Tubefilter News

I suppose if one were to consider the ongoing legacies of former New York City mayors, you’d have to agree that Ed Koch remains an intriguing presence on the cultural landscape (at times annoying, others endearing), especially when compared with the likes of David Dinkins or the perpetually jack-ass impersonating Rudy Giuliani.

After a short stint in the late 1990s at the bench of the People’s Court, Koch is now reviewing movies. No film critic is he, but some will find his frankly honest, folksy delivery quite funny, and charmingly reminiscent of the late, great quintessential grandpa Al Lewis, or really any aging male that loves to kibitz and name-drop.

Mayor at the Movies is shot inside the office of the law firm where Koch is currently ensconced as a partner. In some installments Koch will address the camera directly, at other times with eyes wandering towards a non-existent cue card, and still others referring to a printed page held over his desk. The Mayor is never coy about coming clean: “I liked it!” he says about Inglorius Basterds. “Go see it, you’ll love it!” he adds with his still-present-at-84 Bronx-Jewish accent and a reassuring nod, in reference to the cathartic killing of Nazis as his review draws to a close. Koch also doesn’t deal with thumbs. He ultimately closes each review with: “This movie gets a plus (+)” or “This movie gets a minus (-),”

There’s an intimacy here that fans of Old Jews Telling Jokes will find familiar and others will find endearing. Koch is by no means polished. His reviews come complete with a plethora of uh’s and a steady patter of stammering, just to let you know that here, at Mayor at the Movies, everyone acts casual and we’re all friends.

As Obama continues to work on reviving the US’s reputation abroad, far too many of our countrymen are doing their best to throw a wrench in that process. For Sean McCaffrey, an Irish-American living in London, perpetuating the ugly American seems to be one of his top m.o.’s. And it frequently pays off with innovative, if often sophomoric, comedy.

Written, created by and starring Sean McConaghy as his alter ego Sean McCaffrey, Leave to Enter (taken from the technical term for someone granted entry into the UK by British immigration officers) does an exemplary job of raising the bar for web sitcoms, and could stir up interest in the form over in the UK.

McCaffrey is a young man of about 30 with a bushy mane and a fondness for rubbing his pale, hirsute torso with a mock territoriality (each episode commences with a hearty rub-down, or at least features McCaffrey bare-chested). He’s always over at his Irish girlfriend Donnla’s place (Donnla Hughes), pestering her or her sister Marie (Marie Ruane) about something or other that’s bugging him.

A running thread is Sean’s accusation of Marie using his (electric) toothbrush, a plot device that comes to a wet, wild and exuberant resolution in episode 3, complete with mock-Kubrickian flash edits and Beethoven’s 9th.

Each of the four episodes released so far (the series is slated for 22 total) reliably produces at least a full chuckle if not an all-out bout of cathartic laughs. Along the story line, we are constantly faced with Sean’s exhibitionist, drama king demeanor. He continually sabotages his relationship with the lovely (and reasonable) Donnla by acting like a high-maintenance man-child who just wants to get his way (though Sean is allegedly a chef, he comes across as more of an out-of-work actor).

leave-to-enter-logoFor an Irish-American, McConaghy conjures quite a bit of East Coast Jew. Physically, he reminds me of a cross between my second cousin and DJ Lubel. But personality wise, he’s not as nebbishy. He’s an in-your-face, sometimes trash-talking, always street-corner-rhymin’ Jay-Z worshipper who melds a bit of Swingers-era Vince Vaughn with Curly and a little Charlie Chaplin.

Twenty-five year old Jarrett Larson moved to Los Angeles to make it as a superhero-monkey cartoonist. For the moment, things are not going well. His Halo-intolerant girlfriend / sugar momma just dumped him, and he’s moved into an ominous, illegal commercial rental in a sketchy part of town with just a few boxes and his pug, Cheese. He still has his friends, of course (particularly his fellow Halo-playing teammates), and his sunny and bounding disposition is essentially intact.

