The third show of the block is called "The Festival," and it involves a wannabe filmmaker guy whose film has made it into this indie film festival that's sort of like Sundance, but the fact is that we all know way, way too much about Sundance: It's so commercial, it's so pretentious, the filmmakers are so broke, blah blah blah. Meanwhile, all anyone does is stand around at promotional events, tossing back branded vodka drinks, having the same bad conversations about Sundance while scanning the crowd for Paris Hilton. The free lip balm is pretty exciting, though.

Helpless pictures
Speaking of free lip balm for the chicken soul, those of you who like watching good films more than you like hearing about the bad parties at good film festivals are going to want to tune in for the premiere of "Born Into Brothels" (Tuesday, Aug. 16 at 7 p.m. EDT on Cinemax). That's the Oscar-winning Sundance documentary about kids growing up in the red-light district of Calcutta. Filmmaker Zana Briski lived with the women in the brothels for years, then started to teach some of the kids who lived there photography, and the documentary chronicles their experiences and her attempts to get them out of the brothels and into boarding schools. The kids are sweet and insightful and in many cases, very talented, and their lives are pretty far removed from anything you're likely to have seen before.

When you see the kids play in the ocean, then return, sullenly, to their lives at the brothel, you get a fleeting glimpse of just how lucky you are to be dating the same variety of jerk over and over again and visiting your family over and over again for a regular dose of emotional abuse and so on. In other words, it will restore your youth or at least restore your childlike innocence and wonder -- you know, so that you can be more like Tom Cruise.

In summary
A wise young woman named Missy once said, "Nostalgia is the best. Are you kidding me? That's why I make memories in the first place!"

On the other hand, without nostalgia, Mark Burnett wouldn't be foolish enough to think that anyone considers a lead singer for INXS a "rock star." Without nostalgia, Bobby Brown wouldn't be on our TV screens, George W. Bush wouldn't be in the White House, and Tom Cruise would be leading his own twisted cult somewhere in the Mojave Desert, leaving Katie Holmes safe to play hopscotch and read teen magazines unmolested.

All of this talk of nostalgia reminds me of that terrible song by the band Bowling for Soup, called "1985." For those of you not swimming through the globo-cultural trash heap, "1985" tells the story of a pathetic suburban mom who wishes it were still 1985, because that's when she listened to Madonna and U2 and Blondie, but now she's married to an accountant and her high-school-age kids think she's incredibly lame. Maybe the little bastards even wrote the song. But the point is, idiot loser nostalgic mom has no taste, while her mean cooler-than-thou kids obviously listen to quality music by Ashlee Simpson and Hoobastank.

That song makes me nostalgic for a time when I thought I was cooler than my mom. She had these big, weird, tinted Barbra Streisand glasses, and she'd sometimes wear these old Army jackets and she carried this huge leather purse, all of which prompted me to sing (to the tune of "Our Love's in Jeopardy!") "My mom's a refugee, baby!" Meanwhile, I listened to Duran Duran and wore jackets with huge shoulder pads in them and sprayed my terrible bangs with a really strong hairspray called Stiff Stuff. In other words, I had it all wrong: My mom was a lot cooler than I was. Yet, like a greasy teenager tipsy on peach wine coolers, I'm still a little nostalgic for those days. The moral to our story? Nostalgia makes jackasses of us all.

Next week: The nostalgia of HBO's "Rome" makes a jackass of ABC's inferior "Empire," but it's still nowhere near as good as the most of the other dramas on HBO.

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