Galacticast, the Montreal-based online sci-fi parody show, is back after a long hiatus with its second season. The first episode is RoboJew vs the Giant Nazi Woman of the SS.
Hitler humour. Oh yeah.
Meanwhile, the show has been nominated for three Parsec Awards.
For those of you who haven’t been following NBC’s Last Comic Standing (what are you doing, having a life or something?), you missed Canada’s pride, Video-on-Trialer Debra DiGiovanni, getting eliminated tonight.
She was the last of the Video-on-Trial Toronto comics to survive the show, and ended up reaching No. 8 on the series’ first international foray. Not bad if you ask me.
Give her a round of applause as she heads back home with her cats.
(UPDATE: Wow, a lot of people like to talk about what they saw on TV, even if they admit it isn’t funny.)
Come for the two men walking and slapping each other on René Lévesque Blvd. in the Gay Village, but stay for the play-by-play. (Video)
After last week’s premiere of the ABC version of Just For Laughs Gags, I pointed out audiences were highly critical of the show.
Now, after its second week, the press is getting better. With 8 million viewers, it represented ABC’s best summer launch since 2005. (That doesn’t say much, considering how ABC has been at the back of the pack lately.) Now ABC is talking about this being a long-term thing.
Could this be a hit? Is dialogue overrated on American TV?
Montreal’s Just for Laughs comedy festival is essentially over. The big-ticket galas are done, the newspapers have moved on, and the streets have been handed over to the Francofolies.
Last weekend, I stopped by the JFL street festival to see what was going on. They had lots of stuff there: a giant human-sized chess game (they had an entire section for games including checkers, darts, trivia games, and pool), street theatre, giant heads, people on stilts (and their over-aggressive crowd-clearers), overpriced “official” merchandise, annoying noisemakers, and charismatic Videotron-branded information booths.
As I walked through it all, I wondered: What does any of this have to do with comedy? Nobody was laughing. The only thing in the entire closed-off get-searched-as-you-enter zone that brought on any laughter was a giant screen showing Just for Laughs Gags.
If you want to have people playing chess on the street, go ahead. But don’t brand it “Just for Laughs” when there’s no laughter involved.
So the voice actors from Family Guy came to do a script reading at the Just for Laughs festival. Some people seem to have enjoyed the experience.
Is the esteemed Mr. Gravenor mocking our much-hyped fashion sense?
I’ll have you know my mother thinks I’m very fashionable with my volunteer T-shirt, Wal-Mart shorts and white tube socks.
ABC premiered the American version of Just for Laughs Gags tonight (there it’s just called Just for Laughs).
I’d heard all sort of rumours about this show. It was going to be re-shot with Americans. It was going to have Bob Saget-like voice-over stupidity.
Fortunately, none of these things happened. In fact, other than the ABC logo in the corner of the screen, it’s indistinguishable from the CBC version. The same cheesy music, same familiar locations (Dorchester Square, St. Louis Square, among others), same fake cops. The TV version doesn’t make it explicit that this is filmed in Montreal, which is kinda sad because there’ll probably be quite a lot of people confused at the French signs, red mailboxes and other things that make us not look like them. The website mentions that it’s a Canadian-made series, though the name of our fair city can’t be found (why is a goldmine of free publicity for our city not being pounced upon?).
If anything, it’s how little effort they put into changing the show that concerns me. They did a short graphic (with the familiar JFL logo) for before and after commercials, and they have this guy Rick Miller (yeah, I’d never heard of him either, but apparently he’s a Montrealer) introduce the show and say goodbye at the end. That’s it. I mean, the CBC show was bare-bones as it is. I’m not sure ABC can get away with just repackaging such a show, even over the summer.
From that and their website, which is about as bare-bones as you can get, I get the feeling ABC doesn’t expect this show to last through fall.
We’ll see. Maybe this can pick up an audience that thinks Punk’d and all its ilk are too aggressive or have too much dialogue or something.
UPDATE: Response from the blogosphere so far is not encouraging. The few media who mentioned it in advance gave it “something called” treatment. Blogger response fit that pretty well. “Disappointed.” “Not impressed.” “Beyond absurd” (from someone convinced it was shot in Mexico or Sao Paulo). “Desperately unfunny.” “Bland.” “The lamest.” And my favourite: “Absolute bullshit crap.” On the other side, as far as I can see, just one offhand “great” and one (albeit enthusiastic) “funny.”
LOST 2 this is not. And it’s hard to disagree. I would have rather seen gala stand-ups on U.S. television than a low-budget hidden camera gag show that, as far as they’re concerned, is a bad copy of all the other ones they’ve seen over the past half-decade.
What’s sad is this might give networks pause about importing other (good) Canadian television programming in the future.
UPDATED AGAIN: Overnight ratings for the show weren’t as bad as I thought they might be. They actually went up between shows, which shows it wasn’t advertised properly and viewers came in and stayed more than they left. Overall, it lost to America’s Got Talent, came in about tied with CBS’s NCIS repeat, and beat FOX’s On The Lot.
Could be I’ve written its obituary too soon.
I’m sad to say I’m a bad Quebecer (or, should I say, a bad québécois). I don’t watch Tout le monde en parle, I rarely flick by the local French-language TV stations unless there’s big local news, and I don’t read La Presse or the Journal de Montréal regularly. As a result, I’m missing out on an entire culture going on around me. I have only vague ideas of these shows, these personalities.
So, as I sit here watching 110% (I know, I know, but hockey’s my thing), I’m discovering, for the first time, the group Rock et Belles Oreilles. For those like me who hadn’t heard of them, they’re a 25-year-old sketch-comedy group whose members include the strangely-bearded Guy A. Lepage.
Their videos, most of which are from their 25th anniversary last year, are all over YouTube. Since I’m a media buff, I’ll highlight some that deal with the local French-language media:
A friend pointed out to me today that he was planning to pop his Fantasia cherry by going to an interesting showing this evening. One mention of the words “Total Crap” and I knew exactly what he was talking about.
For those who don’t know, Total Crap is the brainchild of Simon Lacroix, who has for some reason taken it upon himself to collect the worst of Quebec television, from dancing lessons for overweight baby-boomers, to local wrestling previews, cheesy commercials and, every now and then, an appearance by Celine Dion. This is a pretty good example, but there’s much better.
Now, you might think “wow, that’s a really weird hobby”, and you would be wrong. You see, there’s someone else in town who’s doing the same thing. DJ XL5 (Myspace link, sorry) is also a local practitioner of what they call “zapping” and showing awful clips to eager audiences.
Last fall, someone had the brilliant idea to have them square off against each other. On Halloween at Club Soda, they did battle. The audience couldn’t decide between them, and there was no winner declared, but they did agree they wanted more.
So today at 7 p.m. at Concordia’s DB Clarke Theatre (Hall Building, 1455 de Maisonneuve W., corner Mackay), comes DJ XL5 versus Total Crap: La revanche. Here’s the teaser.
Next Friday afternoon, DJ XL5 returns solo with a showing of some pretty insane shorts with DJ XL5’s Kaleidoscopic Zappin’ Party (Teaser).
Tickets to both are $7.50, which you can get at Admission or on-site. (Bell Mobility is running a promotion with $5 tickets if you want to play their cellphone games)
Yeah, I know this is stupid PR-driven non-news advertising crap, but go Vermont! And nice video. Maybe I’ll come visit someday.
For those of you who weren’t watching TV tonight (how dare you?), NBC’s Last Comic Standing had its debut, with auditions from New York, Montreal and San Antonio, Texas. Since Montreal was their only Canadian visit, comedians from Toronto all over the country came to try-outs at Kola Note in March.
So I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to see some familiar faces. Well-represented were the Video On Trial crew, though they had varying levels of success. Two were eliminated in the first round (they were used in the montage of comics who bombed — ouch). I think I recognized Laurie Elliott and Katherine Ryan, or was it Nicole Arbour? Those blond girls are hard to distinguish when they go by so fast (and even if it wasn’t Nicole (UPDATE: It wasn’t), I need some excuse to link to this photo). Sorry kids, no Sabrina Jalees for you.
