Actor Glenn Ford died yesterday at the age of 90 after a long career in the movies and television. Perhaps best known to modern audiences as Clark Kent's father in Richard Donner's Superman—The Movie, Ford made a solid career as a leading man despite a near-complete lack of charisma and magnetism.
Ford's stolid, mature persona contrasted greatly with those of popular contemporaries such as Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, and James Dean who valued a high degree of explicit emotional expression. Ford could show passion when called upon, as in the suspense film Ransom (remade in 1996 as a Mel Gibson vehicle) and the drama The Blackboard Jungle, but even in those cases his stoicism is what we remember most vividly.
Ford's characters often had serious flaws—such as stubbornness, irresponsibility, jealousy, and lack of intelligence—and these flaws led to interesting moral complexities in his best films. In both his virtues and his flaws, Ford represented a strong strain of the American character—the adventurousness, the uncompromising striving for rectitude, and the relentless and often disorganized pursuit of what is right and good in life.
The TV networks will be doing a significant amount of programming commemorating the forthcoming 5th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
ABC has produced a four-hour docudrama, The Path to 9/11, which is based on the government report on the attack and helps explain how the attack happened. After the second, concluding episode of the miniseries, ABC will air a special edition of Primetime hosted by Charlie Gibson. Good Morning, America,World News, and Nightline will also cover the story.
NBC will run a number of programs, including coverage on the Today show. The network will rerun in primetime several programs originally aired in 2001. MSNBC and CNBC will present programs as well, but nobody will watch them.
CBS will air an updated version of the documentary 9/11 on Sunday evening, and on Sept. 6 will present an hour-long, primetime special, Five Years Later: How Safe Are We? (My guess: they'll conclude that we've been demn lucky, not smart.) In the special, Katie Couric will interview President Bush. Hilarity ensues.
Yes, China took over Hong Kong, but it may well be that Hong Kong's former colonizer, Great Britain, is about to take over China—through the media.
Variety reports that the BBC has established a content-provision deal with Chinese broadcasters, through which the Beeb will provide drama programs to more than 300 local and regional channels, including outlets in Beijing and Shanghai. In addition, the latest season of David Attenborough's BBC program Life in the Undergrowth, which will be shown on the national network China Central Television.
The Chinese will be playing cricket and stopping for afternoon tea before you know it.
In our ongoing Everything Happens in the Omniculture department, E! Online reports that a bronze sculpture purporting to be the first solid poop from Tom and Katie Cruise's daughter, Suri, goes on display today at a Brooklyn, NY, art musuem.
Yes, but is it Art?
Short answer: No.
Of course, the museum makes a nice excuse for it, as E! reports:
"It's partially a statement on modern media that 'celebrity poop' has more entertainment value than health, famine or other critical issues facing society and governments today," the Capla [Museum] crew said in a statement, "and also the absurdity of the media coverage on Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes' new baby, Suri Cruise, which has reached stellar proportions, eclipsing far more notable events with more substance."
Yes, a comment on modern media. Thanks for that. Without a sculpture of baby poop, we would never have known that the modern media are superficial—and that modern museums are so much better.
Hong Kong Entertainers Protest Invasions of Privacy
A protest movement in Hong Kong (led by one of my favorite entertainment figures, Jackie Chan), sheds light on some interesting differences between America's wide-open Omniculture and other, politically different places, and also on a conflict endemic to modern societies and which will surely become increasingly thorny.
Jackie Chanand fellow stars marched silently Tuesday to Hong Kong's government headquarters, protesting against a gossip magazine that featured a cover photo of a pop singer changing backstage.
The celebrities, wearing black T-shirts, handed over a petition denouncing the photos that were secretly taken of Hong Kong pop singer Gillian Chung, part of the popular female duo Twins. The stars urged the government to tighten laws governing racy publications.
Chung was shown adjusting her bra backstage after a concert in Malaysia's Genting Highlands. It appeared on the cover of the current issue of Easy Finder weekly.
That is what's considered racy over there, in terms of open publication at least. And in great contrast to America's entertainment community, which perpetually worries that the nation is sliding down a slippery slope to imminent federal censorship of entertainment (an entirely absurd notion), the Hong Kong entertainers and members of the public are actually calling for the government to step in and stop certain types of publication:
The photos have sparked a major backlash. Government regulators have received a deluge of complaints. Hong Kong's Obscene Articles Tribunal has classified the magazine issue "indecent," which could lead to prosecution. Chan and fellow stars attended a TV special protesting the photos Monday.
Hong Kong leader Donald Tsang spoke out against the photos Tuesday.
"I identify with society's strong criticism of these tactics," he said.
I'm not familiar with Hong Kong's constitution, but I suppose that like that of its former parent Great Britain, and very much like that of its new overseer, China, it does not have press protections nearly as universal as those in our First Amendment (and even ours does not protect obscenity, although the Supreme Court has effectively defined the latter out of existence). Hong Kong journalists, in any case, disagree with the entertainers:
Journalists have opposed restrictions on their coverage as a threat to press freedom. Legal reforms propose banning secret surveillance by private parties, but the government is still considering the recommendations.
Chan acknowledges that celebrities are news and should expect to be treated as such:
Asked if he wants to see paparazzi photos banned completely, Chan said he believed celebrities should be held accountable for their actions.
Chan correctly observes, however, that invasions of privacy that would be illegal when done to noncelebrities should be illegal for everybody:
"As public figures, we should allow our pictures to be taken. If we crash our cars when we're drunk, it serves us right. People should scold us. But for a girl to be photographed when she's in a changing room, such a private place, is despicable behavior," he said.
AP reports that Hong Kong publications have indeed been closed down for such activities:
Eastweek magazine was shut down amid the backlash after publishing on its cover a photo of a visibly distressed, seminude female star, widely reported to be Carina Lau, in October 2002.
Eastweek was then owned by businessman Albert Yeung, who controls Chung's record label EEG. It was later reopened under new ownership.
Certainly nothing like that is apt to happen here, although on the state level it would be perfectly constitutional, and on the federal level it would likewise be constitutionally acceptable in response to publications that traffic in obscenity. But even so, it won't happen in the foreseeable future. (Note that I'm not advocating any particular policy in this situation but merely pointing out the constitutional issues.)
American entertainers complain about papparazzi, understandably, and they would certainly like to see local governments step in to ensure that people are prevented from intruding too greatly into their lives. (And I agree with them on that.) Even so, it is very difficult to imagine Hollywood entertainers calling for the government to attack the problem by suppressing the publications in which the photos appear. Well, impossible, really.
This is a very interesting controversy because it places in stark terms our current cultural conflict over what is public and what is private as media penetration into our lives becomes increasingly ubiquitous. It involves an endless series of tradeoffs, to which I think there will never be any easy, conclusive answer.
Heralding the start of an unusual entrepreneurial relationship, Tom Cruise and his producing partner said Monday they have joined forces with a new investment partnership that will fund the duo's production endeavors for the next two years.
The announcement comes less than a week after Viacom Inc. and its Paramount Pictures unit publicly revealed they had ended negotiations to renew the studio's 14-year deal with Cruise/Wagner Prods., which Cruise runs with Paula Wagner.
In comments unprecedented for their bluntness, Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone said last Tuesday that Cruise had committed "creative suicide." Wagner quickly countered that C/W was not planning to renew anyway, and planned to seek other options, including a deal with hedge funds to provide about $100 million in financing.
The company will produce a variety of types of films, some starring Cruise. The option for a long-term arrangement will be settled after the two-year contract is concluded.
The Reuters report points out that the agreement sets up a new model for actors' production companies in light of recent changes in Hollywood's economic situation, and that it shows a strong belief in the viability of Cruise's company:
The deal represents a potential new model for financing stars' production companies, particularly if studios continue to pull back from backing deluxe production deals. Sources at CAA said they know of no other outside investment partnership that has taken a similar interest in a star's company.
Despite Redstone's tart comments, this was an inevitability. Cruise's well-publicized missteps in recent years have not changed the fact that his movies make loads of money. And a relatively brief, two-year commitment with an option for long-term renewal protects the investors. It makes good sense for all parties concerned.
Regular readers of Karnick on Culture will recall that your faithful correspondent stated last week that Paramount's willingness to let Tom Cruise's production company leave the company lot had nothing to do with Cruise's strange behavior in recent years and everything to do with simple economics:
Cruise's deal at Paramount was on very good terms for him, which means it was expensive for the studio—more than $10 million a year. Cruise's representatives say that Paramount made an offer to Cruise to keep his production company on Paramount's lot, but the offer was significantly less money than the Cruise's company had been receiving, so they decided to shop around for private financing. This is not unusual: the Hollywood studios have been slashing costs recently, especially payments to big stars such as Cruise. A slowing of growth in DVD sales has certainly contributed to this trend.
[T]his parting of the ways was really just a bottom-line, cost-cutting business decision on Paramount's part. . . .
It made sense for Paramount to try to get Cruise to sign a less expensive deal and, failing that, to let him leave.
Movie industry executives may be forgiven for thinking that the Viacom chairman was mad to let Tom Cruise go after a 14-year relationship simply because Mr. Cruise seemed a little off balance. After all, the movies made by Viacom’s Paramount Pictures studio and the actor’s production company earned more than $2.5 billion at the box office.
Yet, if you ask economists and other academics that study the movie industry, Mr. Redstone’s decision was, in financial terms, spot on. The best reason to get rid of Mr. Cruise or, for that matter, Mel Gibson, or Lindsay Lohan, is not their occasional aberrant behavior. They, like most marquee names in Hollywood, are simply not worth the expense.
“Who knows what went through Mr. Redstone’s mind?” said Jehoshua Eliashberg, a professor of marketing, operations and information management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. “But one can’t discard that the reason is that it doesn’t make economic sense to pay him all this money.”
I watched a few minutes of the Emmy Awards ceremony last night on NBC. Some thoughts:
It was good to see Tony Shaloub win an award for his acting in Monk. Shaloub gave a mildly humorous speech and seems an immensely likeable person.
Conan O'Brien is a truly scary-looking individual but is rather amusing. The opening song and dance sequence was as tedious and embarrassing as these usually are. When will awards show producers realize that bad production numbers presented with irony are still bad?
Bob Newhart is still one of the funniest men alive. His subtle, intelligent brand of humor is hugely appealing in this time of general raucousness in American comedy.
TV producers must be incredible skinflints, as they obviously do not pay their actresses enough money so that the ladies can afford complete dresses. Many of the gowns on display last night seemed to consist of little more than a few square feet of very sheer fabric. Of course, for those of us who happen to be red-blooded American males, this is a good thing.
It was pleasing to see 24 win for Best Drama Series and Kiefer Sutehrland win for Best Actor (or Outstanding Performance or whatever they're calling it these days). 24 was an innovative show during its first couple of years, and its use of an overarching story line over the course of a season has been much imitated since. In addition, for all the implausibility and melodrama that presses its outlandish storylines forward, the show works very well as a romance fiction, and it is always full of interesting ideas and themes.
The Walt Disney film Invincible, starring Mark Wahlberg as a decidedly underdog aspiring professional football player, took in a respectable $17 million over the weekend to finish number one at the movie box office. The total was more than double that of the runner-up, the Will Farrell comedy Talladega Nights, at $8 million. Snakes on a Plane fell to number six.
Judging from the theatrical trailer and the interesting story line (Philadephia bartender who never played college ball makes the best of a chance to try out for the NFL Philadelphia Eagles, based on a true story), I've been looking forward to the release of Invincible for quite some time. I will try to carve out a couple of hours this week to see it and report on it.
Finally, the USA Network comedy-mystery Psych came up with a fully satisfying episode, last Friday night. The season finale hit all the right notes: it had a solid mystery at its center, including a couple of pleasing, unexpected twists; the setting, a comic book convention, was interesting and unusual and was handled well, especially in revealing that a couple of the top supporting characters were comic book fans; the setting was tied in very strongly with the murder mystery, particularly in the way it is used to place clues to the mystery throughout the episode and motivated the crimes; the way Sean, the main character and fake psychic private detective, used his persona as a psychic in order to obtain clues from a convention hall full of people and expose the murderer in public; Sean's attempt to romance one of the suspects was handled with greater humor than usual, because his lack of progress was funnier and more dramatically interesting than the greater immediate success he usually seems to have in this part of the story; a subplot involving the prima donna nature of even the most minor celebrities (guest actor George Takei from Star Trek); the angry police lieutenant who is persistently antagonistic toward Sean, the lead character, is away with the pregnant chief throughout the episode, and hence not boringly and predictably snarling at Sean; and some amusing self-referential humor.
James Roday still plays Shawn, the lead character, a little to cutely, but he has toned it down a bit, which allows the show to take a more realistic tone and thereby becomemore involving. Or perhaps I'm just becoming accustomed to Roday's overacting. Either way, it's not such a distraction now. (This reminds me of how the USA Network's other Friday night comedy-mystery show, Monk, became stronger when the overacting Bitty Schram was replaced by Traylor Howard when the former left in a contract disagreement. And yes, I know that some people think Schram was much better than Howard. Well, they're wrong.)
Psych will return with new original episodes in January, according to USA Network. Until last night, I wasn't particularly looking forward to the new season; I thought the show was diverting but that it was falling well short of its potential. If the series can pick up where last night's episode left off, it will be a real success.
Yes, the TV academy's annual Emmy Awards are coming up fast, and the ceremony at which they are announced will be broadcast live this Sunday night—but I'm sorry to inform you that you're going to have to be on your own on this one. I just can't watch them. These award ceremonies bore the life out of me, and who wins which one usually just confirms what we already know about the strange and elaborate system of values in Hollywood. However, as a public service to those of our loyal readers who are able to care about the matter, here's a link to a story about what people with way too much time on their hands are speculating about regarding this year's awards, from E! Online.
Manners are important to society and to each of us as individuals, in that they codify and simplify many of the hundreds of little decisions we have to make every day. Contrary to modern thinking, manners don't oppress us, they free us.
The talented and acclaimed actor William Macy made this point yesterday in a thoroughly admirable criticism of the unprofessional behavior of a younger colleague, the actress Lindsay Lohan, in her work on a film in which the two appeared together. As E! Online reports,
When it comes to tardiness, William H. Macy follows the golden rule. Do unto under-the-gun film crews as you'd have them do unto you.
"You can't show up late," the Emmy winner said Thursday at a Los Angeles press junket for his new film, Everyone's Hero. "It's very, very disrespectful."
"I think what an actor has to realize [is that] when you show up an hour late, 150 people have been scrambling to cover for you," Macy said when asked about Bobby costar Lohan's usual check-in time. The two share a scene together in the Emilio Estevez-directed drama about the 16 hours leading up to Robert F. Kennedy's assassination in 1968.
"There is not an apology big enough in the world to have to make 150 people scramble. It's nothing but disrespect. And Lindsay Lohan is not the only one. A lot of actors show up late as if they're God's gift to the film. It's inexcusable. They should have their asses kicked."
Habitual lateness may not just be a problem for Lohan but, according to Macy, despite his opinion that she's a huge talent, "she was pretty late" all the same.
