I checked out the first two episodes of the Neistat Brothers HBO show on Thursday night at the Rooftop Films premiere party at Kips Bay. I liked them. Somehow, the Neistats got HBO to give them an eight-episode series which mostly seems to be about the two brothers making stuff and doing things and then documenting these processes in as rag-tag, homemade and lo-fi manner as possible. What kind of stuff? Stuff like smuggling American maple syrup past TSA to Amsterdam because the waffles are great but the syrup sucks there, or finding one brother’s biological birth father. (The series […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 4, 2010Most of the TV reviewers who reviewed David Simon’s new HBO series Treme were shown the first three episodes. I only caught the first, last night, on its premiere. Directed by Agnieskza Holland, the post-Katrina series set in the world of New Orleans musicians was undeniably gorgeous to look at and listen to. It took the fairly bold approach of not kickstarting with any huge central incident but rather sketching a tableaux of characters defined, in part, by their attitude toward a city that has been irrevocably changed. If The Wire was about characters defined by either their resistance or […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 12, 2010