Released: 25th January
Seen: 22nd February
On the 1st of February in 1982, the television sketch comedy series Not the Nine O’clock News aired an episode that contained a song called “Nice Video, Shame about the Song”. The song was a satire of the recently created MTV and in particular the music videos that had begun littering it with insanely strange yet interesting imagery that accompanied substandard songs. This was the era when all you needed to make it in the music industry was a confusing “artistic” music video that ran through every new tool that was made available at the time. The Not the Nine O’clock News team satirized this by making the most garishly elaborate video they possibly could, complete with images of comical satanic rituals and Elizabethan dress-up, all set to a song that was intentionally designed to be confusingly bad. It’s one of the most gloriously pointed critiques of the music video genre and the phrase “Nice video, shame about the song” became a bit of a personal shorthand for films that worry so much about looking cool that they don’t bother thinking about things like plot, character or dialogue. Films like Avatar or Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets are films that I would put into this category… and now, we can throw Polar into that very specific group of films
Well here we are, face to face, a couple of silver haired fans waiting to see just who wins the title of Americas Next Drag Race All Star and god damn I’m tired. I love this show (as the several thousand word recaps I’ve done will attest) but we seriously need to cut back on how many of these we do each year. With Season 11 starting on the first of March, Drag Race UK starting up at some point this year (If it’s the week after Season 11 ends, I swear to god) and rumours floating around the internet about a Drag Race Legends season… it’s too much of a great thing. Can All Stars stop being yearly now? We’re going to run out of queens and I’m going to run out of patience with the fandom losing their minds every time one of them sends a fan favourite home or when someone who they don’t like wins the competition. I’m still barely over the people reacting to Manila going home and their bullshit, now I have to deal with this… I just need a break, I’m tired. But, this tired boy has a pretend job to do and wants to talk about the final episode of the series before we have one week off before Season 11 begins because I’m taking next week off even if they do a reunion, which I don’t think they’re doing but they should because the best All Stars episode ever was the insane reunion of All Stars 2 and the fact they didn’t take the hint to just do All Stars 2 again but with new queens is just… uggh, let’s do this.
Movie Meister Reviews 