Sure, our subways are soaked with urine, but at least we're spared THIS:
[AP reports:] Tokyo's subway authority will allow a station advertisement featuring a nude and pregnant Britney Spears, officials said Thursday, dropping an earlier plan to censor the photo.
HB Japan Inc., publisher of the Japanese edition of Harper's Bazaar, plans to rent ad space at the posh Omotesando station next week to promote its October issue with Spears posing naked on the cover.
The ad, in which Spears bares her belly but covers her breasts with her hands, is the same one used in the August issue of the magazine's U.S. edition. The 24-year-old pop star is pregnant with her second child.
OK, the magazine cover did appear on newsstands here, but at least it was smaller and might be covered up by a copy of Guns and Ammo or Beekeeper's Fortnightly. This ad will be unavoidable. People of taste will have to hire large people in overcoats to stand in front of the ads and block them from view. It's an extra expense to clean up the subways, but a necessary one.
The New York Times has brought on a perfume critic, AP reports. The column will appear frequently in the Times's style magazine. In a statement, new Times perfume critic Chandler Burr said, “Every other true art has a serious criticism. I believe perfume should as well.” He said he intends to take his new position very seriously.
Well, I suppose somebody has to—and it makes sense that it would be the person who's being paid for it. . . .
I've never seen this much blitzing in the preseason, and it tells me to expect a year of weird, wacky defenses. Normally, defenses are pretty basic in the first two preseason games. Not this year. Defensive coordinators are testing the timing of their blitzes. It's not that they are going with a lot of exotic stuff, It's just that they are sending extra defenders. What's really noticeable is how much more they are doing it on the running downs. The tendencies have been to see teams blitz more on first and second down and rush only three or four on third down, dropping more defenders into coverage. The ability to blitz is causing more teams to have hybrid defenses. Several 4-3 defenses, such as Baltimore, the New York Giants and Miami, have an end standing up and either rushing or dropping into coverages.
That's a very interesting observation, especially the use of blitzes on running downs. It's a big risk, big reward situation. Blitzing can backfire, of course, especially on running downs, but when it works, it puts the offense in a big hole. As offenses adjust to this defensive strategy, a bit more creativity may be in order, which could make for more variety among NFL offenses, which have been converging in recent years.
Tom Cruise's loss of his production agreement at Paramount Pictures has raised a good deal of comment in film-industry circles. The action itself is rather mundane. Cruise's deal at Paramount was on very good terms for him, which means it was expensive for the studio—more than $10 million a year. Cruise's representatives say that Paramount made an offer to Cruise to keep his production company on Paramount's lot, but the offer was significantly less money than the Cruise's company had been receiving, so they decided to shop around for private financing. This is not unusual: the Hollywood studios have been slashing costs recently, especially payments to big stars such as Cruise. A slowing of growth in DVD sales has certainly contributed to this trend.
Moreover, Cruise's company was primarily producing films not starring Cruise himself, which would suggest that any slip in popularity on his part would not affect their box-office prospects. These production deals, however, are realy just ways for studios to keep their most popular stars happy, giving them additional compensation by allowing them to function as producers—making them "creators" rather than just before-the-camera types.
Cruise's popularity has definitely fallen in the past year, making him a less valuable commodity as an actor at Paramount. As AP reports,
[N]egative public perception of Cruise has soared in the past six months in the closely watched Q Scores, which rate celebrity popularity. They indicate that negative perception of Cruise jumped nearly 100 percent since mid-2005, while positive perception fell about 40 percent.
"He's definitely at his low point in terms of consumer appeal, among both males and females," said Henry Schafer, executive vice president of Marketing Evaluations Inc., the Q Scores company.
Actually, contra Shafer, there is room for Cruise's rating to drop further, but that's up to him, of course. Cruise can overcome this if he behaves somewhat normally and has another hit movie, but certainly a Cruise with these Q ratings is worth a good deal less to a movie studio than the Tom Cruise of two years ago. Welcome to Microeconomics 101, Tommy Boy.
All of this confirms that this parting of the ways was really just a bottom-line, cost-cutting business decision on Paramount's part. What made the situation rather surreal and newsy was two things: public awareness of Cruise's bizarre recent history of TV rants and goofiness, and Viacom chief Sumner Redstone's statement regarding the decision to break with Cruise's company. The chief of Paramount's parent company said Cruise's recent antics—leaping about on Oprah's sofa proclaiming his undying love for wife number 3, tearing Matt Lauer a new one for not understanding the magnitude of the conspiracies surrounding us about which Cruise and other Scientologists wish to warn us, etc.—were "creative suicide" and cost the studio up to $150 million in lost ticket sales for Mission Impossible 3.
Possibly, but these big crash and explosion movies may well have run their course, and the fact that the John Woo-directed Mission Impossible 2 was so irrational and uninspired probably did more to tank installment three than anything Cruise could have done. (I like Woo's Hong Kong films and Broken Arrow,Face/Off, and even Paycheck, but I have to say that he was a poor fit for MI2, not that I can fully understand where it all went wrong; it really should have worked. Well, OK, one thing that was disastrously wrong was the fact that MI2 dumped the central concept of the TV series and first film, the creation of a vast illusion to thwart the villains through ingenious trickery. MI2 was at heart an ordinary action film with extraordinary absurdity in its action sequences, which is saying a lot. And it appears that this was a consequence of Cruise's ego and his desire to avert rumors of homosexuality by emphasizing physical action, such as him climbing cliff faces, etc. This overbalanced the film, further removed the film series from the essentially cheerful and optimistic nature of the TV series, and made MI2 perfectly ludicrous.)
It made sense for Paramount to try to get Cruise to sign a less expensive deal and , failing that, to let him leave. There is nothing to be ashamed of in this, and no need to pile on the hapless Scientologist goofball with harsh words. A simple "We love Tom and wish him well" would have been much better than Redstone's high and mighty rant. As in all things, Redstone and Viacom have shown themselves as entirely devoid of class, manners, and principle. A pox on them, I say.
I'll tell you more about the repugnance of Viacom and Redstone in future postings on this site.
Boy, things are getting weird when I find myself defending Tom Cruise. That's how repulsive Viacom is.
Variety reports that Steve Buscemi and Dan Ackroyd have joined the cast of the forthcoming Adam Sandler film I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, which spoofs "gay marriage":
Steve Buscemi and Dan Aykroyd have joined the cast of the Adam Sandler-Kevin James comedy "I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry" at Universal.
The Dennis Dugan-directed laffer, most recently scripted by Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor, is about two straight, single Philadelphia firefighters who pretend to be a gay couple to qualify for domestic partner benefits. Buscemi will play a city worker from financial services who's determined to expose the pair as cheats.
Chicago Nannies Ban Foie Gras—Steaks, Potatoes Next?
The Chicago City Council, in its infinite wisdom and benevolence, has banned the sale of foie gras, arguing that some producers of the delicacy force-feed the geese from which the liver pate is produced, which the Chi solons say is painful and inhumane.
On Tuesday, this city’s lawbreakers were serving foie gras.
The illicit substance could be spotted in places it was rarely seen when it was legal: buried in Chicago’s famed deep-dish pizza, in soul food on the South Side, beside beef downtown.
In one of the more unlikely (and opulent) demonstrations of civil disobedience, a handful of restaurants here that never carry foie gras, the fattened livers of ducks and geese, featured it on the very day that Chicago became the first city in the nation to outlaw sale of the delicacy.
“This ban is embarrassing Chicago,” said Grant DePorter of Harry Caray’s Restaurant, which dreamed up an appetizer of pan-seared foie gras and scallops ($14.95) and a Vesuvio-style entree pairing foie gras and tenderloin ($33.95) just to buck the new ordinance. “We really don’t think the City Council should decide what Chicagoans eat. What’s next? Some other city outlaws brussels sprouts? Another outlaws chicken? Another, green beans?”
The "offense" is subject to fines of $250 to $500, though there remains some question about how aggressively the city will enforce it. The alderman who sponsored the ban, Joe Moore, has been the subject of praise from animal rights activists and derision from restaurateurs, gourmands, and people generally concerned about erosions of individual liberty in the City of Big [Government Looking Over Your] Shoulders.
The law has already induced mockery from outside the city, according to a Chicago Tribune story:
Allen Sternweiller, executive chef and co-owner of Allen's New American Cafe, whose company is a plaintiff in the restaurant association's lawsuit, said Chicago is getting an unwanted reputation based on its proposals regarding trans fat and foie gras.
"Some of my colleagues (around the country) call Chicago 'The Nanny City,'" Sternweiller said.
The prospect of foie gras speakeasies and gang wars over rights to distribute the delicacy is amusingly farfetched, but the increasing number of things being banned by the Nanny City and other places makes a greater flouting of the laws a certainty at some point.
Sony Pictures Entertainment plans to announce on Wednesday that it has acquired Grouper, a Web site featuring videos contributed by users, for $65 million.
The deal marries one of the biggest and most powerful movie studios, which regularly spends more than $100 million on a film, with a Web site that provides free access to short and often inexpensively made videos on topics like pets, sports and music.
Michael Lynton, the chairman and chief executive of Sony Pictures, said the investment was a bet that material posted by users would continue to be a big draw online.
“My sense is that user-based content is a form of content that’s going to last,” Mr. Lynton said. “It’s a bet, no question, but it’s a bet worth making.”
Despite its emphasis on letting users share homemade videos, many of the most popular clips on Grouper are slick short productions, including music videos and commercials. . . .
Grouper will promote Sony’s content and seek to build communities of users around Sony movies and television shows, Mr. Felser said.
Of course it will. That's the whole point of the transaction.
The box office performance of a "high concept" film such as Snakes on a Plane is typically based not on the cleverness of the concept but on whether there is actually a good movie in it. Die Hard and Speed, for example, had characters we could care about, and the films put them in situations where they had interesting choices to make. Those that don't have these things usually fall off at the box office even if they get a good opening weekend.
Interestingly, the least entertaining and involving parts of Snakes on a Plane are the two big action scenes in which the serpents attack the passengers on the plane. The snakes operate in a riidiculously implausible manner, even if we accept the filmmakers' premise that pheromones released on the plane would make the creatures more aggressive. These snakes are much more than "more aggressive"; they're positively malevolent and volitional. That's not at all believable—and it's not the slightest bit necessary, for the film is interesting enough without sci-fi snakes.
The first 40 minutes of the picture are devoted to scenes setting the stage for the big action sequences. The central conceit is that a young man who witnessed a murder by a powerful gangster in Hawaii consents to testify against the killer and is duly to be flown to Los Angeles to appear in court. That leads to the scheme to release hundreds of snakes on the plane and cause it to crash. OK, better plans have been devised in this world, but we'll let it go, shall we?
After all, what really makes a high-concept thriller successful is how the characters react to the situation, and especially the need for them to show courage, honor, and other good character traits. Snakes on a Plane has plenty of that, with some characters acting honorably, others meanly, and others developing better character through the course of the story. What is most pleasing is that the characters actually manage to surprise us just a little bit once in a while. The film has a solid performance by Samuel L. Jackson at its center, and it has the right amount of humor, meaning not too much. Snakes on a Plane also has enough action-film cliches to choke an anaconda, but the filmmakers' willingness to let us see human character in action makes it worth seeing.
Fox's "Vanished"—A Good Start on a Fiendishly Complex Story
The only reviews I've seen of the new Fox TV series Vanished have been negative, although in the promo at the end of last night's premiere episode there were quotes from positive critiques of the show. I just haven't seen any. The critiques I've read all complained that the show was too complicated and that the characters weren't likeable enough or interesting enough to capture the critics' attention
Too complicated? Boohoo. Characters not likeable or interesting? Rather a matter of opinion, that, eh what? I don't like the characters in The Sopranos, but critics managed to find that one interesting.
I thought Vanished was quite well done and very interesting. The story, about the kidnapping of a senator's wife, unfloded into increasing complexity as the episode progressed. New questions and mysteries arose every couple of minutes, as we learned more about the characters' pasts and the niew information conflicted with what we and the characters in the story thought they knew. The very identity of the kidnapping victim came into question, increasing the mystery regarding why she was kidnapped and raising the question of whether she was even abducted at all. The lead FBI agent was certainly likeable, as were most of the other characters, and the persons central to the story were somewhat complex, which is quite an achievement for such a plot-heavy single episode in a series.
Actually, the complexity of plot makes for more interesting characters, in my view (and that of C. S. Lewis and of Aristotle, for that matter), which is contrary to what nearly all contemporary critics tend to think. I'll stick with Aristotle and Lewis on this one, if you don't mind.
Vanished has a very attractive time slot, running on Monday nights after the surprise hit Prison Break. It should appeal to audiences of that show.
You can decide for yourself by watching the program tonight at 9 EDT on Fox or at any time on Fox's site, here.
Turner to Remove Smoking Scenes from Cartoons—in UK
In response to a complaint by a single viewer, British media regulator Ofcom said Turner Broadcasting has offered to delete scenes that "glamorize smoking" in cartoons from earlier decades, when such scenes were commonplace. According to Reuters, the change was instigated when a single viewer complained to Ofcom about two scenes in two Tom and Jerry cartoons (one scene in each) shown on Turner's Boomerang channel in England, 56 percent of whose viewers are aged four to fourteen.
As a result, a Europe-based representative of Turner Broadcasting said the firm will "voluntarily" go through the entire inventory of cartoons owned by the firm, as reported by Ofcom in its news bulletin, according to Reuters:
"We are going through the entire catalog," Yinka Akindele, spokeswoman for Turner in Europe, said on Monday.
"This is a voluntary step we've taken in light of the changing times," she said, adding the painstaking review had been prompted by the Ofcom complaint.
This applies only to Great Britain at this time, as far as I can ascertain.
Interesting how times change, isn't it? In the 1950s, top-rated I Love Lucy was sponsored by a cigarette company, and the firm and network insisted that Lucy be seen holding a cigarette as often as possible. (Of course, it is debatable whether Lucille Ball can be said to have been capable of glamorizing anything at that time. . . .) Requirements that sympathetic characters smoke cigarettes and villans not smoke at all or smoke pipes or cigars were common practice throughout television at that time.
Such strictures applied even on the Camel News Caravan, a network news program, where Winston Churchill could not be shown holding a cigar.
Today, the situation is reversed: sympathetic characters do not smoke cigarettes, and villains do. It's a better lesson, I suppose, but one sometimes wonders why we all have to be treated like children because the federal and state governments will not allow the media to trust parents to teach their kids that smoking cigarettes is a very bad and unnecessary risk.
Obliterating Cultural Distinctions: Shakespeare at the Fringe
Shakespeare in a bouncy castle, or moon walk, is the Reuters writer's pick for zaniest Shakespeare adapatation at this year's Edinburgh Fringe Festival (see full article here).
This year's Edinburgh Fringe includes a "roller-disco" version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, along with other equally bizarre ideas from a crop which the Reuters story describes as "an endless variety that could be collectively labeled '101 Ways to Murder The Bard' ":
"Macbeth -- That Old Black Magic" boasts a Frank Sinatra soundtrack and you can see "The Tempest" with acrobats, puppets and circus tricks.
