Saturday, April 11, 2009

Kafkaesque Thoughts Between "Terminator" and Easter

cockroach.jpg

My Arkansas state representative pal Dan Greenberg mentioned looking forward to the show Parks and Recreation, which (thank goodness!) mocks local-government bureaucracy — and speaking of bureaucracy, he also noted this Onion piece about a Kafka-inspired, globally-confusing airport (noted on the NYT blog due to the Onion’s interesting, lines-blurring recruitment of a veteran CNN anchor).

Kafka also famously wrote about a man who awakes to find himself metamorphosed into a cockroach, a tale no weirder, I suppose, than:

•songs about, for instance, a man made out of balloons — by odd rocker Robyn Hitchcock, who Helen, Francis Heaney, Rose White, and I will see in concert tonight;

•God becoming a human becoming a resurrected human, a purported event Helen and some of my other acquaintances will celebrate tomorrow;

•animals becoming the moral near-equals of humans, as they have in some people’s eyes (though until humans transform into cockroaches, even the pro-animal people at our upcoming May 6 Debate at Lolita Bar on animal welfare will likely keep killing bugs);

•and the likely-dead Terminator series about robots becoming humanoid, which had its season finale last night (with the hoped-for teaser for next month’s film — a potential blockbuster that I would think might inspire Fox to want an associated TV show again after all).

A recent ComicBookResources.com interview with Josh Friedman, Brown alum and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles producer, didn’t clarify whether the show is officially canceled — but it did contain this amusing quote from Friedman about his envy of the Terminator movie’s far larger budget:

They spend more on a day of re-shoots than we do on a whole episode of our show. They did some re-shoots on our lot and we had our set where we had built a nuclear submarine. I was pretty proud of it until one of our writers called me out and showed me a huge Terminator-type stealth bomber that they had for the film. It was just some pick-up shots that they were doing for the movie. There was a big helicopter crash in the parking lot and that was just like one day of [Terminator Salvation director] McG doing what he does. It’s like when you were a kid and you go over to your friend’s house and they have better snacks. Unless you’re going to take a box of Oreos home with you, you’re just screwed. You’re just left wishing that your parents were that cool.

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