"Paul Kedrosky: "I'm particularly fond of SmashingTelly given how it, in effect, Tivo-ifies the web"... Guy Dickinson: "David Galbraith has turned Smashing Telly into well, the new TV."... Fimoculous: "Best Blogs of 2007"... The Guardian: Video sharing on the net has uncovered a hoard of TV gems...and a number of sites have been established to lead us to them. Take smashingtelly.com."
about
"Smashing Telly is a hand edited collection of the best free, instantly available TV on the web. Not 30 second clips (now with added clips, good ones) of a dog on a skateboard, or the millionth person to mime the Numa song, but classic clips and full length programs, with a focus on documentaries and non fiction. Smashing Television, not Gimmick Television.
Each entry is like a postcard, a short piece of text which describes a moving picture."
For Memorial Day, Hunter Gatherer posted an excellent piece on the 1963 war film, The Victor. I recommend reading what he has to say in full, but here is the snippet that accompanies the clip above:
“The particularly strong portrayal of the less heroic side of war’s consequences was shocking given the year that the film was made. One scene in particular, purportedly inspired by the execution of Eddie Slovik, set the execution of a deserter in the last months of the war to Frank Sinatra’s rendition of ‘Have Yourself a Merry Christmas’.”
Pete Seeger represents a bygone era of protest, but arguably his most famous song, a version of Guantanamera, was not a protest song but a love song about a girl from Guantanamo. Ironically it makes a perfect protest song today simply by changing the ‘a’ to an ‘o’ and only open source software pioneer, Richard Stallman seems to have seen this. The second clip included here shows Stallman singing it.
Guantanamera is possibly my favorite song – as my wife can testify after I downloaded 7 different versions and played them on rotation for a week.
There are some other classic versions below the Stallman one, by Celia Cruz and Joseito Fernández. Add any more you can find in the comments
Watching Spock singing ‘Bitter Dregs’ is like seeing your grandfather trying to break dance.
Somehow, however, the series that produced this, that morphed between high camp soap opera and philosophical science fiction has managed to generate a decades old cult following that has a better degree of social cohesion than many religions and without the internecine strife. Perhaps it’s precisely because people take Star Trek seriously but with a sense of humor that is absent among true zealots.
Somewhere in the universe, there will always be a place for the ‘vulcan harp award’ for squeamishly bad performing arts.
One of the few mini-clip-meme thingies that I can bear, unlike dogs on skateboards, is the whole YouTube fetish for dance or body movement stuff – from Parkour to ‘that nerdy looking dancing guy‘ – which lends itself to video bites.
Both Parkour and the Nerdy looking dancing guy show ordinary people doing extraordinary things, but in a format which is far more genuine than the formulaic arena of ‘_’s Got Talent’ and Susan Boyle.
My Choice: James Brown Gives You Dancing Lessons via Rob
Anyway, I’d like to put together an, ahem, postmodernly cerebral, definitive list of this stuff. Add to this list by embedding videos in comments.
(The title of this post is supposed to be ironic, I have not lost my mind).
I’ve installed Intense Debate’s Youtube embed plugin. To to try it out, post a clip of your favorite movie ending.
I’ll kick things off with mine. Its from the Deer Hunter. It’s the only film about Vietnam that I like, understated where Apocalypse Now is overblown, complex where Born on the 4th of July is one-dimensional and epic where Full Metal Jacket is narrow and specific.
The problem with many War films, for me, is that they create an anti-war statement that is macho and an opposition to violence that dwells in its pornographic depiction.
It’s difficult to display fighting as explicitly entertaining unless you are shooting bugs, villains with Hungarian accents or aliens, but if you make a ‘war is hell’ film like Apocalypse Now you can display the deaths of ordinary people with operatic grandeur.
The Deer Hunter is different. Most of the film is about context and relationships, and the war scenes themselves are limited to the blisteringly intense and emblematic depiction of Russian roulette. That the roulette scenes are the most popular on YouTube speaks to a depressing reality, that even in the Deer Hunter people strip out the build up and get straight to the dirty bits, like turning a love story into a porn clip. But in context, the violence in the Deer Hunter is neither gratuitous or unnecessary.
The Deer Hunter starts with a wedding and ends with a wake and in between weaves intertwined relationships that are complicated as in real life. But for me the scene after Nick’s funeral, ending with everyone singing ‘God Bless America’ is my pick for a favorite movie ending.
I am neither American nor do I believe in God but this rendition of God Bless America raises the hair on the back of my neck. This is not a jingoistic, defiant rendition of a patriotic anthem, but a quiet, ambiguous, demonstration of solidarity. A capitulation to ultimately identify as part of a society, while still linked culturally to an old country and living not a Californian dream, but in a deprived town in the rust belt. A community damaged but not broken, from a war which challenged the notion of what it was to be American.
Submit your favorite movie endings with clips embedded in the comments.