In "Corleone: The Godfather," the American High School Theater Festival troupe asks "What if Shakespeare had written the Godfather?"
We can surely hope that such tomfoolery will create an interest in Shakespeare among some individuals who would never otherwise get anywhere near the Bard's works. For the more sophisticated, it could be argued that the contrast between Shakespeare's elevated artistry and the coarse, anarchical surroundings of the Fringe Festival can make for an enlightening contrast that affords one an even greater appreciation of the Bard's work. One could conclude that the humor of such things resides in our appreciation of the contrast between what is vulgar and what is elevated.
But I doubt it in this case. To appreciate the works of Shakespeare, one need only experience them. They still speak to deep truths in human nature and of enduring realities of the human condition. It appears, then that the main effect of such burlesques as are common at the Fringe is to obliterate lines of distinction between cultural artifacts. Burlesques of Shakespeare do not demistify the Bard's works—as if that were at all necessary; they are, after all, quite understandable to any reasonably attentive person—but instead simply make them part of a cultural stew in which all ingredients are equally important and none may be allowed pride of place.
That is something of which the Omniculture provides quite enough already, thank you very much.
"Snakes on a Plane" Falters; Genre Confusion to Blame?
The greatly anticipated comedy-thriller Snakes on a Plane drew in the most money in movie ticket sales nationally over the weekend, though actually not. Snakes would have come in second (to the Will Farrell comedy Talladega Nightsi) if not for the distributor's decision to include Thursday night figures in the total. New Line's head of distribution said it is common policy for studios to do that, and the head of distribution at Sony, which released Talladega Nights, declined to comment to AP. (See AP story here.)
Analysis: The $15.25 million that Snakes on a Plane brought in over its first weekend is a decent amount of money but must be considered a failure given the amount of advance interest that had allegedly been sparked in the film. The film's strong concept, which so greatly piqued many people's interest, may have worked against it as far as actually luring people into theaters: One could very well feel that one already had experienced all that was of value in the film just by hearing about the concept and seeing the trailers, commercials, and TV promo teasers.
I think that another problem with the film was even more serious: a conflict of genre expectations. Snakes has the concept of a Bruce Willis-style suspense thriller, which is a sure formula for success: Die Hard on a plane full of dangerous snakes. The promotion that grew up on the internet, however, saw the film's central idea as throughly comical (which it most certainly is)—and too much comedy undermines the ability to create suspense. Comedy is important to have in a thriler, but too much will make it impossible for audiences to take the concept with even the minimal seriousness required to enjoy modern-day thrillers with their outlandish premises.
I believe that this genre confusion is the main reason for Snakes' lackluster victory at the box office.
The film will certainly do all right overall and will turn a profit, but it most likely will not turn out to be the kind of phenomenon people expected.
In the Omniculture, everything happens. Hence, given the popularity of poker on television, it was inevitable that there should soon enough be a World Strip Poker Championship.
The contest took place in the prestigious Cafe Royal in central London last Saturday. Players competed in games of "No Limit Texas Hold 'em." The winner defeated 200 other players.
A South Park episode, "Trapped in the Closet," was nominated for the award and received a good deal of attention because of protests by the Church of Scientology, which had objected to the showing last November of the episode mocking actor Tom Cruise. Instead of airing a rerun of the episode in March, as scheduled, Comedy Central refused to run the show, apparently buckling under the pressure from the Scientologists and Mr. Cruise, whose film Mission Impossible 3 was produced by Paramount Pictures, which, like Comedy Central, is owned by Viacom. South Park writer-producers Matt Stone and Trey Parker say they believe Cruise threatened to pull out of promotion for the film. Both Cruise's representatives and Paramount say they had nothing to do with the spiking of the program.
The episode is hilarious, as those who missed it will find out when it appears on DVD.
The animated series award was given, as is the academy's custom, in the ceremony honoring technical achievements. The primetime Emmy Awards will be given out on August 27.
Update: In the comments section for this article, comenter Matt notes, "now that MI3 has come and gone from the theaters and Viacom doesn't need Cruise to do promotional work for them anymore, the episode in question is back in rotation." That confirms our conclusion about Comedy Central's motives in cancelling the episode's rerun." Thanks, Matt.
The first installment of Philip Pullman's anti-Christian, pro-"Lucifer" children's saga His Dark Materials is coming to the silver screen. New Line will produce The Golden Compass, based on the first of the trilogy of young-adult novels, with shooting scheduled to commence on September 4 in the UK. New James Bond Daniel Craig will star as Lord Asriel, in a cast that also includes Nicole Kidman. New Line is the company that produced the Lord of the Rings film trilogy.
Fox Entertainment has announced that its 22 owned-and-operated TV stations will air popular primetime programs as ad-supported, on-demand streams on the web on the day they air on television, Variety reports.
Nine stations began doing so yesterday, with the rest of them to follow as the technology is adopted there, according to Variety:
The new initiative, dubbed "Fox on Demand," puts the network's own spin on the video streaming trend by allowing local stations to stream network shows the day after they air on television.
The first stations to participate are some of the biggest Fox affiliates in New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Dallas, Washington, DC, Tampa Bay, Orlando, Birmingham and Greensboro.
Fox digital media president Peter Levinsohn called the initiative the "next logical step" following a digital media deal signed with its local affilates earlier this year.
"We look forward to extending 'Fox on Demand' offering to our entire affiliate body," he said.
The free, ad-supported shows are sponsored by Toyota as part of a campaign for the youth-oriented Yaris subcompact.
Initially the service will offer select episodes of "Prison Break" and "Bones" including episodes from last season and new episodes the day after they appear on TV.
The service will also include older series from 20th Century Fox, "American Dad," "The Loop," and "Stacked."
To see the programs, viewers will have to download a proprietary video player. The effort is part of an overall digital upgrade of Fox-owned TV stations and an attempt to find ways to target advertising more effectively:
Fox execs said the decision to offer shows locally allows the advertising to better target local markets. It also gives stations a greater incentive to promote the network's shows outside of primetime.
Reuters reported on Monday that a Chinese film producer has announced plans for a $25 million film about the 1937 Rape of Nanking, a truly horrific atrocity in which Japanese troops brutally murdered tens of thousands of Chinese civilians.
The soldiers went on an appallingly vicious rampage through the captive Chinese city, and the things they did show the very worst of what human beings are capable of doing, including countless rapes, tossing live infants into the air and catching them on the ends of bayonets, and other such astonishingly barbaric behavior. The incident has been documented thoroughly by historians, but the subject has never received much attention. This movie should remedy that. As Reuters reports,
The movie of the massacres of tens of thousands of Chinese civilians by Japanese troops will be based on Iris Chang's bestseller, "The Rape of Nanking," Xinhua news agency said, adding it would involve a U.S. production company and British investors.
"We hope we can make the film a classic on a massacre in the Second World War, just like 'Schindler's List' about the miserable experience of Jewish people during the war," Xinhua quoted Gerald Green, the American producer of the movie, as saying.
China says 300,000 Chinese men, women and children were slaughtered by invading Japanese troops in war-time capital Nanjing, formerly known as Nanking.
Japan claims that the death toll was about half what the Chinese say, but either way it consitutes an extreme outrage. Chang's book, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, is a very impressive document of the events and the mindset that was put into the soldiers who commited the atrocities.
Reuters reports that the producers are going after some big-name performers to tell this story:
China actress Zhang Ziyi and Malaysia's Michelle Yeoh, stars of Oscar-winning martial arts film "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," were on the investors' wish list, Xinhua said.
The movie is scheduled to start shooting in "weeks to come" and would debut in China next year, ahead of the 70th anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre, Xinhua said.
This is a piece of history that more people should know more about, in America as much as anywhere else. It is a measure of what human beings in groups are capable of doing to one another, and as such it is something we really need to know.
Audiences, Critics Disagree on Summer's Superhero Movies
The Hollywood Reporter observes that audiences and critics differed greatly on the merits of the two big superhero movies of this summer:
As summer nears its end, "X-Men: The Last Stand," which nabbed middling reviews, seems to have exceeded expectations with a $441 million worldwide gross, while "Superman Returns" -- though it earned a strong, positive ranking of 76 percent on RottenTomatoes.com -- has yet to break the $200 million mark domestically.
I agree with the audiences on this one. X-Men: The Last Stand was not exactly profound, but at least it kept things moving and had some interesting characters. The makers of Superman Returns clearly tried very hard, but the film had no charisma whatever, disastrously poor chemistry between the lead performers, and no charm at all. The Christian imagery was an interesting touch and made the film deeper thematically, but the entertainment and artistic value did not match up with it. And the idea of Superdude having had a child with Lois Lane while she married another man is just the sort of clever concept that filmmakers ought to know better than to do. No wonder, then, that audiences thought it OK but not a must-see or a must-see-twice.
The (Temporary) Democratization of the Media, Through Technological Change
It's all too common for writers and analysts to characterize the internet as reponsible for pretty much everything that happens today, but it is true that new information technology is making significant changes in how we gain access to culture. Video-sharing services such as YouTube, for example, definitely constitute an important new channel for information and entertainment programming, and one that younger persons find particularly appealing.
Officially launched last December, this video-sharing service already plays more than 100 million clips per day with more than 65,000 video uploads added to its mammoth inventory. And those rates are skyrocketing.
The significance, of course, is that as the cost of making motion pictures is now a minuscule fraction of what it was during the previous century (and is approaching zero), and the cost of distributing them is now essentially zero, everybody can get into the act. As the AP story puts it:
Where does it end? "As more people capture special moments on video," its Web site declares, "YouTube is empowering them to become the broadcasters of tomorrow."
YouTube (slogan: "Broadcast Yourself") isn't the Internet's only video-sharing service. But it's the reigning brand, the talked-about phenomenon, and a mighty good example of the multiple roles now greeting yesterday's couch potato. These are get-up-and-do-something roles as artist, journalist, pundit, self-promoter, exhibitionist, prankster, weirdo and wag.
Now you, too, can be a TV producer and a TV programmer. Scheduling? That's in your hands on the receiving end, since clips are on demand, arranged in categories or searchable by various "tags." And you can be a distributor: E-mail any clip to your friends.
Ratings? Instant. Every clip appears with a running count of viewings, as well as how many viewers deemed it "a favorite." Not that anything is canceled for not being a hit. Unlike a network constricted by its two or three hours of prime time per night, the capacity of YouTube would appear to be boundless. No need here for one thing to be dropped to make room for another.
So what can you see? Make no mistake, a 10-second video aptly titled "Bunny the Dog Rubs Her Butt Against the Ground" isn't the stupidest, skeeziest or even briefest clip available. Nor is "Cockroach-Controlled Mobile Robot" the most whimsical. Or two pairs of fingers dancing to the tune of "Get Down Tonight" the most charming.
You find video testimony, as well. Katrina-themed clips from hurricane victims. Lebanese and Israelis supplying their images of war.
Meanwhile, broadcast images are being plucked off the air and granted an on-demand afterlife. The impromptu back rub that President Bush gave German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the G-8 Summit last month? It's right here, for screening anytime. So is co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck having a hissy fit on ABC's "The View." A search of "David Letterman" turns up more than 1,000 clips.
Forthcoming TV programs are increasingly appearing on peer-to-peer networks, evidently without the owners' permission. Pretty much everything ends up on these file-sharing networks, so it's no great surprise that yet-to-be-aired TV programs are turning up, but the downloads, and the underground publicity surrounding the programs, are actually affecting TV networks' programming decisions, the Wall Street Journal reports:
. . . In June, a TV pilot called "Nobody's Watching," which the WB network had passed on, was leaked to the video-sharing site YouTube. It generated enough of an audience online that NBC decided to pick up the show for development.
Half a million people watched the program on YouTube, which naturally caught the NBC programmers' attention. This will surely become more common as the media recognize the value of free sites as testing grounds. As the AP story notes:
At about the same time, NBC and YouTube forged a strategic partnership that, among other things, lets NBC hype its fall shows on YouTube. What more proof do you need of new media's appeal than when the mainstream media jumps on board?
NBC is learning one of the new rules YouTube has showcased with its free-for-all policy: Exposure, not payment, is what counts. Spreading it around is key.
And NBC, along with the rest of mainstream media, will have to abide by a new cultural reality as set forth by Chris Anderson in his current best-seller, "The Long Tail": "A once-monolithic industry structure where professionals produced and amateurs consumed is now a two-way marketplace, where anyone can be in any camp at any time."
This truly is a time of greater democratization of the communications media, comparable to the period in Europe immediately after the invention of the printing press. Nonetheless, the reality is that such new technologies are harnessed for political and social control as soon as possible. As with the invention of the printing press, the outcome will include both enjoyment and turbulence, and the world will change greatly.
If history is any guide, the democratization and liberty of the 'Net will ultimately be harnessed by governments and corporations for their own benefit, but as with the printing press, there will be effects that they can neither control nor predict. And that is all to the good.
Way back in the olden days before wall-to-wall coverage on television, highlights programs, and home video recording devices, sports writers wrote about sporting events. That is to say, they described the events for those who had not seen them and as a way of reliving the events for those who had seen them. Writers used a good deal of imagination in describing what happened on the field, indulging their desire to be real writers, not just newspaper schlubs. The best writing in the newspaper was often in the sports section—vivid, powerful, dramatic, and accurate. The latter was so because numerous people actually witnessed the events the writers covered, and hence errors would be quickly exposed.
The best sports writers would do a superb job of describing the ebb and flow of a game, its dramatic ups and downs, and its place in the context of the season. The story was the game itself, and the personalities of the players were important only to the degree that they fit in as characters in the bigger story on the court or on the field.
Writers such as Red Smith, Damon Runyon, and A. J. Liebling made sports journalism as interesting as a well-written novel or short story, because the drama on the field was real and they were willing to bring all their skills to bear on telling that story.
Events off the field were occasionally brought to bear, but they were largely kept out of the story unless they clearly and directly affected the performance on the field. Hence injuries were important to mention, but marital problems and contract status weren't.
That has changed since TV has made sporting events so accessible over the past three or four decades. Aware that their audience could easily see the games if they wanted, sports writers and their editors increasingly concentrated on the interactions among players and those between players, coaching staffs, owners, and the public. The personal lives of the players and other team personnel came to be seen as a legitimate news topic in that one could say that it does affect play on the field. Similarly, sports "analysis" have moved away from critiques of the on-field or game-preparation decisions of coaches and players, to a greater emphasis on how teams are put together, with personality conflicts and personal conduct as central areas of interest.
Hence, it is a real treat when one finds a story or analysis that is actually about on-field events and strategies, as in Gregg Easterbrook's ESPN.com American Football Conference preview. Easterbrook's entire analysis concentrates largely on the on-field strengths and weaknesses of the teams. In so doing, he mentions personal items where appropriate, which means when the truly affect what the team does on the field, as when he notes new Kansas City Chiefs' coach Herm Edwards's contract squabbles with his erstwhile employers the New York Jets last year (which certainly appear to have affected the team's performance) and the suicide of Indinapolis Colts coach Tony Dungy before the team's only playoff game last year (which they lost, to eventual Super Bowl champs the Pittsburgh Steelers.)