But Jarrett’s voice-over tell us he has dreams of putting his cartoon character, Space Monkey, on the pajama pants of every kid in America by the age of 27. So, for the time being, he’s facing a mountain of feces (which may have been fired from his Space Monkey’s ‘feces canon’).

And so begins Singledom, an online series from the ‘stealth’ web TV outlet of Fox Television Studios, 15 Gigs. Singledom embraces a few flourishes of the experimental that you’d expect from a relatively new player in the digital content game. Unfortunately, it starts to feel ordinary once you realize it’s the confused twentysomething progeny of Sex andthe City and Superbad.

It’s not just that Jarrett and his core group of friends (two guys and a girl) banter at a table for four (albeit at a ‘rotisserie chicken-n-donuts’ joint vs. a SOHO brasserie), or that he and his buddies frequently engage in sex-related talk, or that the action plays out on top of a soundtrack all too reminiscent of Friends. It’s more that the creators have opted to take the well-worn path of introspective, post-collegiate man/woman/child making his/her way in a metropolis steaming with possibilities and disappointments.

Plus, it’s all accompanied by a fluffy voice-over. Don’t get me wrong, voice-overs can make a lot of sense for web video. They provide an opportunity to bring viewers up to speed within a limited time frame. But in Singledom, the added explanations dilutes the edgier elements of the series. The show loses some of its bite.

Singledom is created by Jonathan London, a young,accomplished film and commercial director and host of Geekscape. I suspect Fox TV must have had some say in the web series’ production,but for the sake of argument, let’s just say that London had total creative control. Who then, is the target audience? Gamers? No onscreen (game) play to speak of and the storyline doesn’t center around what happens when online addicts navigate real world relationships. Tweens? It’s a little too sexual.Folks in their twenties? Eh. It’s a little too immature. The more one tries to parse the question, the more it seems to be about portfolio-building for 15 Gigs and the director, and not much else.

Dallywood, beyond my original conception, is not at all about dallying. After all, buddies Jeff Hoferer (also the creator) and Bryan Massey are far too busy checking their IMDB Star Meters, psyching each other up before auditions (and then consoling each other), or staring at their vision board to be wasting any time. It took me a while to figure this out, but the physical location where the budding actors are not dallying isn’t in Hollywood, it’s in Dallas (hence the name). They’re kings of their own backyard scene, big fishes in a presumably little acting pond.

Hoferer and Massey (both keep their real names for their characters, presumably to keep their Star Meters churning) bond over auditions and bookings in an industry lingo that sounds familiar, but I’m guessing has its own Texas twang. They, of course, lack the post-pubescent charm of Clark and Michael, and the wisdom, bitterness, and writing chops of the Easy to Assemble crowd (both among many series with interior nods to the machine that is the entertainment industry).

Another thing that Dallywood lacks is funny. Hoferer himself seems to have inadvertently put it best when, in episode 4, after listening to buddy/neighbor Massey recount a bogus love anecdote involving a cupcake and a femme banal, he begins to hang himself from an Ikea plastic chair.

Okay, that’s probably a bit too harsh. Dallywood does have its moments. In episode 2’s ‘STARmeter,’ after Massey catches Hoferer with a tissue box and moisturizing lotion in front of the computer, he runs through the usually rote and overplayed list of self-congratulatory euphemisms, and scores nicely with ‘crisping your Glover.

Life in the 35th century doesn’t have to be dystopic. Well, then again, perhaps some amount of dystopia by then is inevitable. The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century A.D., a new IFC animated series from Dash Shaw (no relation and based on his upcoming graphic novel) comes with its share of alienation and androids. Yet our view into Shaw’s future world is pleasantly intimate, and even subject to hints of romance.

