2012 THE NEWSROOM , another Aaron Sorkin blabberfest

With all the carrying on about the new Aaron Sorkin series The Newsroom, nobody bothers to mention that this is just a remake of Sorkin's earlier and better series Sports Night.

Tiresome TV news anchor Will McAvoy has a meltdown in front of a college audience Q and A.  This brings a lot of soul searching and a realization that it's time for him to be a real newsman instead of a talking head.  McAvoy's boss improbably hires McAvoy's former lover MacKenzie McHale to be his new executive producer.  Their first big story is the Gulf Oil spill, where they scoop the competition and reveal the truth of the extent of the catastrophe.

The best I can say for this talky motormouth show is that it finally got better after about a 1/2 hour of endless unceasing chatter.  People just don't talk like this.  But in the world of Aaron Sorkin nobody has an opinion without launching into a windy tirade about the indifference and evil of you name it.

HBO likes to make quality original programming.  They try to attract people like Martin Scorcese, Michael Mann and in this case Aaron Sorkin.  In Sorkin's case, he is the creator,  executive producer and writer of this show.  Sorkin is a half decent writer but nobody apparently was able to tell him that what he was producing was a lot of long winded rubbish.

Shows like The Newsroom are the result of letting a semi talented person run amock creatively with no one around to tell him no.

75 minutes.

2011 - PAUL, funny and depressing science fiction comedy.

Talk about eating your young.  Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are funny guys and have an affection for science fiction film dorks and their dorky films, but after a while this homage stuff can only get you so far.  Oh yea Paul is about a couple of comic-con nerds who run into an actual space alien and need to get him to his space ship before the government captures him.

At first it's funny to see these guys geek out about Area 51, UFOs and comic books.  After a while you start to realize that there is really nothing more to the film's humor than a bunch of in-jokes about science fiction films and TV shows, in particular, science fiction film and TV shows that only date back as far as the mid 1970's.  Apparently no one has heard of Forbidden Planet or Metropolis or god forbid, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

You're supposed to laugh at the fact that you get all their references to Spielberg films and Battlestar Galacticia.  But those aren't jokes, they're just Pegg and Frost showing how much they know about science fiction films.

The theme of Paul seems to come from that biblical passage, "the nerds meek will inherit the earth,"  but they got it wrong.  Like Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, this film is not a breakout success.  The reality is that no vast audience of science fiction nerds is going to take an in joke film like this and turn it into a big hit because that audience doesn't actually exist.  Avatar doesn't count, that was marketed as an event not an actual film. 

Maybe the problem with Paul was the absence of their regular director Edgar Wright.  Wright could have given the film a little more visual punch which would have covered up the lack of genuine wit that the film is missing.  Edgar Wright was unfortunately working on Scott Pilgrim vs the World and for all the razzle dazzle of that film, it was a heartless film as well.

So perhaps the lesson of Paul is these three guys should just make films together since they seem to compliment each other's sensibilities. 

104 minutes, written by Simon Pegg.