Easterbrook does bring in a few silly sidelights to keep it fun, such as his reports about team cheerleaders, but the emphasis is remarkably strong on analysis, and it is very good analysis indeed. As an example of what a real sportswriter can do, consider the following excerpt on the convergence of offensive strategies in the league on a single style. It is one of the most useful and insightful things I've read on any sport in a while:
This time of year, many NFL teams are crowing about the new offense they are installing. Teams installing a new offense for 2006 include the Bills, Dolphins, Jets, Lions, Rams, Redskins, Saints and Vikings. Often "new offense" means that instead of saying "power 80 slide quick," the quarterback will say "blue X-under 247." Both translate as "square out right" -- much of the installation of a new offense boils down to new terminology for standard plays. But there's a larger trend. In recent years, NFL offenses have converged toward a homogeneous product where everybody runs roughly the same stuff, hybridizing previously distinct offenses.
As recently as 15 years ago, some teams were power rush, some teams were run-and-shoot (no tight end, three small receivers running complex crossing patterns), some teams were West Coast (most passes short), some teams were Bart Starr classic (don't throw much but when you do, throw deep), some teams were hurry-up -- there were distinctly different philosophies of offense. Now everybody's using a little of everything. For instance, the five-wide, empty-backfield set, which a decade ago only a few teams were willing to show, is now in every NFL playbook. It's now in every high school team's playbook! The "bunch," which in the early 1990s only Minnesota was using, now shows up everywhere. Once only Buffalo and Cincinnati would go no-huddle before the last two minutes; now most teams show this tactic occasionally. And with the exception of Arizona and Philadelphia, everyone's run/pass ratio has converged. Nobody in the NFL has tried the Texas Tech offense yet: very wide splits from the linemen, emphasis on throwing lanes. But otherwise, in recent seasons every team has sampled a little of every offensive philosophy.
The kickoff game this season is Miami at Pittsburgh. Twenty years ago that game would have matched distinctly different offensive philosophies: power rush versus an up-the-field passing game based on the post and sideline fly. In 2006, the Dolphins and Steelers likely will show a similar mix of formations and plays. Everybody's trying a little bit of everything. It is, after all, the 21st century.
Unlike most sportswriting, after you read Easterbrook's analysis you actually know more than you did before. That is what good writing is supposed to be all about.
Actor Johnny Depp and writer-director Tim Burton will combine their eccentric talents on a film version of the Steven Sondheim musical Sweeney Todd scheduled to reach theaters next year.
In "Sweeney Todd," to be released in late 2007, Depp will play the murderous barber of the same name who seeks his own brand of razor-slashing revenge against a judge who wrongfully imprisoned him. . . .
The legend of serial-killer Sweeney Todd is rooted in British lore, and has given rise to numerous earlier plays and films, including a 1936 film called "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street," and a 1998 TV movie, "The Tale of Sweeney Todd," starring Sir Ben Kingsley.
The new movie, which will be co-produced by DreamWorks and Warner Bros., will be adapted from the modern musical thriller "Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street," with songs originally composed by Sondheim. That version became a Broadway hit in 1979 and won 8 Tony awards.
Depp and Burton have worked together on several films that have been very successful with audiences and have received critical acclaim as well. Sleepy Hollow, Edward Scissorhands, and The Corpse Bridestand out as very interesting and entertaining films.
Sweeney Todd was revived onstage in England two years ago and on Broadway last year, where the production won a Tony award. It has not yet been announced whether the musical numbers will be included in the film, but I would guess that they would.
Given the consistent themes of Burton's and Depp's past work together, one suspects that the two see Sweeney Todd as the story of another strange and disturbed but goodhearted underdog caught in violent and disorienting circumstances outside his control which make him act out in ways other people just don't understand. Whether a serial killer can be seen as fitting that description well is a matter to be resolved when we see the film.
CBS TV will begin offering free, streaming, next-day video of primetime shows online this fall, the LA Times reports.
According to the Times story, CBS will have the most online primetime programming of any broadcast network, offering seven programs, nearly a third of the net's primetime schedule.
CBS is making several of the network's most popular shows available, plus one new one, the Times reports:
The company will make available "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation," "CSI: Miami," "CSI: New York," "NCIS," "Numb3rs," "Survivor" and its new drama "Jericho," about life in a small Kansas town after a nuclear blast. Episodes will be available online for four weeks after the initial network broadcast, except for "Survivor" and "Jericho," which will be available the entire season.
The programming will be ad-supported, according to the Times story:
"There will be the possibility of targeting ads," said Larry Kramer, president of CBS Digital Media.
He said the ad mix could be changed to reach specific demographic groups. "We may even be giving viewers the option of what advertising they want to see," Kramer said.
An interesting feature will help people to cheat their employers:
CBS' broadband channel, Innertube, will have a "boss button" so people goofing off at work can tap a key to have the audio drop and their computer screen flip to an image of a spreadsheet if their supervisor is nearby.
The boss button recognizes that "prime time" for broadband entertainment is during the traditional workday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. rather than from 8 to 11 p.m., when TV viewership is at its peak.
Now that's what I call technological advance. . . .
One of the more successful Mad magazine imitators (in terms of longevity), Cracked, is back in publication after a two-year hiatus. The magazine, now 48 years old, was originally aimed at adolescent males and is now targeting the 18-34 demographic, the new adolescent males.
The magazine is available on newstands now, and sample articles are available on the magazine's website.
According to the press release from the new publisher: Michael Ian Black, a character actor who appeared regularly in the cancelled NBC TV series Ed, will serve as Editor at Large, which usually means a person who writes for the magazine but does no editing. Entrepreneur Monty Sarhan purchased the magazine and will serve as its CEO and Editor in Chief, which ought to provide a good deal of humor in itself.
Sarhan says the magazine's mission will continue to be "parodying politics, pop culture and society," but that its new approach will be "smart, relevant, sarcastic, clever and biting. Our goal is 'intelligent irreverence,' and we have evolved CRACKED into a best-of-breed humor magazine." Among the magazine's authors will be writers from popular TV shows such as Saturday Night Live, The Daily Show, and Chappelle's Show.
It certainly sounds as if they're going for intelligence.
Judging by the articles on the Cracked website, however, the magazine appears to be only mildly amusing in fits and starts, and is not the slightest bit intelligent. The Onion is a lot better than this.
The prolonging of American adolescence continues apace.
The new trailer for Paramount's upcoming numskull comedy "Jackass: Number Two" is full of quotes from reviews of the first movie. There's just one tiny twist: The studio uses the vitriolic reviews attacking the first film ("A disgusting, repulsive, grotesque spectacle" says an aghast Richard Roeper) to promote the new picture.
With a sly, leering note of triumph, the narrator intones: "Unfortunately for them, we just made 'Number Two.' "
All in all, it's been a rotten tomato of a summer for America's embattled film critics. "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" broke box-office records left and right, despite a yowling chorus of negative reviews. M. Night Shyamalan cast Bob Balaban as a persnickety film critic in "Lady in the Water," then gleefully killed him off, allowing a snarling jackal-like creature to do the dirty deed. . . .
It's no secret that critics have lost influence in recent years. A recent Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll found that among 18- to 24-year-olds, only 3% said reviews were the most important factor in their movie-going decision making. Older audiences still look to critics for guidance, especially with the smaller, more ambitious studio specialty films. But during the summer months, with studios wooing audiences with $40 million worth of marketing propaganda, critics appear especially overwhelmed, if not irrelevant.
The article goes on to suggest a number of reasons for this disdain for film critics, ultimately opting for the one thing that explains everything these days, the Internet:
The media have been full of stories questioning the relevance of print critics in an Internet era that has ushered in a new democratization of opinion. The prospect of babbling blogmeisters being the new kingpins of cinema has left many critics in a sour mood. Reviewing a collection of critical essays by the long-time Village Voice jazz critic Gary Giddins, Time film critic Richard Schickel contrasted Giddins' work with "history-free and sensibility-deprived" bloggers who regularly "blurb the latest Hollywood effulgence." . . .
According to New Line marketing chief Russell Schwartz, "younger moviegoers want the immediacy of text messages or voice mail. A review from one of their peers is more important than a printed review from a third party they don't know, which is how they would describe a critic."
When in doubt, blame technology. Certainly the changes in information delivery have altered the way we approach things, and even how we see them. In particular, the breakdown of media hierarchies—the declining influence of the top-circulation newspapers and three TV networks—has flattened the playing field and made it possible for a pajama-clad blogger to reach as many people as a large media organization, or more. That observation has already become a boring truism. However, the phenomenon surely has had an effect of "democratization," but it is interesting and important to note how the process works: it simply reduces a sense of authority and forces writers to earn their readers' attention with everything they write:
What we're seeing is not so much the death of criticism as the death of the culture of criticism, the culture in which a critic such as Pauline Kael — despite writing for a small circulation magazine like the New Yorker — could have a huge trickledown influence, not just with the chattering class, but with filmmakers and executives who hung on her every word, either in agony or ecstasy, depending on the verdict.
What today's film critics have to deal with that Pauline Kael didn't have to worry about is truly serious competition. Kael could pontificate her nonsense from her safe haven at the New Yorker, and her obedient claque of followers at newspapers and magazines around the country would duly parrot her views, and nobody could gainsay them because, as has been wisely said, freedom of the press is for those who own one.
Kael won her following through networking and bluster and because her worldview fit the tenor of the times perfectly. Her militant leftism, atheism, intellectual elitism, advocacy of hedonism, obsession with novelty and hatred of tradition and formulas, belief in the primacy of emotion over reason in the arts, and the rest of her odious, fatuous opinions were cultural Red Bull for postwar American pseudointellectuals. I'll write more about Kael some other time, but for now the important thing to bear in mind is that Kael was influential regardless of whether her reviews made any sense. (They didn't.) Kael's goal was nothing less than to contribute to social change by undermining what she saw as outmoded, irrational, bourgeois values.
The absurdity of Ebert's assistant characterizing Schlussel and Ann Coulter as "pundits" is absolutely astounding. Ebert has made millions of dollars as a TV film pundit, giving his opinions on why he likes or dislikes this film or that, but let an attractive, right-wing female venture into the sacred territory of film criticism and we find that having thoughts about what movies actually mean is a contemptible thing.
That is the real problem with film critics today: Their complacency and lack of contact with either their audiences or their ostensible subject matter. When critics attacked Dead Man's Chest (which I thought was a terrific film), they didn't just disagree with the audiences. They were wrong. There is plenty of meaning in Dead Man's Chest, and the fact that the criticisms focused on superficial matters (such as the amount of money it cost to make or whether the film brought anything "new" to the series) shows a positively grotesque and unacceptable ignorance of the basic principles of the aesthetics of narrative art. Audiences clearly understood that Dead Man's Chest was well worth watching, even if most people could not have articulated the film's themes or deeper meanings. But they understood intuitively that the film was meaningful, for without meaning there is no comedy nor adventure.
A reasonably intelligent critic will recognize that narratives are all about testing and revealing the character of imagined human beings, and the sensible critic will approach a film or novel from that perspective, seeking out what it tells us about ourselves and how the aesthetics of the form are being used to achieve these things. In so speaking to us, films, dramas, books, and other narrative art cause us to identify with their characters, sympathize with them, puzzle out their motives, and critique their actions. Most major film critics today, however, still follow the Kael formula, seeking to foster social change by pushing their readers to films that will "challenge" them, meaning movies that will undermine the principles of the bourgeoisie. That is why critics push filmgoers away from movies like Dead Man's Chest and toward Brokeback Mountain. It's all about changing the world by changing people's minds.
Although often doing so in the guise of being neutral but highly informed consumer guides, film critics of today typically use their positions as platforms for criticizing the values and ideas their audiences hold dear.
Forthcoming TV programs are increasingly appearing on peer-to-peer networks, evidently without the owners' permission. Pretty much everything ends up on these file-sharing networks, so it's no great surprise that yet-to-be-aired TV programs are turning up, but the downloads, and the underground publicity surrounding the programs, are actually affecting TV networks' programming decisions, the Wall Street Journal reports:
A new television show called "Jericho" has a small but dedicated group of fans, who've been buzzing about the show online. The reaction has been surprising -- considering that CBS won't air "Jericho" until late September. Viewers are responding to a leaked video of the pilot that's been flying around the Internet.
Networks have increasingly been experimenting with giving viewers early looks at coming shows on their official Web sites, as well as on iTunes and through DVD rentals. But recently at least 10 unaired pilots have been leaked -- apparently without the networks' permission -- to so-called peer-to-peer networks that allow users to download files stored on each others' computers. In many cases, the pilots appear to have been "ripped" from official DVDs made for reviewers and company executives.
It's unclear whether the leaks resulted from security breaches or quiet efforts to promote the shows. In either case, Internet leaks can sometimes pay off for TV shows. In June, a TV pilot called "Nobody's Watching," which the WB network had passed on, was leaked to the video-sharing site YouTube. It generated enough of an audience online that NBC decided to pick up the show for development.
At least four of CBS's fall pilots have been circulated on the Web, a development that CBS spokesman Chris Ender calls "both flattering and frightening." He adds: "We're pleased that there's an early demand for our shows but the marketing benefits can't excuse what is illegal theft of our programming."
Translation: Oh, please don't throw us into the briar patch!
The Thomas Kinkade company reports that a new development in Columbia, Missouri, will feature homes modeled on the popular artists' paintings:
Thomas Kinkade- inspired homes will be featured in a new master-planned community in Columbia, MO, announced HST Group, LLC, the Northwest-based real estate development firm in charge of the project. About 100 luxury homes will feature architectural designs inspired by the artwork of Thomas Kinkade, the "Painter of Light(TM)" and world-renowned artist.
"The homes will be reminiscent of Thomas Kinkade's charming cottages that are found in many of his works," stated Rann Haight, Director of Architectural Design for HST Group. "We will also be concentrating our efforts on creating a village atmosphere and neighborhood streetscapes such as those found in Thomas Kinkade's painting, Lamplight Lane."
The 85-acre community, named "The Gates at Old Hawthorne," will be the second in the country to feature the Thomas Kinkade - Masterpiece Homes brand of design. The finished homes are anticipated to be valued between $500,000 and $1,000,000. Construction is targeted to begin in the fall of 2006 with the first home complete in July 2007. HST Group will design, build, and sell the homes in The Gates at Old Hawthorne.
Those are some expensive houses. This is the second Kinkade development. The first broke ground recently in Idaho, and the houses there are even more expensive.
HST Group has seen a tremendous amount of interest with its first community featuring the Thomas Kinkade - Masterpiece Homes brand. "The Gates of Coeur d'Alene" in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, broke ground in June 2006, and will feature five custom homes with designs replicating the look of manors and cottages found in Thomas Kinkade paintings. The luxury homes, which overlook Lake Coeur d'Alene, will be 5,800- to 11,000-square feet with values starting at $4 million.
