So, this may be the dorkiest comparison of all time.  Bear with me.  Does anyone feel like, after a lull in programming, HBO is making like Buffy leading up to the climactic fight with Adam in Season 4?  You know, get your friends together, be they Willow, Xander and Giles or Michael K. Williams, David Simon and Steve Buscemi, perform a spell and summon the spirt of the First Slayer or Tony Soprano, whoever your originary deity is, and then prepare to absolutely kick ass.  Because between Treme (about which I am almost paralyzingly excited) and now Boardwalk Empire (not to mention The Pacific), it looks like HBO has mounted up in a major, major way:

This strikes me as a great thing.  It would have been pretty tragic after The Sopranos and The Wire inspired the fantastic work taking place on Showtime and FX if HBO hadn’t tried to up the game further.    I don’t know if we’re anywhere close to the potential limits to what it’s possible to do with television.  But I hope folks keep stretching until we get there. (Plus, you know, Michael K. Williams 4 Evah! you guys.)

So, I have not read the book but Eat, Pray, Love looks like a pretty dopey movie:

Maybe it’s jealousy–I would love to be able to take a year off and travel, though I think I’d get bored, and I’ve never had a problem that required me to dump James Franco–but I don’t know how this qualifies as an “incredible true story.”  I think Elizabeth Gilbert did something that sounds like a lot of fun: take a trip funded by a book advance (I will be curious if the movie addresses that).  I think she probably learned lessons that are important and extractable for a lot of women who don’t have that kind of luxury, though it makes me incredibly, incredibly sad that one of those lessons is, apparently, that it’s okay to have an intense relationship with the food in Italy and that it is not a tragedy to go up a jeans size.  That such a thing counts as a revelation means we live in shrunken times indeed.

I don’t mean to harsh on the profundity of Gilbert’s experience, which was meaningful for her and a lot of other people.  I just am not that interested in this movie.  One great virtue of dumb action movies as opposed to the palest chick flicks is this: when they say something is momentous, one usually gets at least an explosion.

I thought last night’s Community was lovely, and surprising in a lot of ways.  As I wrote in the recap:

Community draws much of its charm from the fact that its setting, unlike a traditional four-year college—be it Ivy tower or state school—brings together people at very different points in their lives. But as the study group at the show’s core coalesced, the sitcom’s spent less time addressing their anxieties about the fact that they’re at Greendale Community College, whether as the result of a divorce, a pill addiction, or a misrepresentation of a Colombia degree as a Columbia degree. In last night’s episode, as the characters struggled with classes they thought would be easy A’s, that anxiousness came to the fore.

Plus there were boats!  And hilariously-shaped pots!  The crew’s parking-lot rescue of Pierce may stand as a high point in all-time gentle sitcom surreality.

I think it makes a huge amount of sense to give out awards to movie opening sequences, as South by Southwest is doing this year.  They’re absolutely a distinct art form, although an unusual one: when done poorly, nobody really notices.  When done brilliantly, nobody quite knows how to judge them, and their impact on the movie as a whole.  The opening credits sequence for Casino Royale, for example, doesn’t explicate the movie, but it does an incredible job of setting up the aesthetics (I particularly like the target sites that spin into roulette wheels) of the movie, and it’s a great piece of graphic design and animation.  And it’s one of the few Bond songs I actually quite like: