The American Culture

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The TV networks' ratings for "premiere week," when many returning shows have their first new episodes of the season, were up over last year's performance. As Reuters reports:

CBS on Tuesday claimed victory as the most watched television network in prime-time during last week's fall premieres, but more people tuned in overall than last year, giving each network victories to tout.

Led by crime dramas "CSI," "CSI: Miami," and "Without a Trace," CBS drew an average of slightly over 13 million viewers a night, up 2 percent from 2005, compared to second-place ABC's 12.3 million viewers, according to Nielsen Media Research.

But ABC scored the week's No. 1 show with the premiere of hospital drama "Grey's Anatomy," which pulled in 25 million viewers on its Thursday night premiere to "CSI's" 23 million. . . .

"It was a solid premiere week, and I don't think there were any real ratings disasters," said Nicholas Fonseca, staff editor for Entertainment Weekly magazine. "I think every network has something to be happy with."

But there were no big winners either, as happened in 2004 with ABC hits "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives," making industry watchers anxious to see whether viewership will slip in coming weeks.

NBC showed improvement over last year also. And although it was reported earlier that Fox's ratings had slipped by 20-35 percent with the coming of the new season, the network bounced back during premiere week:

Fox also improved during the week, led by dramas "House" and "Prison Break." Its viewership was up 16 percent among all viewers and 11 percent in adults 18-49. . . . Fox also awaits the mid-season premieres of "American Idol" and drama "24," which are among TV's top-rated shows.

Whether this increase in viewership will be sustained is the big question, of course. Many of the new shows seem to be very similar to one another, and one suspects that there will be a major shake-out down the line, as there are few shows with obvious hit potential.

Probably the strongest candidates for success so far are NBC's smart soap opera Studio 60 on Sunset Strip, Fox's sex-heavy but funny comedy 'Til Death, and CBS's Shark, with James Woods in another of the network's strong lineup of pro-law and order shows.

Most likely to be cancelled first: Fox's amusing Happy Hour, which has drawn about one-fourth as many viewers as timeslot competitor Survivor: Cook Island on CBS. The network has placed the show on a production hiatus and replaced it with reruns of 'Til Death, which benefits from the relative star power of Brad Garrett (Everybody Loves Raymond).

Being replaced, even if only "temporarily," by another show is bad enough, and being replaced by a rerun is even worse. But being replaced by a rerun of a brand-new show is a real disaster.

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The Fox TV network debuts its shows earlier than the others, in an evident effort to get them off to a good start before the real competition begins. However, if a show doesn't click early, it's likely to be on a short lead once the other nets begin running new episodes of their top programs. Hence, Fox is reshuffling its lineup a bit, which probably presages some imminent cancellations. Broadcasting and Cable reports that Fox's ratings have declined rather more than the net's management and stockholders would probably like:

Fox’s new shows have been far from electrifying. They debuted in August, while rival broadcasters have been in reruns. Credit Suisee media analyst William Drewry says that since NBC, ABC, CBS and The CW have put on fresh shows, the ratings for Fox shows have fallen 20-35%.

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In an effort to show better profitabilty to their corporate conglomerate owners, magazines are instituting hiring freezes to reduce expenses through attrition. Advertising Age reports:

Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S., where ad pages through August are down 6.1%, according to TNS Media Intelligence, has a freeze under way. And at Time Inc., where pages are off 2.9% through August, the heads of finance and human resources have gotten together over the past month to look at all open positions; which vacancies actually get filled will be up to four executives who report directly to Chairman-CEO Ann S. Moore.

In addition, numerous magazines have shut down in the past year.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 09:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Gridiron Gang, mentioned immediately below, is a very good film, by the way, well worth seeing. Starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson," the film is based on the true-life story of a juvenile-home worker who put together a football team that helped some of the young men learn good character and thereby find a way out of the gang life which sucks in so many young people today and destroys their lives.

Watching the film, one feels great sympathy for the boys even while seeing that their choices are indeed choices and are appallingly stupid and destructive of both others and themselves. The key is that the boys don't believe they have a choice in life until their coach shows them that they do.

This is a truth we can all benefit from remembering at times. Our overall circumstances are indeed largely outside our control, but how we react to them and what we make of them and ourselves are left up to us.

The belief that we don't have a choice is the thing that most certainly cripples us, far more powerfully than circumstances ever can.

