Word: pseudo
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Turning your dial to a pop radio station is like turning back to 1999. The Backstreet Boys' new album rehashes track-for-track the pointless pseudo R&B and insufferable ballads of Millennium (cool drinking game: take a shot every time you can name the Millennium song that inspired a new album cut). Perhaps the only interesting thing about Black and Blue is its odd title (didn't you expect something like Jive-in' with the Homies?). The Boys prefer to leave its meaning ambiguous, perhaps because the label chose the title and they're as befuddled...
Carter took the change as an opportunity to shake up the show a bit. After Mulder was abducted by aliens at the end of last season, he decided to write not a pseudo Mulder but a skeptical foil for Scully. And when the hard-boiled Doggett joins the search for Mulder in the premiere (Fox, Nov. 5, 9 p.m. E.T.), Scully receives him as harshly as many X-philes have. "We let the returning characters speak to our own discomfort with the idea of a new guy," says executive producer Frank Spotnitz...
...wrong reasons for it and propose another model, which in turn proves equally unworkable. This is as true of nutty little proposals by discontented geniuses--like the idea of communalist, rural "pantisocracy" put forward by Shelley, Coleridge and others in their youth--as it is of paranoid, pseudo-collectivist systems that take over whole societies and make huge contributions to the sum of human misery, like Stalinism. We flawed animals can be somewhat improved, spottily and with difficulty; but we cannot be perfected, which is what the Utopian project, in its various forms, is all about...
Berlinger, who has co-directed true-crime documentaries in rural settings (Brother's Keeper, Paradise Lost), juxtaposes the real with the surreal, whatever those words mean in a fictional spin-off of a pseudo documentary. BW2 ends in a delirious ambiguity, which can be solved by the maxim "Films lie; video tells the truth." But few movies have spread their fibs or facts as clumsily as this one. There's not an emotionally plausible moment in the picture. If Berlinger thinks he's commenting on media sensation--and not trying to exploit it--then the joke...
...producers, to their credit, made an intriguing move in selecting documentary filmmaker Joe Berlinger (Paradise Lost) to helm the project. On paper, the choice is inspired-who better to tackle the pseudo-reality of the Blair Witch than a man who's spent his entire career grappling with the constructs of the non-fictional? But whatever documentary instincts Berlinger may have honed over the years can't help his script, co-written with Dick Beebe, which unfolds with all the imagination and genre-challenging of a "Tales From the Crypt" episode. The premise at least taps nicely into the vein...