What a "tremendous amount of interest" in five houses translates to is anyone's guess, but evidently Kinkade's plan to take over the world is beginning to work. Certainly what he and his paintings stand for is nice and pleasant:
"The Thomas Kinkade brand stands for the values associated with home and hearth, peace, joy, faith, family and friends. Partnering with HST in the creation of homes inspired by the artwork of Thomas Kinkade delivers on what collectors tell us inspire them most about Thom's work -- that they wish they could step into the world created in the painting. The Thomas Kinkade Company is pleased to align itself with such a visionary home builder," said Dan Byrne, CEO of The Thomas Kinkade Company.
But the paintings are so exaggerated in their presentation, they tend to make their subject matter seem a bit silly and weird. Kinkade makes Norman Rockwell look like a psycho by comparison. Still, people certainly like Kinkade's paintings, so his intense evocations of simplicity and striving for transcendence obviously serve some powerful need in modern-day Americans. Kinkade is important not so much for his actual aesthetics as for the values he sells.
The two-hour, season-ending episode of the Fox TV program Hell's Kitchen airs tomorrow night beginning at 8 EDT. It's a reality program in which a dozen contestants vie to become the head chef of a multimillion dollar Las Vegas restaurant that is in the process of being built in a new resort.
The program stars English celebrity chef enfant terribleGordon Ramsay, and the gimmick is that Ramsay verbally abuses the contestants as they try to cook dinners in his Los Angeles restaurant named Hell's Kitchen. Nearly all the contestants are grotesquely unsuitable for any work at all, and, frustrated by their ineptness, Ramsay spews profanities and calls his charges stupid donkeys and says that they should be working in a garbage dump and other such choice criticisms. Ramsay is loud, angry, obnoxious, and most important of all, he's right. These people are incredibly complacent, sloppy, lazy, ill-mannered, ignorant, self-indulgent, and blithely unaware of the most basic standards of achievement and decorum.
It's rather compelling television, for what Ramsay is asking these people to do is simply to work hard, learn, and accomplish what they set out to do. Their failure to do so is often quite mindboggling—if you were competing to win the job of managing a multimillion dollar restaurant, you'd think you would try to learn a little bit about how restaurants operate and venture to do exactly as the head chef tells you, right? Not these people....
Ramsay is clearly not from any sort of privileged background himself, and therefore there is no excuse for any of the contestants not to work hard to do exactly what he has done and rise above their origins.
Ramsay has appeared on several programs on British television in recent years, and the difference between his British programs and the American one is quite revealing. In the English programs, including Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, several episodes of which are running on BBC America this afternoon and in the coming weeks (schedule here), Ramsay visits poorly run restaurants and advises their owners on how to make them work. Typically that includes simplifying the menu, getting the staff to work together as a team (which often involves snapping the head chef out of an utterly demoralized condition), matching the style of food to the location and restaurant's history and decor, using food ingredients economically, and generally looking at ways of making the place run profitably.
The show, it should be clear from this description, focuses on teamwork, a characteristically English concern, and on improving entrepreneurship, an area in which Britain is not nearly so strong as the United States. Hell's Kitchen, by contrast, concentrates on development of personal character and skills. This, too, makes sense. Entrepreneurship is certainly a strength of American society, but our education system is very poor, and concerns about personal character have been at the forefront of the national discussion in recent years. The snotty, overly self-confident, or lazy contestants are eliminated quickly, and the ones who remain are those who have a bit of talent for the job and who begin at least vaguely to recognize that Ramsay's standards of quality are unlike anything they have ever experienced or, in some cases, even imagined. To be the best, Hell's Kitchen makes clear, you have to try to be the best. Coasting won't get it done.
There is a further lesson here. The contestants in Hell's Kitchen are learning to serve other people. As Ramsay continually points out, they have to concentrate on their work and nothing else while on the job, and they have to leave their egos outside the kitchen and serve. The only way to succeed in Hell's Kitchen is to recognize that you're not good enough yet and that your job is as a servant to others. Ego is not an option.
Fox's Hell's Kitchen is a variation on an earlier, British program of the same name starring Ramsay, and the difference is interesting. In the British version, Ramsay had two weeks to train celebrities into becoming Michelin-star chefs. It's something of a lark, of course, and the fact that his students are already celebrities means that the emphasis is on learning a new and unfamiliar skill set, not on developing the personal character necessary for worldly success. In the American version, the emphasis is strongly on the contestants' unsuitability for high-level work and on the amount of improvement they will have to make both in skills and, more importantly, in how they approach the job and life in general, before they can hope to make anything of themselves.
The entertainment attraction of Hell's Kitchen is in awaiting the next disaster and Ramsay's explosively frustrated reaction to it, but there is much more to this reality program, and much to learn about what it takes to make it in this world. As Hell's Kitchen shows every week, success is no accident, and those who want to get ahead have to pay their way like anybody else. The real success in Hell's Kitchen as in life in general, is for those who learn to serve others.
There is a mad variety of entertainment choices available to the average American today, and celebrities would do well to remember that. Their popularity is always due in large part to a magical combination of talent (not always necessary in any great amount), guile, ambition (absolutely essential), and pure luck that creates a desire on the part of total strangers to welcome these people into our humdrum lives. The one thing that all celebrities have in common—the only thing they all have in common, in fact—is that a very large number of people like them, often for no readlly identifiable reasons.
Television network programmers know that this mysterious likeability is the number one factor in success in that medium, and it is true throughout the Omniculture. There are just so many choices out there that people can never be forced to accept something from someone they don't like. They can always go elsewhere.
That is why celebrities strive so hard to create and maintain a particular public image. And it is also why likeable celebrities do incredibly stupid things that make people cast them aside like yesterday's poop. They don't understand how fragile likeability really is. Apparently they entirely forget the lessons about human fickleness they should have learned indelibly in high school.
To wit . . .
Reuters reports that the pop country band the Dixie Chicks have changed their tour schedule to avoid "red states." As you'll recall, Natalie Maynes, the group's lead singer, said she was ashamed of being from the same state as President Bush, while onstage at a concert before thousands of people. Then the band appeared naked on the cover of Entertainment Weekly magazine with angry words scrawled on their bodies, then Maynes apoligized for criticizing the president, and then she took back her apology.
For some obscure reason, the band's fans decided they didn't want to support them any more and could do without their music. Reuters writes:
Country-pop trio the Dixie Chicks, still feeling a backlash for criticizing President George W. Bush, have been forced to mostly abandon the American heartland and Deep South on their latest tour
Facing lackluster ticket sales in many U.S. cities where radio stations had banned their music to protest the band's anti-Bush remarks, the Chicks' promoters have revised their tour with new stops in Australia and Canada.
Only four Southern U.S. cities remain on the newly overhauled 49-date concert itinerary posted days ago for the Chicks' "Accidents & Accusations" trek, their first major tour in three years.
Those four -- Nashville, Atlanta, Dallas and Austin, Texas -- were pushed back about two months to the end of the tour, now set for late November and early December.
Dropped from the original tour schedule released in May were 14 stops in the Southern and Midwestern regions that traditionally form the core of fan support for country music acts.
Cities stripped from the original itinerary include Indianapolis, St. Louis, Houston, Memphis, Greensboro, North Carolina and Jacksonville, Florida.
The band and its promoter, Concerts West/AEG Live, say the overall number of North American dates remains the same.
But there is no question the Chicks are spending a lot less time in Dixie than they did during their 2003 tour, when Southern stops accounted for nearly a third of the 57 cities they visited.
According to the band's representatives as quoted in the Reuters story, radio stations have cut back on free promotions of the Dixie Chicks tour, which has resulted in the slow ticket sales in several Southern and Midwestern cities. They say the drop in sales is therefore the stations' fault, and not any decline in the band's overall popularity.
Of course, when those stations were giving the band free promotion, market capitalism was a very good thing indeed.
And the fact that instant wealth and worldwide celebrity tempted a young woman and her satellites to think that she was more than just a stupid singer had nothing to do with it.
The New York International Fringe Festival opens today in the city that never sleeps, kicking off 16 days of theater in 20 venues. It's an offshoot of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, which I wrote about recently in these pages. As I've noted earlier on this site (here and here), an interesting and essential aspect of the Omniculture is that "the counterculture continuously becomes the culture. If you want to know what is going to surround you tomorrow in American culture, look at what is on the fringes today."
Confirming this tendency of the counterculture to become the culture, the New York Daily News reports that "the Fringe Festival didn't start out as a breeding ground for the Great White Way. The Present Company, a nonprofit Off-Off-Broadway organization, began hosting festivals in Scotland in 1966 in order to showcase unspoken talent."
But the fringe has become increasingly absorbed into the mainstream:
Since then, the Fringe has exploded into a world-famous phenomenon, much to its founders' surprise. "To last 10 years as a cultural institution in this city is very impressive," says Lasko.
An important element of that absorption has been the effect on the Festival's content. With big theatrical producers, critics, media, and financial interests prowling the venues, the Festival has become a very effective place for playwrights and producers to audition their wares before people who can help them enter the real mainstream, moneymaking world of culture. That means that many of the plays presented will be not much different from what is already making money on Broadway and off. Or perhaps not at all different. For example, the Daily News story lists the following offerings the writers find most interesting:
"The Bicycle Men," a musical about an American who crashes his two-wheeler and ends up in a wacky French town. Why we're psyched: It won a Fringe award for excellence a couple years back.
"Faded," about a tabloid reporter on the trail of a scandalous photo of a U.S. President and a sex goddess. (JFK and Marilyn Monroe, anyone?) Why we're psyched: The author, Robert Dominguez, is a Daily News staffer.
"The Fan Tan King," a musical about a Chinatown gambling bigwig. Why we're psyched: The book is by C.Y. Lee, who wrote "Flower Drum Song."
"Perfect Harmony," a mockumentary about a high-school a cappella group. Why we're psyched: The high-school musical has never been a trendier genre.
"Only a Lad," a musical about a punk teenager accused of murder. Why we're psyched: The score is based on songs by 1980s rock band Oingo Boingo - which gave us film composer Danny Elfman.
"Don't Ask," about an affair between a U.S. Army private and his superior in Iraq. Why we're psyched: Several hot topics in one.
"Infliction of Cruelty," about some dark doings at a family reunion. Why we're psyched: Secrets. Lies. Vengeance. Good times.
"Walmartopia," a time-tripping musical set in 2036 about a single mom who goes up against the world's largest corporation. Why we're psyched: We dig an underdog story - even one that sounds this weird.
"Oblivious to Everyone," about a trashy Paris Hilton wanna-be. Why we're psyched: Paris-bashing is always a kick.
"I Coulda Been a Kennedy," about an ambitious family scheming to get a kid into the Oval Office. Why we're psyched: If only to see if there are bad Boston accents.
The Daily News story reports that "Tickets are $15 each at (212) 279-4488 or fringenyc.com, which has a complete schedule."
World Trade Center, Oliver Stone's film about the 9/11 attacks, is really about just one aspect of the events of that day. As has been widely reported, World Trade Center tells the story of two New York City Port Authority policeman who went into one of the Twin Towers, as part of a team of five, and were buried in rubble when the first tower collapsed. They survived the subsequent collapses of two other buildings in the seven-building WTC complex, and were rescued after enduring a long time pinned under the heavy debris while gravely injured. The rescue was the result of heroic and courageous efforts by many people whose desire to help others overcame their personal fears and self-interest. That, of course, is exactly what the two policeman and their comrades had done as well by going into that obviously dangerous disaster site.
The film is very skillfully made and is quite moving at times. It is probably best described as a disaster movie of very high quality.
It could have been more. The film resolutely avoids dwelling on the deeper causes of the disaster, downplaying the people behind the 9/11 attacks and the fact that they deliberately did this to innocent strangers. The film shows with apparent sympathy a Marine who decides to go to war against the perpetrators of the atrocity, and there are other occasional, fleeting references to the fact that the collapse of the Twin Towers was the result of a deliberate act of mass murder, but director Stone and screenwriter Andrea Berloff keep the focus firmly on the men in the rubble, their loved ones, and their rescuers. That keeps the film on the positive side of things, showing how good people live their lives and give of themselves to serve others. And to concentrate on that story is certainly the filmmakers' prerogative.
In addition, the film includes a large amount of Christian imagery and actions that add weight and context to the events of the story. That is all to the good.
However, the full story of 9/11 also involves the other side of things, a story of people who want the world to be their way regardless of what it takes to force it into their intolerant, hateful mold, who resent others' success and happiness, who actively work to hurt innocent people and are willing to give their lives in order to bring death to those they hate. That is the other side of the 9/11 story, and it is in fact what set in motion the events that brought out the love, hope, faith, and heroism of the people at the center of Stone's story. It is the side of things that makes the foreground events so much more meaningful. We bring that story to the theater ourselves, but World Trade Center would have been much more than a highly impressive disaster film if Stone and Berloff had been willing to bring out that contrast themselves.
Here's another interesting bit of news from Disney: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest has taken in over $800 million worldwide thus far. Disney spent a very large amount of money on promotiing the film, to be sure, but that doesn't always work.
Hence, $800 mil is an impressive box office intake for a film that got mediocre to poor reviews.
I thought Pirates II was terrific, and I'm glad to see that the audiences once again outsmarted the critics.
Profits at the Walt Disney Company have soared as the studio has been moving back into family programming and jettisoning its adult-oriented ventures, according to Reuters. Disney CEO Robert Iger has quickly reversed the move toward a hipper, edgier approach spearheaded by longtime Disney head Michael Eisner.
Disney grew rapidly under Eisner's leadership, but much of that growth in the early years can be attributed to Jeffrey Katzenberg, who rejuvenated the company's film division with its turn toward spunkier animated movies. Subsequent growth was based on Eisner's attenuation of the Disney image. Eventually this would have been an unsustainable situation, as Disney moved farther and farther away from its founder's legacy and increasingly became just another producer of snarky programming aimed at the adolescent in all of us.
Iger arrived just in time and has made the right moves.
I know, Oliver Stone's World Trade Center opens today, but I'm busy working, so I'll just save that one for later.
Does that seem crass? Is it an obligation on my part, as a critic and, much more important, as a citizen? Is this like church?
I don't think so. I was very impressed with the earlier theatrical treatment of these events, United 93. It showed in microcosm the struggle that was to come in the War on Terror, and it was very moving and intense.
Stone's film, however, strikes me as just another disaster flick, like Poseidon or Earthquake.
How can I say such a beastly thing? What is the matter with me?
Who caused the attacks of 9/11? Who hijacked planes? Who flew them into the Towers? In "World Trade Center," it's hard to tell. Nicholas Cage's cop rescued from beneath the ruins speaks of "the evil"; a Wisconsin cop twice mentions the "bastards"; And a marine speaks about the need to "avenge this." But what is the evil? Who are the bastards? What needs to be "avenged"? Stone deliberately whitewashes the clear-cut answer to these questions—extremist Islam's attack on Americans. . . .
"World Trade Center" is more notable for what it leaves than for its content.
There isn't a single mention of Islam. Or Bin Laden. Or Mohammed Atta. Were there really 19 hijackers on the planes? No mention of them in this movie.
As Schlussel writes,
this one is like "The Poseidon Adventure," with concrete instead of water. And Nicholas Cage instead of Shelley Winters. Some unnatural force caused water to sink the ship and the World Trade Center towers to mysteriously implode upon themselves.
