Tagged: Pop Culture

Time now for a home viewing recommendation from our film critic Bob Mondello. This time Bob urges taking the plunge from the seven-and-a-half-th floor into the Criterion Collection's Blu-ray release of Being John Malkovich.

1999 Weirdness run amok: Struggling puppeteer John Cusack gets a filing job in an office building where one floor — seven-and-a-half — isn't quite tall enough for him to stand, but does have a portal into the mind of actor John Malkovich. As he tells co-worker Catherine Keener, "you see the world through John Malkovich's eyes, and then after about 15 minutes, you're spit out into a ditch on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike."

Fifty years ago, Johnny Carson became the host of The Tonight Show. During his 30 years as host, he reached a nightly audience of 15 million people and became one of the most trusted and famous men in America.

But Carson was intensely private off-screen, and very few people — including members of his own family--really knew him. Documentary filmmaker Peter Jones wanted to try and change that. Once a year, for 15 years, Jones sent Carson a letter, begging him for permission to make a documentary on his life.

When it comes to monsters on television, vampires have the market more or less cornered. Think about it: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, True Blood, The Vampire Diaries ...

Vampires' enduring popularity on TV may not be eternal, but they have been appearing on the small screen for decades. Mark Dawidziak, who's written books about vampires and teaches a class at Kent State University on their appearances in film and TV, says that part of the way vampires have remained a force in popular culture is through their evolution on TV.

"The great innovations, as far as vampire characters go," Dawidziak says, "always have come from either the printed page or television. Television has contributed as much if not more than movies ever have."

Don Draper sure has a lot of power for a fictional character. At the end of this week's episode of Mad Men, Don dropped the needle on that copy of Revolver ("start with this," his wife Megan said as she pointed at Side B's final track) and the tape loop distortion of "Tomorrow Never Knows" started dripping through his hi-fi speakers. As Lennon sang, "You may see the meaning of within," the camera showed Don's wife and his co-workers, all caught in moments of uncertainty and transition. Don's own response to this hit of mind-expanding music? Disinterest. The episode closes in the silence that follows him lifting the needle mid-song.

When author and illustrator Maurice Sendak entered the world of children's books, it was a very safe place. Stories were sweet and simple and set in a world without disorder. But Sendak, who died Tuesday at age 83, broke with that tradition. In Where the Wild Things Are, Sendak explored the darker side of childhood. Upstairs in young Max's bedroom, a jungle grows, and he sails off to a land of monsters.

John Cech, a professor of English who wrote a book about Sendak's work, says Where the Wild Things Are fit perfectly into American culture of the 1960s. It came out just before the Beatles' first tour of the U.S.