The artful animation is the key. Mixing hand-painted cells with occasional light touches of CG, Unclothed Man conjures and then assimilates references ranging from Charles Burns’ comics, to Bill Plympton’s hand-drawn animation, to the painterly aesthetic of the late video artist Jeremy Blake.

On the story side, our protagonist Rebel X-6 is part of an anti-android organization that goes undercover to inhabit roles typically given to droids. His assignment, of all things, is to be a drawing class model. People still draw in the 35th century? Well, yes and no. The students/drawers use devices that give them the ability to draw with their eyes. The lines are produced by paths the eyes take through the scope of an appropriately futuristic drafting tool (which all is sort of similar to a device we currently have in the 21st century). Rebel X-6 fools the art teacher, who assumes he’s a model droid when he’s in fact a human subterfuge.

Talk about bad timing. Just as my colleague recently noted the wide open field for fantasy football-themed programming to be explored, a couple of identically-named series have come along to narrow the window considerably. Perhaps for fantasy football addicts, the more content covering their passion the better, but for the rest of us, Rules of The League appears to be an early casualty.

A casualty by whom, you ask? Two words: The League. First, there’s the TV show The League, which recently debuted on FX. It seems that one of the main hurdles for web video to flourish and make it onto a wider [mainstream?] radar is that it keeps up with, if not transcends, some of the latest offerings from corporate entertainment, i.e. The Man. But with programming like The League – whose debut episode I caught a good chunk of over the weekend, and which looks to be kicking some serious ass – that’s going to be a tall order. Meanwhile, on the internet itself, another The League, now six episodes in, also appears to making rather respectable inroads, nicely balancing fandom rituals and vernacular with some of the daily challenges of life.

Thanks to these two entries alone, Rules of the League appears to be, dare I say it, late for the game. Well, for those still on board, here’s the story: Joel Ballard has recently become unemployed from the L.A. Times (ouch, I can relate) and is aiming to make a career of his fantasy football blog, which had gotten him the Times job, and the job, in turn, had kept him from the blog.

One of writer/director Adam Kerpelman’s strengths is his use of cross-platform communication—texts to video, video chatting, onscreen email lists – to nicely illustrate our electro-centric lives.

If for some reason you didn’t realize that The Broadroom is a Candace Bushnell production, whether by noticing her name right there below the title on the series’ website, or by way of the gestational buzz, well then she’s right there onscreen. The famous author introduces each episode, looking ever the quintessential confident Manhattan socialite, if a far more successful one than any of the characters she’s created.

Bushnell’s Sex and The City mega-franchise, love it or hate it, leaves behind a lot of baggage – a ‘guilty pleasure’ that for many overstayed its welcome (I’ll never be able to bring myself to watch the movie, and I’d like to think I’m not alone). The Broadroom’s first episode, ‘Husband Highjinks,’ is a messy affair, maybe Bushnell inadvertently working out some residual anger towards men and their perpetual shortcomings that didn’t make it onto HBO.

The series is written and created by Bushnell, and presumably produced with the budget of a medium-sized independent film. Maybelline’s project hosting is a bit like a one-off version of Lexus’ L Studio (home of Puppy Love and Lisa Kudrow’s Web Therapy), meaning it’s there, but it’s not intrusive in the programming (if you don’t count the tacky lipstick cursor). The actors aren’t drawing big box office numbers, but are more than recognizable, each taking on Bushnell’s modern woman archetypes. Along with Esposito, Balsam, McCann, and Bushnell, you have Jennie Garth of old school (and new school) Beverly Hills 90210 as the Natasha “The Breadwinner” and youngster Lauren Devereux as “The Millenial,” Brittney, presumably so younger viewers don’t write the show off.

When your online series is called Titsburg!, you don’t very much need the subtitle “a (dirty) web show.” The audience already knows it’s in for something risque. Creators Tavon Bolourchi and Chioke Nassor, along with pal Kristen Holbrook, could’ve gone with a tagline a touch more descriptive. Their program certainly is dirty and definitely NSFW, [...]