News Network

One of the interesting trends of the past few years involves a sort of democratizing of art and culture, whether it be in the form of blogs, podcasts, youtube, whatever.  It is just a lot easier to produce content, even if the same media oligopoly still exists on a large level.  The same dreck that gets lapped up by major record labels, studios and whatnot still hold – indeed witness a show like Two and a Half Men being the top rated sitcom on TV BEFORE Charlie Sheen decided to do whatever the hell it is he is doing.  But it is easier to find nooks and crannies for a consumer – and it feels like producers of niche entertainment can find niche audiences easier.  As Bill Simmons in his podcast noted, the idea that a channel could take reruns of The Larry Sanders Show and Freaks and Geeks and other stuff for people who like critically acclaimed stuff – and subsist on that entirely – is kind of amazing.  After all, Bravo tried it for years until it transitioned into a place for botox-laden housewives and reality television contestants to cavort.  But indeed IFC has done just that – obtaining many of these terrific properties that are destined to have a small loyal following.

Within this lineup, The Onion News Network is perfect – a brilliant critique of television cable news which takes up some of the ground that The Daily Show once did before it started inexorably creeping towards being the type of show that it was lampooning.  In its 2011 form, Jon Stewart’s show these days seems to be focused on making fun of the content of news programs and the stupid things politicans say.  By contrast, The Onion News Network focuses on not just content but style – creating a set and look so convincing, that it could very easily be The Situation Room without much stretching at all.  Like The Colbert Report, the entire production FEELS like a real program – and then it stuffs itself with ridiculousness.

As mentioned above, the star of the show is the set.  The Onion lovingly borrows all of the staples of CNN.  We see the large video screen like the one Wolf Blitzer uses, there is overpopulated panel of experts with their laptops (so they can pretend they are actually working).  Manning the host’s position is Brooke Alvarez – who looks a little like Rita Cosby – and she is expert at speaking with that sort of “I’m Brooke Alvarez and you’re not” smug self importance that make individuals like Blitzer or Lawrence O’Donnell so creepy.  In the episode I caught, they covered a summit meeting between Washington and Real America.  The satirical point of the story itelf is straightforward and well played, but what elevates it is the toss back and forth from the studio to the “remote location”.  The show looks and sounds right.  Just like CNN, the screen also contains the headline, and the crawl that seems to specialize in showing only the most disposable of news items.  Other stories of course are very much in The Onion tradition – absurd but presented without a wink.  This is good satire, the sort of thing that actual CNN correspondents and Gloria Borger types might not fully appreciate as their empty headed bleatings go on uninterrupted.

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The Master and Margarita

Before I dive into this fully (and there is a lot to dive into), I will note that this is the first book I read on the Sony Reader.  I was worried that my eyes might get tired or something like reading a computer screen, but the E-Ink technology really is pretty good.  I use the Pocket E-Reader which means I don’t get wi-fi or a touch screen.  On the other hand, the reader is very compact, and the managing of the books is easy.  If I dive more into the Gutenberg project, this will be invaluable.  Anyway, now for the review.

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Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, the #1 on Keith Law’s 100 Greatest Novels list, is a savage satire of life in Stalin’s Soviet Union.  Of course, like any good novel, it does not stop with the tone of satire, but instead also touches notes of sadness and hope in its parallel stories.  In particular, Bulgakov spins a tale of Moscow under the enforced atheism (consider the deep irony of that turn of phrase) of the Communist regime – and speculates about what would happen if Satan visited.

Indeed, Satan DOES visit – and descends upon Berlioz, the head of the state sponsored literary guild, and Ivan, a poet who is writing atheistic poetry for the State.  The Devil talks to Berlioz about being witness to the execution of Jesus, and tells the story of Pontius Pilate, the governor of Rome who oversees said execution.  And (I am not giving anything away here), the Devil summarily predicts how Berlioz will die.  Berlioz pooh poohs what he sees, and indeed … well, no points for figuring out what happens.

In a lot of ways, a one sentence description of The Master and Margarita could be “the Devil starts some shit in Moscow”, and the first half of the novel is dedicated to Satan’s causing mischief – exposing people’s dirty laundry, sending others to death, culminating with a lovely scene where he gives clothes to all the women in town and rather inconveniently takes them all away.  Bulgakov has fun with this savaging, and as a reader, it is actually quite breezy.

However, at the second book, we start discovering a sadder tale.  We learn of the Master, a guy who was divined Pontius Pilate’s story and is engulfed by the effort to write the book.  In this story, Bulgakov is less satirical, and we see a man who is holding up free thought (in this manifestation, non-atheism).  As the master is engulfed he eventually leaves his wife, the Margarita of the story, and she has spent her time waiting for him to return, or living in suspended animation as he is all that matters to her.

