Noiseless Chatter Archive

As if only to prevent this from turning into a Red Dwarf review blog, one of my other favorite shows of all-time has decided to bless us with an early premiere: The Venture Bros. won’t be starting its fifth season until next year, but its creators — and network — were generous enough to speed up production on one episode. And though it was an 11th-hour decision to ship this one early, and it’s not technically the season premiere, it’s an absolutely perfect whetting of a Venture fan’s whistle. It’s by no means a masterpiece, but it doesn’t aim to be. It aims to catch us unaware, and I think it does that. It aims to sell itself a bit short — it’s The Venture Bros. , after all, where all of the most exciting stuff is off-camera by design — but then absolutely nails the ending, with a devastating revelation for one of the characters, and a genuinely touching speech from a character who’s far too long been kept from speechifying. And I think it also did a great job of il...

Hands up everyone who’s surprised that I think this episode went off the rails the moment Lister’s ballsack got wired to explode. No takers? ON WE GO THEN I guess the upside here is that we now know “Lemons” was a one-off. A comparative breath of fresh air in the midst of a series that didn’t know what the hell it was trying to be, but was damned determined to annoy the everloving shit out of you while it tried to find out. But I’m getting ahead of myself here, and my disappointment I guess technically qualifies as a spoiler, since the first act was actually quite good. In fact, while I didn’t need another “Lemons” per se , I actually started to believe that this episode might surpass it. After all, early disappointments in that episode had to do with far too long and unfunny exchanges (such as the Shakespeare bit) and buffoonish physical idiocy (assembling the Golden Shower or whatever the fuck). Here, the potential was there for each of these things to rear thei...

Is it any coincidence that the best episode of the series so far has no B-plot? I highly doubt it. “Lemons” isn’t great. But here’s the miraculous thing: “Lemons” is good . Call me crazy, but the consequence-free slaying of a main character’s brother in the first week and Taiwan Tony’s Racism Follies in week two left me more or less dreading the crew’s encounter here with the son of God. But it was good. It did a lot of things right. It did some things wrong, and in a few cases those were quite annoying things to do wrong, but it was better than “ Fathers and Suns ,” which was better than “ Trojan ,” and I’m finding it quite a bit easier now to be optimistic about the back half of series X. “Lemons” starts off on some terribly shaky footing. For starters, Doug Naylor has the annoying habit of opening on scenes that set up later punchlines, but don’t have a purpose themselves. They feel disconnected and clunky, and that’s what happens here. Lister cooks dinner while...

Friend of the website Dave is hosting a 1990s blogfest today. He’s managed to rope quite a few great bloggers into this (complete list and his own choices here ), and we’re also now selling cosmetics door to door on his behalf. The idea is to choose one thing — one anything — as your favorite thing from each year from 1990 – 1999, and write a short bit about it. He also did one for the 2000s, which was pre-Noiseless Chatter I think, but since everything released in that time period was garbage you missed nothing. (And, honestly, I’ll probably end up doing a 2000 – 2010 one just for the heck of it.) Anyway, enjoy…thanks to Dave for hosting this, and let me know what some of your own choices might have been in the comments below. Or tell me I’m wrong in a profane way…I always like that! 1990 – Vineland I feel more than a little intellectually guilty for only including one novel in my year-by-year rundown, but I’d have to say that the 1990s weren’t particularly well ...

Well, that was fucking awful. Okay, with that out of the way, we can…no. No, it was just fucking awful. “Fathers and Suns” represents the fifth consecutive episode in which the nicest thing I can say is that it’s nice to see the cast together again. And it’s getting to the point that it’s no longer nice to see the cast together again. What’s nice about knocking them around in humiliating ways while the sharp writing and character-driven comedy that once defined the show circles ever more deeply down the toilet? Like last week’s “Trojan,” “Fathers and Suns” has a can’t-miss premise. And then it spectacularly and insultingly misses anyway. I’m still reeling from just how thoroughly they managed to botch a Rimmer’s-brother reunion story, but “Fathers and Suns” wastes no time in shoving even larger problems into our faces. The plot is threefold. Firstly, Lister is coming to grips with certain emotional issues that have resulted from learning that he’s his own father....

  “For the sake of honor I did sacrifice my soul For the sake of vengeance I did struggle to regain it.” –The Crimson Corsair: Minutemen #1 Join Jacob Crites as he reads too deeply into every issue of Before Watchmen: Minutemen . The following is part one of a six part series. There are people who will never like Before Watchmen simply because it exists. If you’ve ever read Watchmen , you know that this viewpoint is not entirely unreasonable. There was no more story to be told by the end of Alan Moore’s masterwork; he, along with artist David Gibbons, had challenged and redefined an entire art form with their unparalleled mastery of the comic medium. And it also, even stripped of its technical brilliance, is still a really incredible story with characters that leave a lasting imprint somewhere in the deep pit of your being. But you know all this already. You know why it shouldn’t be done. And you know why DC did it anyway. What none of us knew is just how incredibly ...

You burned so bright… Neither Bob Dylan nor John Lennon survived 1980. And yet, they’re both still with us. Transformed…echoes of the past. One solid, one ethereal…but both of them spokesmen for a time long gone. The major difference, of course, is that only Dylan’s career was buried. It was Lennon’s body. Tragedy is relative. In somebody’s mind, John Lennon deserved to die. His death, for reasons neither you nor I nor anybody will ever understand, was necessary. We may not have the right as individuals to decide who should live and who should die, but we all have the ability. One finger, one firearm, one bullet. It’s all anybody needs. It happens all the time. It’s usually somebody we don’t know. It’s sometimes a man who changed the world. That early December gunshot can still be heard, if you listen hard enough. If you concentrate. If you take a moment to think about how the entire world shifted from one state of being to another, from one bright f...

  Note: This entry was published in an earlier form as a standalone Anatomy of a Scene feature here . It has been reworked slightly for this series. Celebrity oceanographer / documentarian Steve Zissou has just premiered his latest and most tragic film to an audience that responds with a distinct lack of interest. Steve emerges from a post-screening Q&A session that has gone no better, and that’s where today’s scene begins. We’re still in the process of setting the film into motion and already we see Anderson — and Mothersbaugh, and Murray — at their indirect best, and absolute strongest. Every line and detail hearkens forward to what’s to come, turning this routine meet-and-green into a brilliantly constructed overture. And yet, viewed out of context, it functions perfectly well as a piece of work unto itself, standing alone as a series of emotional triggers for one man who is having a terrible night…and being forced to suffer in public. We open on a vast and...