Hence the film is about much more than football, touching on issues of race and class and the question of how much of our behavior is determined by circumstances (including genetics) and how much we choose. It's a good deal more serious and thoughtful than the general run of movies this year, and I recommend it highly.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 09:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Jackass Number 2 was the weekend movie box office champ with an impressive take of $29 million. Jet Li's Fearless came in second at $10.5 million.

The football movie The Gridiron Gang came in third with about  $9.5 million, showing a strong continued appeal in its second week.

Although overall box office take was down for the third consecutive week, reflecting a year-long trend, Jackass Number 2 outgrossed the first Jackass move by $6 million and earned back its production costs in just the first weekend.

You may draw your own conclusions about the imminent fall of Western Civilization. 

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 09:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've written frequently about how technology is changing the media industry—both on this site and in articles such as today's piece on media consolidation on Tech Central Station—and one of the most significant events yet is about to happen: the Nielsen service is about to begin reporting on how many people watch the advertisements on commercial programs, in addition to the previous convention of reporting how may people watch the surrounding programs.

The first such ratings will be released on November 18 of this year. 

This is a highly important change, of course, and it has TV executives understandably nervous. In a time when DVRs and the TV remote make it easy for viewers to zip through commercials without watching them or to switch back and forth among various channels to avoid sitting through advertisements, the companies that pay for TV programs are of course intensely interested in knowing whether the programs are actually delivering viewers to their ads and not just to the programs around them.

The effect of this new information will not be solely on television, by any means. Certainly advertisers have already attempted to lure viewers to watch their ads by creating amusing scenarios, little mysteries, and the like—as they have always done, but now more commonly and perhaps a bit desperately. That's old news.

The real significance will be if the ratings cause advertisers to decide that they are not getting the best return on their investments in TV programming and choose to migrate more to newspapers, magazines, radio, and especially the Web. That would depress television's profitability, though over the long run it would continue to rise as the overall economy contnues to grow.

What it would do most profoundly, I think, is raise the attractiveness of the web.

And what that infusion of money will do will be to accelerate the corporatizaion of the web, although it will still remain a more diverse medium than television, with a buy-in cost of basically zero for content providers (meaning all of us). More money will flow to web content providers, a much larger proportion of whom will not be affiliated with corporate giants than is currently the case with any other communications medium.

If that happens, this could be another great tidal change in the American mass media. The opening of the media into a wider range of voices will continue and accelerate, and although efforts by big government and big business to control the communications media will continue, the technological and social momentum will almost certainly be too much for them to overcome.

I'm betting that the effect will not be immediately obvious but that over time it will indeed be momentous.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Saturday night has long been a desert on television because the networks and cable channels came to the conclusion that nobody worth chasing for advertisers is at home then. Hence they largely programmed cheap shows that had a chance of appealing to babysitters.

Much of the Saturday night programming in recent years has been replays of theatrical movies which most people have already had several chances to see in the theater and on other cable channels, magazine programs about murderers, and reruns of shows that had appeared earlier in the week. That's why the nets run those three-hour marathons of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit on Saturday night.

Of course, such a choice becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If purveyors program only for teenage girls, then teenage girls is the audience they are going to get—if that.

That's why it's interesting to see ABC trying something different, running college football on Saturday nights.

Notre Dame went into the game under intense scrutiny after their loss last week to Michigan, and the Irish got behind early and stayed there nearly all the game. Heavy winds and driving rain roared into the stadium throughout the second half, making it immensely difficult to mount a passing attack on offense, which made it even tougher for ND to score points and mount a comeback.

On top of all that, the wind direction actually reversed at the end of the third quarter, when the teams switch goals, so that the Irish had the wind against them the entire second half of the game, instead of being able to move with the wind in the last quarter.

In the end, however, the Irish stormed back as their defense finally managed to put some pressure on Spartan quarterback Drew Stanton, and the ND offense finally kicked into gear as QB Brady Quinn started to show better throwing accuracy and/or his receivers managed to run their routes more accurately.

In the end, the Irish won 30-27 on a 27-yeard interception return for a TB by ND cornerback Terrail Lambert.

Notre Dame didn't look like a potential national champion by any means, but it was a great game—and it certainly was much more interesting than another episode of 48 Hours Mystery.

