A lot has happened between September and now. I've become involved in a very exciting project for 2008 that I don't want to really go into detail about on this blog until the time is right to go into detail about it (my family and some of my friends, as well as a few AFOS listeners I've chatted with over e-mail, will know what I'm talking about because I've told them about my involvement in the project, and they're all excited about the project as well).
I haven't recorded a new episode of AFOS: The Series since August because in the past few months, I've been trying to save up for a new condo I've recently moved into, but the ep will eventually get recorded and it'll be streamed sometime in early '08.
Saving dinero has also meant that I've been renting DVDs more often than buying them. I've lately been Netflixing all kinds of things. Season 1 of Dexter. Joe Dante's Masters of Horror eps. Michael Bay's hit-and-miss Transformers (just to rewatch my favorite visual effect--Megan "Bodimus Prime" Fox showing off her bodimus while popping Bumblebee's trunk). Live Free or Die Hard. The early Alec Baldwin vehicle Miami Blues (I've been loving Baldwin's scenes on 30 Rock, so I wanted to check out this overlooked Baldwin movie, which features what a 2003 Entertainment Weekly article has called Baldwin's greatest performance). The Silent Partner, a 1978 Canadian crime flick starring Elliott Gould at his menschiest, Christopher Plummer at his batshit-craziest and a really hot French chick named Celine Lomez, who's so hot I had to CNdb her (I happened to watch The Silent Partner during the same weekend when legendary jazz pianist Oscar Peterson died--he composed the movie's score). The pre-Code Barbara Stanwyck movie Baby Face. Battlestar Galactica: Razor. Superman: Doomsday. Season 1 of Flight of the Conchords.
I skipped most of FotC's first season during its original airing because I didn't want to sit through yet another HBO sitcom about showbiz. But then I caught the "What Goes on Tour" ep late in the season and I became hooked. "What Goes on Tour" was a showcase for Rhys Darby, one of the series' many scene-stealers. Darby's a riot as Murray, the band manager who's so inept he makes Garrett Morris' Les Irving character from Jackpot look like Michael Ovitz. (I don't know if any of the FotC staff writers have ever seen the similarly deadpan Jackpot, which focused on the lower rungs of the music industry ladder just like FotC does, but it sure looks like the writers have taken some cues from that movie.) Only Darren Lamb, the manager from the now-defunct Extras, outdoes Murray in dumbassity.
I've caught up with the rest of the first season via Netflix and now consider the hilarious FotC to be my favorite HBO sitcom since Larry Sanders.
In a review I posted on Netflix, I took away one star for the Conchords box set's lack of extras--unless you count the Spanish audio track as an extra. For the Spanish track, Jemaine and Bret went through the trouble of hiring a pair of very good soundalikes to re-record their songs in Español, something that's not commonly done on the foreign-language tracks of DVD releases of musicals. Who knew these songs would be awesome in Spanish as well? On the Español track, "Business Time" and "Ladies of the World" now sound like the greatest Los Amigos Invisibles tunes LAI never recorded.
Posted below is not the dubbed-into-Spanish version of "Business Time" I'm talking about, but the original version (with Spanish subtitles). Es la hora/Es la hora de los negocios...