The more recognizable contestants are also the ones who made it into the second round (which involved a live audition in front of a local audience): Debra DiGiovanni and Trevor Boris.
Debra stole the show, and got lots of airtime before, during and after her acts. She made it through easily. Trevor, meanwhile, wasn’t shown at all during the first round and only appeared briefly for the second. He didn’t make it.
NBC has some Montreal audition footage posted to YouTube, featuring both Trevor and Debra, among others. NBC’s website even has a special clip of Debra, showing she’s going to go far in this one.
And Television Without Pity, which should be in everyone’s bookmarks, has a moment-by-moment recap of the episode.
Just got word that Tivijournal, the news parody show produced by ex-UQAM journalism students that I wrote about a month and a half ago, is screening its May episode tomorrow at 8pm at Les Pas Sages, 951 Rachel East (corner de Mentana).
For more of what they’re about, see my previous blog post.
Casey McKinnon and Rudy Jahchan, the couple behind the geek-comedy web show Galacticast, have started up a new venture with their company 8-bit Brownies called A Comicbook Orange (sigh). As you might guess, it is a weekly comic-book review series. Its first episode gives you an idea of what it’s going to be like: a mix of B-roll and voice-over that unfortunately looks and sounds like just about every other TV review show out there, mixed in with the fun cheesy-FX sci-fi comedy that have made them the most famous Montreal-based sci-fi sketch comedy web video show in the world.
I met Rudy and Casey for Galacticast’s 1-year anniversary a couple of weeks ago, where they promised a “big announcement” coming soon. I thought NBC picked them up for a short summer run, but I guess this’ll have to do.
While I was at their exclusive VIP party (oh yeah baby, I’ve got it made!), I had a chat with Mommy McKinnon, and after some small-talk about the weather (Casey, why did you leave me in your living room with your mother?), I asked her the only question that came to mind: What does she think of her daughter going all crazy with the Internet stuff instead of, you know, making money?
“She’ll always be my baby,” Mom said. (Awwww…) Though Mom, as a non-sci-fi fan, doesn’t get 90% of Galacticast’s jokes, she watches it every week and fully supports Casey’s endeavour. Which is good, because if I threw away a good job to do this for a living, my mother would think I’m nuts.
Speaking of Galacticast, they’ve upgraded their equipment. A new wireless clip-on microphone will hopefully solve the dreadful echo that has been distracting from the quality of the show a bit, and they’ve hooked themselves up with an HD camera (like the one that filmed this episode).
The show itself has come a long way since I interviewed them back in December, and even longer since the show began. The scripts are tighter, the special effects are less cheesy and the production is more professional (though, without any crew whatsoever, it’s pretty impressive that they manage to do anything on a weekly basis). And when you’re taking on things like LOST, the Muppets, Star Trek’s mirror universe and Super Mario Bros., how could it be the coolest thing in the world?
Warner Bros. is cancelling advance screenings of its blockbuster summer films in order to combat rampant camcording piracy in Canada, and especially Montreal. So we won’t be able to see Harry Potter and Emma’s enhanced breasts before it’s actually released. Who cares? Well, the papers do, since they won’t be able to review films in advance of opening weekend. Instead, they’ll have to do what they did with Snakes on a Plane, and review it with real people sitting in the theatre with them.
I suppose I should mention that the claims — that people camcording films in Montreal’s movie theatres is the biggest source of pirated movies — have already been debunked, and that Latin America is more of a problem than Canada. But if I did that then we wouldn’t be able to write big feature stories about Canada’s rampant piracy problem.
In other non-news, the Eastern Townships School Board is in “trouble” because it spent $38,000 sending 34 people to Texas for a conference on integrating computers into the classroom. Who cares? If you ask me, getting people to a conference like this for about $1,000 a person is a pretty good deal, and considering their laptop program costs something like $15 million, spending a tiny fraction of that on proper training seems to me to be a good use of money.
The Justiciers Masqués fooled Nicolas Sarkozy, pretending to be Stephen Harper with his bad French, and inviting Sarkozy to a “diner des cons” with George W. Bush. Listen to it here. Who cares? They did the same thing to Jacques Chirac last year.