It's good to see ABC try this, and it seems to me that it will be a good thing if the choice proves successful.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 09:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday we noted that NBC is leaning toward including Madonna's mock crucifixion scene when it airs her concert special in November. Catholic and Orthodox church organizations have protested the aging pop star's inclusion of the scene in her concert shows, and they will undoubtedly view a decision by NBC to run it as an insult to Christians.

As noted yesterday, NBC is probably going to run the scene, and there will probably be complaints from Christians.

NBC will undoubtedly be willing to endure any controversy and in fact expect to benefit from it.

Not so with atheists.

NBC is airing the Christian program Veggie Tales, but it has censored out all refernces to Christ and Christianity. According to the AP report,

Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber always had a moral message in their long-running "VeggieTales" series, a collection of animated home videos for children that encourage moral behavior based on Christian principles. But now that the vegetable stars have hit network television, they cannot speak as freely as they once did, and that has got the Parents Television Council steamed.

The conservative media-watchdog group issued a statement Wednesday blasting NBC, which airs "VeggieTales," for editing out some references to God from the children's animated show.

"What struck me and continues to strike me is the inanity of ripping the heart and soul out of a successful product and not thinking that there will be consequences to it," said L. Brent Bozell, president of the Parents Television Council. "The series is successful because of its biblical world view, not in spite of it. That's the signature to `VeggieTales."'

The references to Christ and Christian values offended the network's broadcast standards, the AP story reported:

Two weeks ago, NBC began airing 30-minute episodes of "VeggieTales" on Saturday mornings. The show was edited to comply with the network's broadcast standards, said NBC spokeswoman Rebecca Marks.

"Our goal is to reach as broad an audience as possible with these positive messages while being careful not to advocate any one religious point of view," she said. . . .

All programs set to air on NBC must meet the network's broadcast standards, said Alan Wurtzel, a broadcast standards executive. "VeggieTales" was treated the same as any other program, he said.

"There's a fine line of universally accepted religious values," he said. "We don't get too specific with any particular religious doctrine or any particular religious denomination."

The program's creator/producer, Steve Vischer, said he understands the network's position:

"VeggieTales is religious; NBC is not," he said. "I want to focus people more on `Isn't it cool that Bob and Larry are on television?' "

What NBC thinks is cool is something a bit different: grabbing a particular audience of impressionable young people without offending powerful anti-Christian advocacy groups such as People for the American Way and the Freedom from Religion Foundation.

To get uncensored copies of the Veggie Tales programs, click here. 

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The nascent but distinct and ongoing reversal of the corporate consolidation of the U.S. media received another boost yesterday with the Tribune Co.'s announcement that it is willing to sell any or all of its 11 newspapers and 25 television stations.

The Tribune Co. announcement follows hard on the heels of the selloff of a dozen newspapers by Knight Ridder, which was the nation's second-largest newspaper chain (after Gannett).

“The restructuring of these partnerships frees the company to move quickly to pursue strategic alternatives to further enhance shareholder value,” said Tribune Co. CEO Dennis FitzSimons. “Under these terms, all shareholders benefit.”

The firm's newspapers have been hit hard by competition from the internet, as the New York Times reports:

The media business has been in turmoil as readers, viewers and advertisers have shifted their habits and turned to the Internet. Newspapers in particular are facing a slump in circulation and little growth in advertising revenues while at the same time facing rising costs.

The competition has depressed the media giant's stock price, and the only thing that has raised it, interestingly, has been the increasing recent rumors that Tribune Co. would divest itself of some of its holdings:

Tribune shares, like those of other public media companies, have weakened significantly over the last few years, falling 36 percent since 2003, when Mr. FitzSimons took over. But the stock has risen recently as speculation has increased that it might sell some assets, and it shot up 4.4 percent yesterday.

As reported earlier on this site, the corporatization and business consolidation of the U.S. media, which began in the 1960s and caused much anguish among leftist critics and media analysts, was in fact a positive thing that actually increased competition in American mass media. And as I noted in in the post cited at the head of this paragraph, it was always very likely that the consolidation would reverse once it became necessary in order for media firms to make themselves leaner and more effective at responding to competition. This, too, will increase competition and will ultimately be a good thing, as I suggested earlier.

The current de-consolidation, then, is a response to competition and will itself create greater competition.

