In the final episode of the seminal high school TV comedy-drama Freaks And Geeks, titled ‘Discos and Dragons’, teenage nerd Sam Weir (played by John Francis Daley) is fed up. “I'm sick of being called a geek,” he complains to his friends. “I mean, what's so geeky about us, anyways? We're just guys.” Then, with perfect comic timing, his equally nerdy friend Harris (Stephen Lea Sheppard) approaches him in the school corridor and announces: “Gentlemen. Good news! New Dungeons & Dragons handbook. ‘Deities And Demigods’. We’re gonna have a fun Friday night!”
Criminally cancelled in 2000 after just one season, Freaks And Geeks was at the time perhaps the most accurate on-screen depiction of the fantasy tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. For a long time, D&d — with its high fantasy tropes, its fair maidens, its complex magic, its many-sided dice and its opaque, labyrinthine rules — seemed solely the domain of geeks.
Criminally cancelled in 2000 after just one season, Freaks And Geeks was at the time perhaps the most accurate on-screen depiction of the fantasy tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. For a long time, D&d — with its high fantasy tropes, its fair maidens, its complex magic, its many-sided dice and its opaque, labyrinthine rules — seemed solely the domain of geeks.
- 3/31/2023
- by John Nugent
- Empire - Movies
Freaks and Geeks Episode 1 ‘Pilot’
Directed by Jake Kasdan
Written by Paul Feig
Aired 9/25/1999
If there’s such thing as a perfect pilot, Freaks and Geeks‘s first hour is it. Most pilots are mish-mashed groups of scenes with some overly constructed jokes, an audience-grabbing plot hook, and numerous scenes where characters explain who other characters are. ‘Pilot’ is the exact opposite of that, a beautiful, detailed photograph into a high school in suburban Detroit on the first day back from summer vacation. From that first scene, where an overwrought confession of love between a football player and cheerleader (“I just love you so much… it scares me”) is shoved off-frame to introduce us to the ‘freaks’, Freaks and Geeks established itself as a different kind of high school show, one that wasn’t afraid to be honest about shitty high school life when you’re not “one of the cool kids.
Directed by Jake Kasdan
Written by Paul Feig
Aired 9/25/1999
If there’s such thing as a perfect pilot, Freaks and Geeks‘s first hour is it. Most pilots are mish-mashed groups of scenes with some overly constructed jokes, an audience-grabbing plot hook, and numerous scenes where characters explain who other characters are. ‘Pilot’ is the exact opposite of that, a beautiful, detailed photograph into a high school in suburban Detroit on the first day back from summer vacation. From that first scene, where an overwrought confession of love between a football player and cheerleader (“I just love you so much… it scares me”) is shoved off-frame to introduce us to the ‘freaks’, Freaks and Geeks established itself as a different kind of high school show, one that wasn’t afraid to be honest about shitty high school life when you’re not “one of the cool kids.
- 6/5/2013
- by Randy
- SoundOnSight
Freaks and Geeks Episode 1 ‘Pilot’
Directed by Jake Kasdan
Written by Paul Feig
Aired 9/25/1999
If there’s such thing as a perfect pilot, Freaks and Geeks‘s first hour is it. Most pilots are mish-mashed groups of scenes with some overly constructed jokes, an audience-grabbing plot hook, and numerous scenes where characters explain who other characters are. ‘Pilot’ is the exact opposite of that, a beautiful, detailed photograph into a high school in suburban Detroit on the first day back from summer vacation. From that first scene, where an overwrought confession of love between a football player and cheerleader (“I just love you so much… it scares me”) is shoved off-frame to introduce us to the ‘freaks’, Freaks and Geeks established itself as a different kind of high school show, one that wasn’t afraid to be honest about shitty high school life when you’re not “one of the cool kids.
Directed by Jake Kasdan
Written by Paul Feig
Aired 9/25/1999
If there’s such thing as a perfect pilot, Freaks and Geeks‘s first hour is it. Most pilots are mish-mashed groups of scenes with some overly constructed jokes, an audience-grabbing plot hook, and numerous scenes where characters explain who other characters are. ‘Pilot’ is the exact opposite of that, a beautiful, detailed photograph into a high school in suburban Detroit on the first day back from summer vacation. From that first scene, where an overwrought confession of love between a football player and cheerleader (“I just love you so much… it scares me”) is shoved off-frame to introduce us to the ‘freaks’, Freaks and Geeks established itself as a different kind of high school show, one that wasn’t afraid to be honest about shitty high school life when you’re not “one of the cool kids.
- 4/24/2013
- by Randy
- SoundOnSight
As a part of the superb line-up of the 49th New York Film Festival, The Film Society of Lincoln Center’s young patron’s group New Wave celebrated the 10th Anniversary of The Royal Tenenbaums with a screening and Q&A featuring Wes Anderson, Gwyneth Paltrow, Anjelica Huston, Bill Murray, Noah Baumbach and Eric Anderson. As someone who has long counted this quirky tale of an oddball clan of geniuses as one of her favorite films, I was among the first ticketholders to trickle into the expansive and awe-inspiring cavern that is Alice Tully Hall.
Here giddy twenty-somethings, who (like myself) must have taken to Anderson’s bittersweet yet hopeful worldview in their formative years, trickled in. Several even emulated Anderson’s recurring gentle but warm color palette in their outfits, favoring light browns, pinks and pale yellows in the forms of suit jackets, sweatervests and polo shirts. Next came...
Here giddy twenty-somethings, who (like myself) must have taken to Anderson’s bittersweet yet hopeful worldview in their formative years, trickled in. Several even emulated Anderson’s recurring gentle but warm color palette in their outfits, favoring light browns, pinks and pale yellows in the forms of suit jackets, sweatervests and polo shirts. Next came...
- 10/15/2011
- by jpraup@gmail.com (thefilmstage.com)
- The Film Stage
New York -- Thursday night, the New York Film Festival toasted the 10th anniversary of Wes Anderson's film "The Royal Tenenbaums." And although a decade has passed, the film's production remains remarkably ahead of its time.
The glossy, kooky tale about a family of off-beat geniuses screened in front of a packed theater at the Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center -- with laughter and silences so on-point, they almost seemed rehearsed. Afterward, Anderson and the film's stars, Gwyneth Paltrow, Anjelica Huston and Bill Murray, filed out before a sea of fans to reveal what we didn't already know about the "Tenenbaums."
Everybody's terrified of Gene Hackman.
"The word cocksucker gets thrown around a lot," Murray began, the audience erupting in laughter. "I'd hear these stories, like, 'Gene threatened to kill me today.'" Murray said he responded unfazed: "'He can't kill you, you're in a union!' [or] 'Gene...
The glossy, kooky tale about a family of off-beat geniuses screened in front of a packed theater at the Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center -- with laughter and silences so on-point, they almost seemed rehearsed. Afterward, Anderson and the film's stars, Gwyneth Paltrow, Anjelica Huston and Bill Murray, filed out before a sea of fans to reveal what we didn't already know about the "Tenenbaums."
Everybody's terrified of Gene Hackman.
"The word cocksucker gets thrown around a lot," Murray began, the audience erupting in laughter. "I'd hear these stories, like, 'Gene threatened to kill me today.'" Murray said he responded unfazed: "'He can't kill you, you're in a union!' [or] 'Gene...
- 10/14/2011
- by Jessie Heyman
- Huffington Post
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