What works throughout the novel is Bulgakov’s imagery – that of Satan, Margarita.  The novel is clearly contemporary to its time.  Particularly audacious is Bulgakov’s portrayals of Jesus and Satan.  In fact, Satan could be argued to be the real protagonist in the story.  The Master and Margarita’s fate is essentially adjudicated by Satan and his crew, and indeed they are not presented as simply evil personified.  While nobody would confuse Bulgakov’s Devil with Martin Luther King, he is much more nuanced than an instrument of evil.  Really he seems more a messenger of the divine message than anything – someone to smite those so aggressively denying the existence of God … and perhaps by extension less the existence of any other mode of thinking than a state sponsored one.

Is this the greatest novel of all time?  What is tough when you get to these sorts of lists is personal criteria, and so much of the context and knowledge of reservoir literature of the time is important.  Bulgakov references the Bible and Dostoyevsky and classic Russial Literature, all allusions that are less resonant to yours truly than to others.  While this limits its “super greatness” to me, even not being 100% familiar with everything out there, it is still a very good read.  Bulgakov’s passion and sense of justice drive the story along, and the wit and irony are there, even if a reader (like me) does not know ALL of the nooks and crannies.  It is very readable for a “classic” (even with the textured weaving of the Jesus, Moscow and Master threads), and definitely a worthwhile book to get around to – if nothing else as a useful artifact of what Communism was like from the inside.

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The Good, the Bad and the Weird

The Good, the Bad and the Weird (or Joheunnom Nabbeunnom Isanghannom if you like phonetic spelling of Korean titles) might be the truest movie title of all time.  An obvious spoof on Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns, Ji-Woon Kim’s successfully captures much of Leone’s self conscious directorial mannerisms to the degree that the film is at times totally incomprehensible.  (now as to whether this is meant to be part of the satire is a point of debate certainly, but I think I have seen enough movies to be able to recognize a satirical wink from the director if it indeed was there)  That said, the movie is not boring, it is pretty well made, and in its quieter passages, it is in fact pretty funny.

The movie starts with a train robbery where a treasure map is being pursued by the three combatants.  No explanation is provided, indeed no backstory is told of any significance – the map is a MacGuffin, and so it really becomes about the chase.  The movements on the train, the dialogue, the action, basically serve entirely to introduce the three individuals – all good performances and all clearly studied Leone closely:

Park Do-Won (The Good) – As played by Woo-sung Jung, he is the implacable silent hero.  With his cowboy hat, limited dialogue and very very deft shotgun, Park Do-Won is a perfect tribute to the archetypal Clint Eastwood hero.  That Jung lacks Eastwood’s weathered features – and thus some additional kickass hardness – is not a huge problem.

Park Chang-Yi (The Bad) – Played by Byung-hun Lee, he is the tribute to the Lee Van Cleef character in the Leone film.  Indeed his behavior and mannerisms are pretty menacing.  He is a cold blooded killer, seen sharply in a movie with a startling amount of gore (more on that later), and had a chance to be menacing if he did not look like Prince.  Actually, he looks less like Prince as the Prince who took out Charlie Murphy in basketball:

Maybe it’s just me.  (shoot the J!)

Yoon Tae-Goo (The Weird) – in his work playing the Eli Wallach character, Kang-ho Song gives the best performance in the movie.  Fast talking, desperate and not what he seems, Yoon Tae-Goo is simply a con man after treasure.  Much like the Eli Wallach character, he seems twirpy and helpless, but you can see it as a defense strategy – his tools for getting by.

So, those are the sides – we have seen them inside a nonsensical train robbery, then comes pursuit of the treasure.  It is in these passages that the movie starts to take some shape as good satire.  We get scenes of The Good and The Weird in the desert (Japanese occupied Manchuria here), complete with a useful scene of doublecrossing.  We see what Yoon Tae-Goo does when he has a chance to escape – and it leads to a very funny scene in a whorehouse, where a sadistic pimp suffers an end that, yes, would have been at home in Pulp Fiction.  There are also encounters with the Bad, which turn into firefights whose spatial and plot reality seem completely obfuscated – really it is just the chance for Kim to film some very deft action sequences, although for a comedy, the gore level is a bit much … Tarantino controls his effects much better on that front (just to name one).

All of this culminates with a chase for the treasure in the desert which is right out of Raiders of the Lost Ark in addition to the Western tradition, and for me at least, it evoked The Road Warrior as well.  At this point, Kim dispenses with plot entirely and is just filming kills.  (I did not stay long enough to see if there was an assurance that no horses were harmed in filming – whatever assurance that might have been, color me skeptical)  This makes it like a funnier Saw on some level, but I found it a bit distracting.  That said, when it gets to the final three finding the treasure map X … it ends more or less exactly as it has to.

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Startling Redskins News

Obviously, it has to be The Onion:

WASHINGTON—Washington Redskins head coach Jim Zorn held a press conference Sunday to reassure fans that, despite an inability to effectively execute their offense, defense, or special teams, the Redskins were still somewhat comparable to a real football team. “It’s been a tough season so far, and even though we are 2-4, we still have players, uniforms, Motorola headsets—all the components that technically constitute an NFL team, sort of,” Zorn said while grimacing and making a “so-so” gesture with his hand. …