What is missing from World Trade Center, and what makes it a disaster film instead of a serious drama that deals with its subject from all the important angles, is a strong sense of why the disaster happened. Oh, we all know what happened and why, but Stone is careful not to tell us who is responsible. In a serious drama, there are people on both sides of the central conflict, as in United 93, and we know exactly who these people are and why they're doing what they're doing. But in a disaster film, the central catastrophe is simply a given; it just happened, and the story is about how people respond to it.
That, as the producers of World Trade Center readily admit, is exactly what Stone's new film does. And that is why we have no obligation to rush out to see it, any more than we should rush out to buy DVD copies of Poseidon or Earthquake.
To be sure, there are lessons about human character to be drawn from a well-made disaster film. Some characters respond heroically, some just follow the leaders, some do stupid things that worsen the situation, and some actively resist what is clearly right to do. But all are simply responding to a catastophe for which no one is shown to be fully responsible.
In limiting the scope of his film in this way, Stone misses an important opportunity to draw a serious distinction that would place his heroes' actions in context. For people to risk their lives to help others is surely among the most honorable things we can imagine. And for people to give up their lives in order to kill innocent people is, by contrast, among the most dishonorable, despicable things possible. Stone refuses to make this contrast, and in doing so he limits the meaning of what the emergency workers did. That is a serious flaw indeed.
The emergency workers and police officers who rushed into the Twin Towers on September 11 are impressive heroes. We should continue to honor them. And it is good to be reminded of their sacrifices and why they made them. But going to see a disaster movie that leaves out half the story is no way to do so.
The eminent poet and philosopher Frederick Turner provides some big-picture, civilization-level cultural commentary in an excellent article in TCS Daily today, thinking about why some societies die out and others manage to hang on or even thrive.
Turner's thesis: that people who have a sense of life beyond themselves tend to have children and build for a future they will probably not live to share. After demonstrating that birth rates, not environmental or social catastrophes, best explain population declines such as those of ancient Rome and contemporary Europe, Turner writes,
If we eliminate all external causes for population collapse, what is left is people's own reproductive choices. The reason people stop replacing themselves is, I would argue, cultural.
What, basically, persuades people not to have babies even when they have the political, social and economic stability to do so? Among the eras and nations where this phenomenon occurs or occurred one basic characteristic stands out: the loss of a transcendent future. What I mean by "transcendent" is some ideal or love or hope or faith that rises above the interests of the self, the practicalities of expected income, the security of predictable outcomes, and the lifetime of the individual. What I mean by "future" is that it is an ideal, love, hope, or faith that extends beyond the present and is not satisfied with an instantaneous and eternal reward in the now.
Religion is the way that humans attempt to put into language, stories, art and ritual their guesses about such things. As a species whose major and unique specialization is language, we are meaning-seeking beings, and when the buck of meaning has been passed around the various contents of the world about us, it ends up usually in the plate of religion. One hypothesis about demographic collapse that might be worth checking out is that it happens when a nation loses its religion.
Turner points out that human beings spend on religion an astonishing amount of time and energy that could be devoted to more direct pleasures:
[W]e might well choose the long golden afternoon of a culture in which the pleasures of food, gardening, education, lovemaking, sports, hobbies, art, fashion, and conversation would conduct us sweetly to a drugged and painless ending. We would be experts in enjoying the moment to the full. We could choose our sexual lifestyle. We would be living in a culture in which the opportunities, perspectives and pleasures of the two sexes would be fully shared and virtually indistinguishable. We might be as happy as any being can be that has a built-in dissatisfaction with the accustomed.
Yet we don't do that—not here in America, that is, or at least not most of us. Although birth rates of native-born Americans are lower than in the past, they are still much above those of Europe and other developed nations such as Russia and Japan, which are well into population shrinkage that will increase in pace over the coming decades—to be replaced, it seems likely, by immigrants from poorer nations with faster birth rates (although it is important to note that birth rates in poorer nations are decreasing rapidly as well). Turner contrasts the two attitudes and their likely future in the final words of his article:
I believe that it is possible to have a high and reflective civilization whose transcendent love, faith and hope burn as hotly as that of the mullahs, and in which one can still hear the lovely din of a schoolyard at recess. But if I were still a European, as I once was, and not an American, as I now am, I might not be so sure.
As the immensely wealthy Louis Trevelyan says in Chapter 92 of Anthony Trollope's novel He Knew He Was Right, "The world must be populated, though for what reason one does not see." That is the European mind today, and that of the Russian, the Japanese, the Canadian, and nearly all the world's wealthy nations.
Turner is right. As long as we retain our belief in a transcendent order, we will continue to thrive. If we ever lose that, we risk ultimately losing everything.
And that is why the culture is so bloody important.
As I've pointed out before, in the Omniculture, everything happens. A particularly vivid current proof of that is the Fuse Network television program Pants-Off Dance-Off, "the only naked dancing game show on television," as Fuse describes it. The content is exactly what you might expect, given the title: "ordinary" people strip off their clothes, to the accompaniment of rock music, before the hungry cameras of an obscure music video channel. The participants are nonprofessional, and their naughty bits are tastefully covered with video "towels" when the ecdysiasm is complete
The venture doesn't sound particularly constructive or even interesting, but the reality is that whatever one might choose to put on TV or the net, somebody will watch. Of course, a good sophist could make the case that a program like Pants-Off Dance-Off does good by breaking down unfair socially constructed ideas of beauty, but a good sophist can make a case for anything. The fact remains that in the Omniculture, everything is permitted, but not everything is good.
Warners Bros. has announced that its film adaptation of I Am Legend, the 1953 horror novel by Richard Matheson, will be released on Nov. 21, 2007, according to Reuters. Matheson's novel has been seen as a response to McCarthyism, and it can be read as such, but that limits its meaning unnecessarily. In fact it is a strong assertion of individualism and against forced social conformity in general. As such it is very much a product of its time, as the Omniculture began to form after World War II. As I noted in my two-part National Review Online article on the subject, "the '50s culture was not quite what it has been portrayed to be [stifling, conformist, etc.]. . . . Far from being a hotbed of conventionality, the American culture of the '50s in fact did much to promote individualism, self-expression, egalitarianism, and a widespread reaction against mindless conformity."
The story has already been filmed twice. The first was the 1964 film The Last Man on Earth, starring Vincent Price as the title character who spends his time fighting off vampire-zombies and searching for some sort of meaning to his life. It's an enormously bleak and apocalyptic film, yet there is also an important theme of Christian hope: Price's character's blood may just be able to save mankind. Interesting, then, is the fact that the actor playing this character is named Price!
The Last Man on Earth is probably the first prominent zombie film and kicked off a genre that has lasted more than four decades. Better known than the Price film is The Omega Man, starring Charlton Heston and released in 1971. Here, too, the Christian symbolism is strong, with apparent references to Judas, Mary Magdalene, satanism (in the form of a vampire-zombie family evidently modeled after the Charles Manson cult), a crucifixion pose at the film's climax, and so on. Also dominant is the late-1960s/early '70s sense of impending worldwide catastrophe, in which population growth, pollution, nuclear war, and other human-caused evils were expected to end life on earth at any moment. Ah, nostalgia. . . .
Smith's films often have fairly evident Christian themes among the knockabout comedy and action-film mayhem, and it seems a natural step for the star of I, Robot to take on Matheson's novel. It will be interesting to see what he and his team do with it.
Warner Bros. has announced that the film version of Harry Potter #6, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, will be released to theaters on Nov. 21, 2008, according to Reuters.
The current catch phrase for the ABC Family Channel is "A New Kind of Family"—a sure indication that the old kind of family channel wasn't making it. The channel has bounced around over the years, having been started by televangelist Pat Robertson in the 1980s. After building it into a solid ratings machine, Robertson sold the channel to Fox. Rupert Murdoch's people clearly had no idea what to do with it, and the station lost both viewers and its identity. Fox then sold it to Disney, which changed the name to ABC Family and created a mix of reruns (lots) and new programming (a little) evidently aimed at teenage girls and their moms in the American heartland. The movies and series had a heavy Eisner-era Disney feel, which is to say simultaneously snarky and smarmy. Not the sort of thing any reasonably sophisticated person would enjoy.
The current approach of the network is to get a little bit more adventurous in terms of program concepts. With Eisner gone, Disney has moved back pretty much exclusively into family fare at the movie studio. ABC Family looks to be going in a slightly different direction. Think of it as the Hallmark Channel with a bit of an edge.
Their self-description is humorously earnest and politically correct:
ABC Family is television for today's families –- connected by birth or by choice, diverse and multicultural, mirroring our changing attitudes and lifestyles. The movies, hits, holidays and originals of ABC Family feature relatable characters and coming-of-age stories, reflected with heart in the comedy and drama of the experiences of today’s families.
Fortunately, the actual programming does not seem to press this already cliched notion of multiculturalism too openly. Falcon Beach, for example, is a rather silly knockoff of the WB's sexy-teenager genre.
The new series Kyle XY, by contrast, has an interesting premise reminiscent of Fox's John Doe series of a couple years ago. As in the Fox series, in Kyle XY a young man (in this case an adolescent rather than an adult) suddenly turns up naked and without any memory of his past. In the present case, he joins a typically quirky American TV family, and thus begins the challenge of identifying exactly who and what he is. It's an interesting premise, and the writing and producing do it justice. A few episodes have appeared on ABC Family thus far, and Disney has run the show on the main ABC TV network as well, a wise move that should create more interest in it.
Premiering last night was a new program on ABC Family, Three Moons Over Milford. This one has an equally interesting premise: it looks at life in an idyllic small Vermont town after the moon has split into three pieces after being struck by a gigantic meteor. Scientists have concluded that a big chunk will inevitably strike the earth at some point, destroying all life on the planet with the possible exception of the cockroaches, and that it will probably happen very soon. How people react to this doomsday scenario reminiscent of evangelical interpretations of Bible prophecies is supposed to reveal much about those persons' character.
Elizabeth McGovern is the central character, a once-wealthy mom whose husband has left to pursue his dream of climbing the highest mountain on each continent, and whose inattention to business has driven their corporation to the brink of bankruptcy. In the premiere episode, the daughter of McGovern's character accidentally fulfills every child's dream of buring down the local public school, and a good deal of other plot and character arcs are set in motion. The idea that people will reveal their true selves as death approaches is probably a sound one, and the show seems willing to purse the matter without being overly cute or portentous. A new kind of Family Channel indeed.
Another hugely successful "fringe" phenomenon (see my Lollapalooza post immediately below) is the Edinburgh Fringe, which Reuters characterizes as "the world's largest and most irreverent arts festival." According to the Reuters story, this "fringe" phenomenon is a big business and highly influential on the culture. The festival's director "said the Fringe has sold about 20 million tickets over the past six decades 'and we hope this year to top the million mark again which we have done for the last three years.' "
A common theme in this year's program reflects some current concerns, but with a typically quirky approach. As the Reuters story reports, the Edinburgh Fringe
. . . celebrated its 60th birthday on Sunday with religion the big theme being tackled this year by playwrights and comedians.
Fringe performers revel in controversy and 2006 should be no exception with "We Don't Know Shi'ite" about British ignorance of Islam and "Jesus: The Guantanamo Years."
"It is the most amazing barometer of world politics," said The Scotsman newspaper's theater critic Joyce McMillan, reflecting on the Fringe which last year tackled the subject of terrorism head on after the London suicide bombings.
Fringe director Paul Gudgin, overseeing 17,000 performers at the three-week festival of anarchy, said "I find it endlessly fascinating how a thread like this emerges.
"It's either about what is happening with radical Islam or reflects interest and concern over the influence Evangelical Christians seem to be having in the United States," he told Reuters.
The Edinburgh Fringe festival is another of those "fringe" phenomena, like the Lollapalooza Festival, that become part of the mainstream culture and redifine it, as is the way of things in the Omniculture. Another truth about the Omniculture is this:
In the Omniculture, everything happens.
The Edinburgh Festival is a fine example of this principle. As Reuters notes:
Wading through the Fringe program is a stamina test in itself, but picking the quirkiest title of the year can be fun.
Leading contenders are "Afternoon Tea with a Transvestite" and "Sit: The History of the Chair" but it is difficult to top "How To Explain The History of Communism To Mental Patients."
The reality of the Omniculture is this: If something hasn't happened yet, it will.
For a summary of what the Omniculture is all about, click here.
The Lollapalooza festival of "alternative" music is drawing huge crowds in Chicago this weekend. Reuters reports:
Thousands of concert-goers, mostly in their 20s, returned to Chicago's lakefront Grant Park on Saturday as the three-day music festival Lollapalooza resumed after drawing more than 50,000 people on Friday night.
Billed as one of the city's largest music events ever, the festival is expected to draw about 150,000 people by the time it ends on Sunday.
I put quotes around the word alternative because the very popularity of the music indicates that it is a mainstream part of the culture, no longer—if it ever was—some sort of fringe phenomenon. Scheduled performers such as the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Kanye West, the Flaming Lips, Sonic Youth, and Manu Chao are anything but obscue, and 130 music acts in total are scheduled to perform at the festival.
It's a great example of what happens in what I call the Omniculture, where the counterculture continuously becomes the culture. If you want to know what is going to surround you tomorrow in American culture, look at what is on the fringes today.
Here's a fascinating tidbit for you. The twenty-five-year-old actress/model/allegedlyunwillingpornstar/crazyrichgirl/humancuriosity Paris Hilton has decided to swear off sexual activity for a year. E! Online reports:
In an interview for the September issue of British GQ, the star whose oeuvre includes The Simple Life and One Night in Paris set out to dispel rumors that she's a sure thing when it comes to taking relationships to that next level.
"People think I sleep with everyone, but I'm not like that," Hilton told the magazine. "Kissing is all I do.
"I'm not having sex for a year. I've decided. . . . I'll kiss, but nothing else." . . .
The hotel heiress, who seems to change boyfriends faster than shoes, appears excited about the effect her vow of chastity could have on her personal life. . . . [S]he sounded as if there's some method to her madness--she has thought this one over and knows exactly what she's doing.
"I feel good about it," the 25-year-old told GQ. "I like the way guys so crazy when they can't have sex with you. If he can't have you, he stays interested. The moment he has you, he's gone. Unless he is really in love with you."
She went on to say that, as far as she knows, she only plans to walk down the aisle once and that, when she goes on dates, she prefers to be treated "like a princess."
It's interesting to see a such a prominent and highly . . . experienced young lady decide to become a renewed virgin. It is quite possible that this resolution will last only as long as anything else Miss Hilton has done, but we have to give her credit for thinking about the subject a little. One doubts that it will really strenghten the chastity movement among the nation's young people, but stranger things have happened in this world.
The people behind MyNetworkTV are characterizing their forthcoming national network as something new, and it certainly is that. Starting September 5 on stations around the country, the network will feature two programs per night: Desire, at 8 p.m. EDT, and Fashion House, at 9 p.m. EDT. The innovation is that each program will consist of 65 episodes in a single story arc, shown five nights per week (with a "weekly recap" on Saturday nights). The programs are filmed in high-definition video, and the visual quality looks quite good in the commercials and on my computer screen. (Sample clips are available at the network's website.)
