IMDB 250 - The Hunt (2012)

The Hunt (2012)

Lucas is a male teacher who lives alone and works at a kindergarten.  He lives in a small small Danish town where everyone knows everyone else. One day a female student says that Lucas exposed himself to her. Could she be making it up? The head of the school suspects not: "I don't think children, not in that way." Lucas is sent home and the girl's parents are called in and told the story. The girl recants, says she made it all up but her parents assure her that it did happen - sometimes when memories are bad, we convince ourselves that we made it up. Lucas finds his life is changed forever - he's fired, ostracized from the community and eventually arrested.

This is Director Thomas Vinterberg's second movie in the IMDB 250 and both deal with sexual abuse. The first was "The Celebration" (1998).

As you'd expect, this isn't the kind of movie that makes for a great Friday evening. Or any evening. This movie is difficult to watch. It's harrowing material. But by no means does that mean it's a bad movie... far from it. It's a thoroughly realistic situation with authentic characters who act the way people sometimes act. Particularly when the stakes are so high and the accusations are so heinous.

7/10.
Total "Top 250" Movies Seen: 381.

P&S - Casey Kasem is Missing

I love Steve's Casey Kasem impression. I can't get enough of it. Recently it was revealed that Casey Kasem may be on a Native American reservation and it lead to a short tirade.

The pre-requisite to any Steve bit on Kasem is knowing this audio (warning: language):



And this is the new result:

Late Night - Second Chance Theatre

Last night Late Night aired the first truly innovative segment in the Seth Meyers era. It's called "Second Chance Theatre".

It works like this: Seth Meyers was, for a long time, the headwriter at Saturday Night Live and in his tenure there he had the job of deciding which skits work and which don't in order to determine what gets into the actual show. There were quite a few times where a writer was SURE that a skit was funny but Seth disagreed and vetoed it. Now that he has his own show, he's inviting various cast members back to actually perform their rejected sketches and give them a chance to convince the audience that what they wrote actually had merit.

The first episode of Second Chance Theater is Will Forte's sketch "Jennjamin Franklin". I'm not embedding it, if you want to see it it's here, but I'm not going to post it directly because it's actually more disturbing than funny. But what I did enjoy much more is the "after show" where the creators discuss the sketch and how they thought it went.

Turns out I'm not going to embed that video either because hulu is broken. You can watch it here.

Tonight Show - The Lost Monologue

A funny thing happens if you go to hulu and watch the latest episode (the 5/13/14 episode) of The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon... the show starts, the band plays, Jimmy comes out and the video cuts to the band playing again. The latest episode on hulu edits out the monologue completely. If you go to the video on nbc.com, it's the same thing.

Lately the show has been uploading monologues to youtube. It's missing from there as well.

Twitter is abuzz with questions and conspiracies. Well, not really but some people are wondering. One theory is that the monologue addresses the Jay-Z surveillance video and this has upset Jay-Z. Hmm, seems pretty vague and pretty unlikely. Everyone's talking about the Jay-Z thing so why would this show be any different? Also, why not just excise that one section and leave the rest intact? But, as no one has a clue at this point, I suppose that theory is as good as any.

The full monologue did air on television and so some viewers did see it, it's just gone from the online sources. Odd.

Tonight Show - Best Show Ever?

It really probably isn't the best show ever. It's really just a catchy title. I should probably change it. Of course, that would take work.

This is a post that's a bit different from the norm. Yesterday's Tonight Show was significant for the lineup of guests it contained. The three guests were Louis C.K., Jack White and Neil Young. It doesn't get much better than that.

Watch the full episode here. If you don't want to watch the whole show and are looking for the one "must-watch" segment, it's the musical performance where Neil Young performs "Crazy" in a recording booth. Why is Neil Young recording in a booth? They explain that in the show but you just said you didn't have time for that! Good grief.

Tonight Show - Word Sneak with Bryan Cranston

Jimmy and Bryan Cranston play "Word Sneak", a game where they are given a list of words that they have to subtly insert into their conversation. Their subtlety needs work but it's fun.