Tip Of The Hat, Jon Hamm; Wag Of The Finger, D.J. Caruso

Loyal readers of this blog know that I try to use the weekend to review this week in TV, but a mixture of things have delayed me: shopping, lethargy caused by the tail end of a really shitty ill patch, a trip to see Eagle Eye at IMAX, the usual habitual refreshing of Huffington Post and Daily Kos and Daily Dish and Salon and FiveThirtyEight just to be sure that the desperate Republican-originated October Surprise hasn't happened yet. I'm working on that post (spoiler alert: nothing topped The Shield, just as predicted). Until then, yes, I'm again being naughty and resorting to linkblogging. It's linked to the Mad Men End of Season Review I hope to get on with later in the week, so it's almost as if this is a prologue to that. I just needed to say, good work hosting Saturday Night Live this week, Jon Hamm, and I will have more praise for your recent work in a few days.


Here is Don Draper's Guide To Picking Up Women, and here is some of the Mad Men cast opposite Jason Sudeikis and Kristin Wiig. Why have I not embedded videos onto the blog? Because NBC videos are too large for this horrid template, Hulu won't allow me to embed because I'm in the UK even though US readers would still be able to see it, and AOL had embeddable videos that were the right size but their code is as shitty as any of their godawful programs, such as the IM app that crashed Canyon's iPhone and made her lose all of her contacts, or the IM app that wrecked our new laptop to the extent we had to reinstall everything down to the operating system OH GOD AOL YOU SUCK RACCOON ANUS!!! Anyway, check out the links. Jon Hamm is great, and I especially liked Bill Hader's impression of Sal.


Oh, and Eagle Eye? Note to director D.J. Caruso (formerly of The Shield, just to keep this "topical"). Mr. Caruso, if you're going to film a series of car chases that are going to end up projected on a screen as high as three double decker buses, move the camera back far enough that people can see something more than five minutes of smudgy black shapes flashing past the camera with white dots zipping back and forth. I think they might have been bits of glass. Seriously, people bitch about Michael Bay's incoherent car chases, but compared to the scenes in Eagle Eye, this...



...looks like Peter Yates' crystal clear Bullitt setpiece. The first Eagle Eye car chase was so poorly shot and edited that I thought Shia LaBoeuf and Michelle Monaghan had died four times, but instead four other identical cars had crashed, leaving our heroes improbably untouched. It ruined an otherwise entertaining, if utterly preposterous, bit of nonsense, and one that featured Michael Chiklis, earning the berserk project 10,000 bonus Chickie points.

One more thing. Thank you, YouTube, for allowing me to link to a crazy Nic Cage vs. Sean Connery car chase, and for not being as shitty as AOL, who lick dead toad scrote.