It's a very clever idea. The long-term trend in TV drama programs has been to include an overarching mystery element to the series while having each episode deal with an additional story that wraps up in that episode. The idea is to give viewers the satisfaction of a full resolution while encouraging them to return the next week to find out what's happening in the main story line.
In Monk, for example, the mystery of the murder of the title character's wife, which happened before the events of the series began, is always in the background and affects the way he reacts to events. In Veronica Mars, each season includes a mystery that works out over the course of the season, often coming to the foreground. In Crossing Jordan, the long-ago murder of Jordan's mother reenters the story on a regular basis. Lost, Alias,Desperate Housewives, and other such programs are more directly serial in their approach, stretching out the story lines over the full run of the program.
The MyNetworkTV series are the next step in the process: limited-run series—if you can think of 65 episodes as being limited—that move through a single overall story arc consisting of several plot threads linking the lives of a central group of characters.
Fashion House, for example, features 1980s sex symbols Morgan Fairchild and Bo Derek in what the promotions suggest will be a continuing series of catfights set in the sexy, sassy, intensely competitive fashion industry. (Desire doesn't have any big stars attached to it, if either Derek or Fairchild can be considered big in any way other than in cup size, so I simply chose the most cliched-looking actor for the accompanying photo.)
Fashion House sounds like a Dallas or Dynasty presented five nights a week, as in cable reruns. Desire seems like an attempt at a grittier version of those programs, in which the danger to the main characters comes from their being pursued by the Mafia (don't ask). Dallas and Dynasty and their spinoffs did awfully well in their original runs, of course, with the two originals often leading the ratings, but their production values and scripting were topnotch. It remains to be seen whether the MyNetworkTV series will receive a like investment. It seems unlikely that they should, but if we think of each program as being five series, in budget terms, it is possible that economies of scale could come into play. Plus, the decision to shoot the programs in hi-def video, which is in fact of greater resolution than most film stocks, will also help keep costs down.
All of this could allow the producers to achieve higher program quality than one might expect. The proof will be in the pudding, of course.
To help viewers keep abreast—excuse me, track—of what's going on in the series, the network will use web technology in addition to the nightly updates that customarily precede episodes of serials such as these. Updates will be regularly available on the MyNetworkTV website, and viewers can also sign up for regular email updates. In addition, the website includes numerous "prequel" clips for each program, in which the characters speak directly to the camera about the problems they face in the series. Each of the two series adds a new clip every day.
Rather like a Wilkie Collins novel, these programs apparently will aim to present sensational fiction in an epic form. The extended attention to melodramatic story material could either elevate the stories or constitute an epic waste of time. It will all depend on what the creators put into it. And that is always true of any work of art, popular or otherwise. As a result, MyNetworkTV might be a positive innovation, or it may be a form of cultural decadence—but it will certainly be interesting to see.
MTV turned 25 this week, and your intrepid correspondent has contributed a few thoughts to a National Review Onlinesymposium on the deeper meaning of it all. Most of the comments in the symposium are fairly light, but there are some interesting facts to be gleaned and ideas to be pondered.
It's certainly interesting to see this group of right-wingers' rather amused and unworried reaction to MTV, widely considered to be a powerful force of cultural change. Perhaps American conservatism is not so conservative after all.
In addition, the category entries at the right side of the page offer full lineups of articles in various subject areas, including quite a few on music.
On his Classic Images website, Charles Mitchell offers this fascinating little morsel of information: during the late 1930s, Mitchell claims, the great silent comic Buster Keaton was being "considered for a series of light comedy/mysteries about a low key Midwestern sheriff who always wound up solving the crime." Mitchell does not tell us which studio was considering this, nor how far the idea ever got, but it is an extremely interesting notion—and sounds like a tragically lost opportunity.
As it happens, Keaton had made a silent comedy-mystery in 1924, Sherlock, Jr., and it is not only one of Keaton's best films, it is one of the greatest silent comedies ever made. Set in small-town America (as the proposed 1930s mystery-comedy series was planned to be), the story features Buster as an ambitious young movie-theater projectionist who is studying to be a detective. After being falsely accused of theft, Buster, back at his job as projectionist and watching an adventure film, falls asleep and dreams that he walks into the screen (an impressive visual effect) and becomes the brilliant and invincible detective Sherlock, Jr. as the adventure story of the film actually being shown in the theater takes on, in his dream, aspects of the case he is involved in in reality.
Buster solves the mystery in the film-within-the-film, of course, after continually displaying his indomitable spirit and much of the impressive stunt comedy for which Keaton was so justly celebrated. Some of the stunts in this film are simply jaw-droppingly astounding—such as when Buster jumps through a hoop and emerges on the other side dressed as a girl. This stunt is done is one shot, with no camera trickery, and is simply amazing. And there are numerous other such impressive moments, including much good physical comedy with Buster's clockwork intricacy. And Buster does it all in just 44 minutes.
Obvously no low-budget comedy mysteries of the 1930s would have that kind of brilliance, but the concept of Keaton as a bumbling small-town detective who always manages to get the job done sounds very appealing.
One thing that surely stood in the way of any plan to star Keaton in a series of films in the late 1930s was the actor's alcoholism, which was very bad at the time and precluded him doing anything approaching his best work. He did largely conquer the problem a decade or two later, and he enjoyed a brief career revival as a result, in the years just before his death in 1966.
Steady work, however, might have helped Keaton beat his problem much more quickly. Keaton's alcohol problems certainly seemed to have been agggravated tremendously by his career disappointment after 1928 when his film production contract was sold to the MGM studio against his will. MGM, to which he was contracted during the late 1920s and early '30s, utterly failed to find the right way to use his great and unique talent. Instead, they paired him with mouthy Jimmy Durante and made Keaton the latter's straight man, an entirely asinine misuse of the great comedian.
It was ultimately Keaton's fault, however, that his response to the career disappointment and failed marriage to his beautiful costar from the Keaton classic Our Hospitality, Natalie Talmadge, was to crawl into a bottle of alcohol. His characters were made of much sterner stuff than that, and it would have been better if his life had imitated his art.
If it had, a series of sound films with Buster as a low-key Midwestern sheriff who always wound up solving the crime would surely have been a delight. Today there would be plenty of opportunities for a man of Keaton's talents to work his way back from even so steep a career decline at that which Keaton suffered during the 1930s. During Keaton's time, production costs for sound comedies were simply too high, and the risks that a producer would be taking in relying on an alcoholic star were simply too great. It was not to be.
Although 20th Century Fox is not exactly shouting it from the housetops, The Mr. Moto Collection, Vol. 1 is now available on DVD. In the series of Mr. Moto films from the late 1930s, Peter Lorre played the title character, a Japanese secret agent who solves crime mysteries. Lorre was absolutely brilliant in the role of the small, slight, unobtrusive, exceedingly polite master of jiujitsu and deductive logic. The films were made on B-level budgets, but the directors definitely got the most out of the investment. The stories were more action-oriented and hard-edged than most detection series of the time, such as the Charlie Chan films, and they hold up surprisingly well.
Peter Lorre deserves admiration for his performance as Mr. Moto. Although he was very ill and fighting off the overuse of morphine to combat gall bladder pain, Lorre brought great charm to the character, which was lacking in the Moto novels of J. P. Marquand, on which the series was based. In the books, Moto is something of a mystery himself, as Marquand tells us little about him other than his doings as an agent, and he is always seen from other characters' point of view. Lorre's provision of greater charm and personality to the character worked well with the tone of the series, which was lighter than that of the books and was even sometimes rather tongue-in-cheek.
As is surely understandable, the series ended in 1939, and Lorre went on to give impressive, memorable performances in films such as The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, and Arsenic and Old Lace.
The Mr. Moto films are well worth watching and an essential addition to the collection of any fan of classic action mysteries.
The season-ending episode of Hustle, one of the very best programs currently on television, will be broadcast tonight at 10 p.m. EDT on American Movie Classics. AMC will begin cycling through all 18 episodes of the BBC-AMC co-production again on September 20, so feel free to drop in tongiht and see why I think this program is so good.
Set in present-day London, Hustle has a terrific mid-'60s feel to it, from the animated opening credits to the charming, rougish central characters (including Robert Vaughn of The Man from Uncle fame) and on to the very concept of the program: a group of English confidence tricksters target deserving bullies and con them, to take away a bit of their money and as much as possible of their arrogance. The plots are tricky, sophisticated, and morally challenging, and they usually include a nice twist or two at the end. The con artists are likeable despite the questionable morality of their enterprise. Consider them to be avenging angels if if makes you feel better.
I'll write more about Hustle later, in particular drawing attention to the tradition of rogue heroes of which it is the latest noble installment. For now, watch and enjoy.
Those who have read my music criticism in the past know that I prefer compositions that are melodic and musically logical. I like music to sound good, and I don't think that's too much to ask, thank you very much. I like a wide variety of types of music, from Haydn and Bruckner to Clarence Williams, Frank Sinatra, Fats Domino, the Beach Boys, the Rev. Gary Davis, Deep Purple, Bill Monroe, King Crimson, Badfinger, Ella Fitzgerald, Roy Wood, Hank WIlliams (Sr. and Jr.), Sly and the Family Stone, Neal Morse, and dozens upon dozens of other composers and popular artists. If it sounds good to me, I like it.
Listening to rock & roll radio has become a chore. It's not the ten minutes of commercials or the narrowing of formats. CD stores and online music retail sites have the same problem -- though, truth be told, the offerings are more diverse.
The bands that rule the airwaves now are Korn, Nickelback, AFI, Tool, Godsmack, and their ilk. Rock & roll, that great music that celebrated freedom and exhilaration, has become repressively dour. The bright and wild colors of rock & roll have faded to a shade of dark gray.
Lest he be lambasted as a right wing, Hitler-loving, moneygrubbing, churchgoing, abortion protesting, married with children social conservative, Jurek hastens to state his shameless fondness for 1980s hair bands and correctly argues that the music of that decade was much more fun than what is popular today:
[T]he music of the early to mid-'80s resembled thematically the same kinds of irritation, rebellion, and boredom that kids in the mid- to late '50s experienced. The music of both eras spoke boldly that kids were going to be kids. They were going to work and college, sure, but they also wanted what was outside the socioeconomic circle: they were going to make love; drink, drug, and party; drive fast; and escape the increasingly restrictive social mores introduced by the new conservatism of the Reagan era.
Apparently I missed observing the "increasingly restrictive social mores" of the Reagan era, in that the 1980s appear to me to have been a continuation of the increasing individualism of post-Cold War America in all realms of society, especially given that Jurek's point about the hedonistic nature of the most popular music in the 1980s is itself proof that the decade was by no means culturally conservative. Nonetheless, Jurek is correct to observe that the music of the time was greatly different from what it is now:
The late '80s also ushered in the turning to the dark side, and the celebration of all things young began to turn sour. While many would make the case for grunge as the changing force, the shift began in 1987 with Guns N' Roses' "Welcome to the Jungle" and Jane's Addiction's "Jane Says." Metallica's breakthrough single "One" from And Justice for All -- despite the fact that 1986's Master of Puppets went platinum after being ignored by radio and MTV -- showed another side of melancholy and rage. The music -- and the videos around them -- no longer reflected the culture of young people as a group but reflected the alienation of the individual.
The 1990s unearthed an explosive reaction against the new "traditional family values" that were reflected in the hypocritical political circus of Washington, the religious right, and the Parents Music Resource Center headed by Tipper Gore.
Why social conservatism should have elicited two such vastly differing reactions is left unexplained (because it surely isn't true), but the observation that musical gloom and doom was on the rise and has yet to recede is unassailable:
There was a reason for excess and a reason for escape, and the story was told by Nirvana, Mudhoney, Soundgarden, Screaming Trees, Tad, Pearl Jam, Tad, Ministry (check "Stigmata" from 1988 and "Burning Inside" from 1989), Nine Inch Nails (who can forget the anger and sinewy alienation in "Head Like a Hole" from 1989 or "Closer" from 1994?), and Alice in Chains. If Nirvana rallied young people around them with their anthemic "Smells Like Teen Spirit" -- an openly critical and expository tune about the sham of living in society -- then Alice in Chains defined it and then wrote it in stone on 1992's multi-platinum Dirt. Virtually every single hard rock band that has come down the pipe in America owes them a debt, for making bleak, angry pessimism and nihilism accessible and salable to young people.
After Alice in Chains there were the Stone Temple Pilots, Therapy?, Trouble, Tool, and on and on into the present era, when Korn's sarcastically titled Life Is Peachy reached the number three spot in 1996 and topped it in 1998 with Follow the Leader. David Fricke, in a Rolling Stone review of the album, titled the piece "Korn Feels the Skate Generation's Pain." And they did. That headline also sums up so much of what mainstream rock & roll is now about: feeling the pain and wallowing in it. It's about as far from the central pole of rock & roll's early escapism as one can get. Their followers -- Linkin Park, Papa Roach, Nickelback, Limp Bizkit, Godsmack, Mother Earth -- follow in their footsteps and dig deeper into pain as an end in itself as violence, suicide, and sheer personal implosion become the ends. Kids flock to the gigs, buy their records -- or download them -- and become a community of separates, wearing their iPods no less.
The individual becomes the central focus of the music and the first-person pronoun "I" becomes the sole means of expression.
Jurek argues that rock and roll music in the past stood for communal values, although it is important to acknowledge, as Jurek does not fully appreciate, that the communalism was typically limited to particular age groups:
The explosion of teen rebellion as a manner of developing community and celebrating life has vanished. The "I" in the music of the late '50s and the early to mid-'80s was expressed simply as a reaching-out point for others to join the party. In the new dourist rockism, the first-person is singular, a diary chronicler of angst and pain who invites no one, though one is welcome to enter that world from one's own chronicle of loneliness, alienation, and rejection.
The dourist movement registers everywhere, and it's lasted almost 20 years if we trace it from "Welcome to the Jungle." One has to wonder if everything in rock does indeed cycle repeatedly, or if this time out the music merely collapses from the sheer exhaustion of expressing pain and other negative emotions ad nauseam. Let's hope so. In the meantime, pull out those Cinderella CDs and listen to Whitesnake's recent Gold double disc. Or better yet, pull out the Beastie Boys and Warrant, then go back to Chuck, Little Richard, Carl, Elvis, and Eddie, dig in, take off your shoes, and raise a toast to living for its own sake and listen to those two generations talk to each other with laughter. Long live rock.
I won't join Mr. Jurek in listening to any '80s hair bands soon, but the '50s rockers he cites are certainly a tonic for those weary of the moaning and noise so common in today's popular music, and just for fun I'll also throw on some Move, Bach, Dave Clark Five, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Django Reinhardt, Flash, Thin Lizzy, Blind Willie Johnson, Mozart, Johnny Cash, Triumvirat, Bing Crosby, Al Green, Brian Wilson, and a few dozen other choice items until this thing gets sorted out properly.
