The greatly missed opportunities of The Office’s eighth season

The eighth season of The Office has been a bit frustrating, to say the least. Obviously, the show was going to be changing greatly with the departure of Steve Carell as Michael Scott. Many fans thought that Michael leaving Dunder Mifflin should have been the end of the series – and if that were the case, Goodbye Michael could not have been a more perfect swan song. Personally, I remained optimistic. I’ve always liked the idea of The Office as a show that could continue on for a long time, cycling through salesmen and accountants like ER cycled through medical staff. I was even excited when I read an interview with Paul Lieberstein (writer and producer who also portrays human resources representative Toby Flenderson) describing that each episode of season eight would focus on a different character, taking advantage of the show’s great ensemble cast as opposed to singling out a specific character as “the lead,” as Michael Scott was. It didn’t hurt that season seven also felt like a dramatic improvement over the two previous seasons.

(spoilers begin after the jump)

My Top Hong Kong movies of the 80′s Ballot

One of my favorite resources on East Asian cinema is LoveHKFilm.com, which obviously specializes in Hong Kong cinema but often reviews films from other countries as well. A few years back, they did reader polls on the top movies from the nineties and the naughts/aughts/double zeroes/whatever. In the interest of transparency, I’ve decided to release my ballot for the 80′s and 90′s polls. I don’t have my naughts/aughts/whatever list, but I’ll try to reproduce it to the best of my ability.

Defining the Bourgeoisploitation Film

Good evening fellowettes,

Every year, from October to December, dozens of unadventurous, middlebrow movies are pumped out by the Hollywood Industrial Complex that are so ridiculously white bread and milquetoast (see what I did there?) that they clearly only serve one specific audience: Those with too much money, too much leisure time, and too much pent-up emotion.

The Amazing Indiewood Movie Plot Generator!

Good evening fellowettes,

On June 8, 2010, after viewing Crazy Heart, I first constructed a working model of how to construct the plot of an Indiewood movie (branded as being “independent” but actually financed by a major studio). After witnessing my parents not enjoying Noah Baumbach’s very typical Greenberg, I’ve decided to revisit and update the Indiewood Plot Generator.

My 20 Favorite (And 5 Least Favorite) Episodes of Daria

I am one of very many who felt like the outcast during the teenage years, especially middle school. One thing that seems to bond many of us self-perceived outcasts together is our unabashed, shared love of MTV’s spectacular animated series Daria.

Now that pretentious introduction crap is out of the way, let’s get to the episodes. The order, as with every list I make, is extremely vague but generally ascending in quality.

15 Animal Collective Songs that are Awesome

I love Animal Collective.

Now that’s out of the way, so let me explain why I felt like making this list: because I had nothing better to do on this lazy Wednesday afternoon. Except look for jobs, or work on a screenplay, or record weird experimental music that’s pretty much ripping off Animal Collective. Watching movies would probably have been a better use of my time as well. Instead, I’m subjecting three or four people to my worthless opinions by making an extremely vague list of Animal Collective songs that I would consider to be among my favorites.

The “That Guy” Problem

It’s pretty obvious to anyone who knows me that I have a pretty distinct interest in East Asian culture, in particular, East Asian cinema. It started for me with martial arts films. As someone who is attentive to film style and technique, a well-done fight scene is one of the most satisfying things that one can encounter, and there is no place that does that better than Hong Kong. So from Hong Kong cinema, I moved into Japanese cinema, watching the samurai films that influenced the kung fu and wuxia I had grown to love. I moved on to movies from directors and actors I had grown to like. Korean cinema got into the mix when I saw Park Chan-Wook’s Lady Vengeance, originally thinking it was going to be an action film, but being even more pleased with the fairytale-like revenge film I got than I had expected to be. In general, I just found myself enjoying the East Asian artistic aesthetic overall, beyond just the films themselves, but other things such as the architectural styles, the different types of narratives being told, the fashion sensibilities of the period costume films, etc.

My Top 10 Songs of 2011

Because I felt like putting something on this stupid blog that practically no one will ever read. Keep in mind that I haven’t heard every single song released in 2011, that I came up with this list very quickly, and that the order of this list is extremely relative. Any of these songs could really be switched around by a few places.