Speaking of Perry Mason as we were yesterday, you might be interested to know that the first 19 episodes of the long-running TV series are now available on DVD. The series, as noted yesterday, often had an interesting noir-like atmosphere, and the characters, including the victims, suspects, and other non-recurring ones, were sharply drawn, and the incidents and conflicts handled with a nicely perceptive eye. The author of the original series of nearly 90 Perry Mason novels, Erle Stanley Gardner, oversaw production of the program, and it was very good television, especially during its first few years.
The theme music to the show, by the way, is probably one of the most widely recognized TV themes of all time, and brilliantly sets the tone for the episodes. Upon hearing it I always reflexively feel a sense of anticipation and excitement.
I wrote a long essay a couple years ago about Erle Stanley Gardner, "The Case of the Bestselling Author," for the Weekly Standard, and it is available on their website here. I've included a few extracts in a posting below, to give you a sample.
The one thing I must add is that in the process of editing the piece to the right length for submission, I cut out the paragraph mentioning Gardner's Bertha Cool and Donald Lam series of novels and failed to add their names to my list of other Gardner series characters, which is a major omission indeed. Gardner began his writing career producing hundreds of stories for the pulp magazines of the 1920s and '30s, and he created numerous interesting series characters. Some of these characters are very interesting, and his extraordinary plotting ability—so impressive in the best Mason books—is evident in his pulp writings. My Weekly Standard article on Gardner includes a list of some of his pulp series characters.
After creating Perry Mason for his longrunning series of novels, Gardner greatly cut back his production for the pulps (largely moving on to the better-paying "slicks") and concentrated on series of novels. In addition to the Mason series, Gardner produced a series about a district attorney, Doug Selby, known as the "D.A." series. These are well worth reading, if you can find them.
Even more popular, however, were the Bertha Cool and Donald Lam novels Gardner wrote under the name A. A. Fair. These were an amusing takeoff on Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe series, with Cool as a tall, heavy-set woman with a loud, aggressive personality, and Lam as her short, unprepossessing, but intrepid investigator. Cool heads their detective agency and basically plays the Great Detective role, and Lam does the legwork for the firm, performing the great majority of the actual investigating. Gardner wrote nearly thirty of these books, and they can be very funny and, yes, superbly plotted, with lots of crazy twists and turns. Clearly Gardner had great fun composing these, and readers enjoyed them immensely.
Somebody really should bring these to television.
There is only one Cool and Lam novel currently in print, as far as I can determine, from the Hard Case Crime specialty house. Top of the Heap is a fine installment in the series.
Historian Douglas Greene is producing volumes collecting stories by several of Gardner's pulp series characters for his excellent Crippen & Landru mystery press. The latest is The Casebook of Sidney Zoom, stories about a "wealthy yacht-owner who prowls at night to help the downtrodden in the days of the Great Depression." (Crusades to help the downtrodden were a common theme in all of Gardner's writings and in his personal and professional life as well.)
The other Gardner collection currently available from Crippen and Landru is The Danger Zone and Other Stories, a group of tales featuring a variety of Gardner's pulp heroes. These volumes are well worth having, and they are beautifully produced with the loving care Greene's house gives all its books. Crippen and Landru has plans to release several more in this series, all edited by mystery writer Bill Pronzini, and there are numerous other excellent mystery collections available from this important publisher.
Here are some extracts from my article on Erle Stanley Gardner, "The Case of the Bestselling Author," for the Weekly Standard, which is available on their website here.
OVER THE YEARS, Perry Mason has become an American archetype: the wily lawyer who always gets his client off regardless of the niceties of legal procedure. Yet in the eighty-two books Erle Stanley Gardner wrote about his lawyer detective, published between 1933 and 1973, Mason remains largely an enigma beyond the work he does, and (unlike, say, Sherlock Holmes or Miss Marple) he never reveals much of a persona beyond his professional one. Indeed, Gardner's work rarely showed much concern for characterization, writing style, or moral ambiguity--which is probably why he was utterly ignored by the literary establishment and generally slighted even by his fellow mystery writers.
Nonetheless, for many years Erle Stanley Gardner was commonly listed as the bestselling fiction writer of all time (though the perennial Agatha Christie has now surpassed him), his books having sold well over 300 million copies. . . .
The Mason books differ greatly from the television series, even though Gardner personally supervised the show. When the first installments appeared in the early 1930s, mysteries were either hard-boiled (emulating Dashiell Hammett and the other "Black Mask" pulp writers) or relatively urbane (like the puzzle tales of Ellery Queen and Agatha Christie). Gardner somehow managed to write both at the same time. Like a Hammett private eye, Perry Mason is tough and relentless, actively investigating the crimes and willing to use his fists when necessary. In the second novel, "The Case of the Sulky Girl," Gardner describes the lawyer as giving "the impression of bigness; not the bigness of fat, but the bigness of strength. He was broad-shouldered and rugged-faced, and his eyes were steady and patient. Frequently those eyes changed expression, but the face never changed its expression of rugged patience."
Mason's biggest weapon, however, is his mind, and he differs from his hard-boiled contemporaries in using logic to solve the crimes (although the cases are so intricate that it is usually all but impossible to determine whether Mason's arguments actually make sense). After Mason presents his elaborate solution in "The Case of the Counterfeit Eye," District Attorney Hamilton Burger asks how he knew what had happened, and Mason says, "Simply by deductive reasoning." The Mason books further follow the puzzle form in forgoing the cynicism that pervaded the hard-boiled school of mystery story, where money inevitably corrupts and women are nearly always duplicitous.
Incorporating elements from both types of popular crime fiction, the Mason stories follow a strict but highly flexible formula unique to Gardner. First we encounter some strange and puzzling events that will lead to murder, either shown through third-person narration or told in first person as a character (often the one who will eventually be accused of the crime) relates the incidents to Mason in his Los Angeles office. So, for example, in "The Case of the Counterfeit Eye" (one of the very best entries in the series), a man hires Mason to find out who stole one of his custom-made bloodshot glass eyes. . . .
Mason's quest is for justice, and Gardner's multimillion-dollar observation was that a lawyer could stand as the new knight, with his clients as beautiful damsels and oppressed peasants who needed protection from wicked and incompetent nobles, invading warlords, pirates, and rogue warriors. Knight-errantry was a conscious decision on Gardner's part. In their 1980 "Secrets of the World's Best-Selling Writer," Francis and Roberta Fugate quote Gardner: "This is the vision of the knight charging to the aid of the damsel in distress. It is the fairy godmother touch of Cinderella, in which justice is brought to the downtrodden. And it also has something of Robin Hood because Mason's mind is about the same as Robin's bow and arrow."
The narratives and imagery of the Mason books make this intention clear. Mason tells an antagonist in "The Case of the Stuttering Bishop," "I'm not merely a paid gladiator fighting for those who have the funds with which to employ me. I'm a fighter, yes, and I like to feel that I fight for those who aren't able to fight for themselves, but I don't offer my services indiscriminately. I fight to aid justice." In Gardner's modern romances, wealthy businessmen replace the barons, and government officials (usually corrupt) serve as their satraps. Gangsters replace the independent warlords, while playboys and idle young women are the new courtiers.
The jousting in the Mason books is done with the mind rather than lances, of course. . . .
As with all romances, story takes precedence over characterization. Concealment of individuals, objects, and information is always a powerful motif in Gardner's work. In every Mason story, the lawyer hides a crucial witness or fact from the police, leading them astray and preventing them from assembling an airtight case against his client. Gardner further evokes classic romances by having his protagonists adhere to a clear code of honor: Although Mason flouts the rules and even breaks the law, he does so only in pursuit of justice, never for selfish reasons. . . .
Like all real romances, the Mason tales show little interest in psychological examination and explanations. Gardner's insistence that people are responsible for their actions provides what the critic J. Kenneth Van Dover called a "stable moral background" for the stories. In "The Case of the Velvet Claws," for example, the pervasive blackmail in the plot does not imply that all of society is fundamentally corrupt, as it would in a Hammett or Chandler novel. On the contrary, these transgressions reinforce the sense of justice at the center of the story. Mason's goal is not to ensure that nobody is held responsible for the crimes in question, only that his client is not wrongly convicted. . . .
You can read "The Case of the Bestselling Author" at the Weekly Standard website here.
Actor Glenn Ford died yesterday at the age of 90 after a long career in the movies and television. Perhaps best known to modern audiences as Clark Kent's father in Richard Donner's Superman—The Movie, Ford made a solid career as a leading man despite a near-complete lack of charisma and magnetism.
The TV networks will be doing a significant amount of programming commemorating the forthcoming 5th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
I watched a few minutes of the Emmy Awards ceremony last night on NBC. Some thoughts:
Finally, the 
Manners are important to society and to each of us as individuals, in that they codify and simplify many of the hundreds of little decisions we have to make every day. Contrary to modern thinking, manners don't oppress us, they free us.
"I think what an actor has to realize [is that] when you show up an hour late, 150 people have been scrambling to cover for you," Macy said when asked about Bobby costar Lohan's usual check-in time. The two share a scene together in the 
Sure, our subways are soaked with urine, but at least we're spared THIS:
Tom Cruise's loss of his production agreement at Paramount Pictures has raised a good deal of comment in film-industry circles. The action itself is rather mundane. Cruise's deal at Paramount was on very good terms for him, which means it was expensive for the studio—more than $10 million a year. Cruise's representatives say that Paramount made an offer to Cruise to keep his production company on Paramount's lot, but the offer was significantly less money than the Cruise's company had been receiving, so they decided to shop around for private financing. This is not unusual: the Hollywood studios have been slashing costs recently, especially payments to big stars such as Cruise. A slowing of growth in DVD sales has certainly contributed to this trend.
Possibly, but these big crash and explosion movies may well have run their course, and the fact that the John Woo-directed 
As I noted just this past week on this site, 
It's all too common for writers and analysts to characterize the internet as reponsible for pretty much everything that happens today, but it is true that new information technology is making significant changes in how we gain access to culture. Video-sharing services such as 
That has changed since TV has made sporting events so accessible over the past three or four decades. Aware that their audience could easily see the games if they wanted, sports writers and their editors increasingly concentrated on the interactions among players and those between players, coaching staffs, owners, and the public. The personal lives of the players and other team personnel came to be seen as a legitimate news topic in that one could say that it does affect play on the field. Similarly, sports "analysis" have moved away from critiques of the on-field or game-preparation decisions of coaches and players, to a greater emphasis on how teams are put together, with personality conflicts and personal conduct as central areas of interest.
Actor 
CBS TV will begin offering free, streaming, next-day video of primetime shows online this fall,
he two-hour, season-ending episode of the Fox TV program Hell's Kitchen airs tomorrow night beginning at 8 EDT. It's a reality program in which a dozen contestants vie to become the head chef of a multimillion dollar Las Vegas restaurant that is in the process of being built in a new resort.
Here's another interesting bit of news from Disney: 
How can I say such a beastly thing? What is the matter with me?
Yet we don't do that—not here in America, that is, or at least not most of us. Although birth rates of native-born Americans are lower than in the past, they are still much above those of Europe and other developed nations such as Russia and Japan, which are well into population shrinkage that will increase in pace over the coming decades—to be replaced, it seems likely, by immigrants from poorer nations with faster birth rates (although it is important to note that birth rates in poorer nations are decreasing rapidly as well). Turner contrasts the two attitudes and their likely future in the final words of his article:
The Last Man on Earth is probably the first prominent zombie film and kicked off a genre that has lasted more than four decades. Better known than the Price film is 
The current approach of the network is to get a little bit more adventurous in terms of program concepts. With Eisner gone, Disney has moved back pretty much exclusively into family fare at the movie studio. ABC Family looks to be going in a slightly different direction. Think of it as 
The new series 
Premiering last night was a new program on ABC Family, 
The Lollapalooza festival of "alternative" music is drawing huge crowds in Chicago this weekend. 
n an interview for the September issue of British GQ, the star whose oeuvre includes The Simple Life and One Night in Paris set out to dispel rumors that she's a sure thing when it comes to taking relationships to that next level. 
The people behind 
Fashion House, for example, features 1980s sex symbols Morgan Fairchild and Bo Derek in what the promotions suggest will be a continuing series of catfights set in the sexy, sassy, intensely competitive fashion industry. (Desire doesn't have any big stars attached to it, if either Derek or Fairchild can be considered big in any way other than in cup size, so I simply chose the most cliched-looking actor for the accompanying photo.)
MTV turned 25 this week, and your intrepid correspondent has contributed a few thoughts to a 
Obvously no low-budget comedy mysteries of the 1930s would have that kind of brilliance, but the concept of Keaton as a bumbling small-town detective who always manages to get the job done sounds very appealing.
It was ultimately Keaton's fault, however, that his response to the career disappointment and failed marriage to his beautiful costar from the Keaton classic Our Hospitality, Natalie Talmadge, was to crawl into a bottle of alcohol. His characters were made of much sterner stuff than that, and it would have been better if his life had imitated his art.
Those who have read my 
Roy Wood, Hank WIlliams (Sr. and Jr.), Sly and the Family Stone, Neal Morse, and dozens upon dozens of other composers and popular artists. If it sounds good to me, I like it.
I won't join Mr. Jurek in listening to any '80s hair bands soon, but the '50s rockers he cites are certainly a tonic for those weary of the moaning and noise so common in today's popular music, and just for fun I'll also throw on some Move, Bach, Dave Clark Five, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Django Reinhardt, Flash, Thin Lizzy, Blind Willie Johnson, Mozart, Johnny Cash, Triumvirat, Bing Crosby, Al Green, Brian Wilson, and a few dozen other choice items until this thing gets sorted out properly.
The theme music to the show, by the way, is probably one of the most widely recognized TV themes of all time, and brilliantly sets the tone for the episodes. Upon hearing it I always reflexively feel a sense of anticipation and excitement.
Even more popular, however, were the Bertha Cool and Donald Lam novels Gardner wrote under the name A. A. Fair. These were an amusing takeoff on Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe series, with Cool as a tall, heavy-set woman with a loud, aggressive personality, and Lam as her short, unprepossessing, but intrepid investigator. Cool heads their detective agency and basically plays the Great Detective role, and Lam does the legwork for the firm, performing the great majority of the actual investigating. Gardner wrote nearly thirty of these books, and they can be very funny and, yes, superbly plotted, with lots of crazy twists and turns. Clearly Gardner had great fun composing these, and readers enjoyed them immensely.
Historian Douglas Greene is producing volumes collecting stories by several of Gardner's pulp series characters for his excellent 
OVER THE YEARS, Perry Mason has become an American archetype: the wily lawyer who always gets his client off regardless of the niceties of legal procedure. Yet in the eighty-two books Erle Stanley Gardner wrote about his lawyer detective, published between 1933 and 1973, Mason remains largely an enigma beyond the work he does, and (unlike, say, Sherlock Holmes or Miss Marple) he never reveals much of a persona beyond his professional one. Indeed, Gardner's work rarely showed much concern for characterization, writing style, or moral ambiguity--which is probably why he was utterly ignored by the literary establishment and generally slighted even by his fellow mystery writers. 
Warner Bros has confirmed that 