That is how markets work: brilliantly.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 09:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

NBC TV is pondering what to do about rock singer Madonna's upcoming TV special on the network. A video of the middle-aged pop star's latest  concert will be broadcast on the network in November. The problem: Madonna sings one song, "Live to Tell," while suspended on a cross, bound by silver cuffs and wearing a crown of thorns.

Catholic and Orthodox church groups have protested the spectacle. Madonna defends it by saying that it is not "anti-Christian, sacrilegious or blasphemous." She says that in fact Jesus himself would be just like her if he were here today: "It is no different than a person wearing a cross or 'taking up the cross' as it says in the Bible. Rather, it is my plea to the audience to encourage mankind to help one another and to see the world as a unified whole. I believe in my heart that if Jesus were alive today he would be doing the same thing."

OK. . . . 

NBC will probably air the scene. E! Online reports:

NBC President Kevin Reilly told TVGuide.com several weeks ago that the scene will probably stay put because Madonna "felt strongly about it" and considers it a highlight of her show.

"We viewed it and, although Madonna is known for being provocative, we didn't see it as being ultimately inappropriate," Reilly said.

This was a foregone conclusion, really. The scene is obviously a central part of the show, and the network would be subjected to widespread scorn if it deleted it. They wouldn't have bought the program if they weren't wiling to air the scene.

As to what it all means, I suspect that most of the audience will get the message Madonna is trying to send in her usual unsophisticated, unsubtle way: that religion is all about caring about other people and doing good works.

That sounds nice on the surface, but it is very bad theology because it considers only half the story—the part about loving God with all one's heart, and all one's soul, and all one's strength is missing, and it is the foundation for the message about loving one's neighbor as oneself.

Nonetheless, I doubt that the scene will have any real effect on what people think about the Almighty, one way or the other.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 09:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Fox's new sitcom Happy Hour (Thursday nights at 8:30 EDT) is a real guilty pleasure—a show about moral chaos with surprising humor and cleverness.

Happy Hour follows the misadventures of a small-town Missouri sad sack who moves in with a would-be suave, Rat Pack bachelor in a very ordinary Chicago apartment. As in ABC's comedy-drama Men in Trees, the women want their men to have an impossible combination of contradictory qualities, looking for a perfectly sensitive, thoughtful . . . Tarzan.

And the men want, well, the women. It’s a situation with a good deal of humor in it—though probably not so funny to have to live it.

The cast is excellent, especially Beth Lacke, who is quite simply the funniest woman on television today. The show is worth watching if only to see what she'll say or do next.

Any program that comes out in favor of the 4 p.m. martini is all right by me, and the characters' unabashed and frequently unhinged pursuit of the good life in our modern-day mismash of conflicting values is truly comic and highly enlightening.

This is one I'll watch again.

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In ABC's new comedy-drama program Men in Trees, kooky blonde actress Anne Heche plays a famous “relationship coach” and authoress of women’s romantic self-help books who is temporarily stranded in Alaska after discovering that her fiancé has been cheating on her.

In this simple, natural, and untamed environment she predictably realizes that she really knows nothing about men and romantic relationships. Naturally, she decides to stay there, get some wisdom, and write a truly informed book about men and love.

Presumably, new illusions will be shattered in funny-serious ways each week.

What the great screenwriter-director Preston Sturges called Topic A is of course at the center of things, and it seems likely to remain there, given the concept of the show.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 11:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Produced by critical favorite Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing), NBC's Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is another primetime soap opera with an interest in serious issues, this time set behind the scenes at a network television sketch comedy program.

The cast is strong and reasonably likeable despite their characters' largely amoral and power-mad nature, and the show has some intentionally funny moments.

The discussion of issues is laughably earnest and elementary, as in Woody Allen’s non-comedy films and Sorkin's other work, but it’s reasonably diverting to watch wealthy, influential people discuss how they should use their power.

In that way it’s a good deal like The West Wing.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 11:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The new CBS program Jericho (Monday nights at 10 p.m. EST is set in small Kansas town after an atomic explosion has hit Denver.

The premiere episode seems to blame the U.S. President’s zeal in combating terrorism as the cause of the attack, but it also shows the small town mayor’s political rival trying to use the situation to gain advantage, in a manner reminiscent of national Democrats regarding the Iraq War. That shows an admirable nonpartisanship on the producers’ part.

Later in the show, the townspeople find out that Atlanta has been hit also. As is common for these programs, the crisis brings out both the best and the worst in people. Mysterious benefactor characters and unexpected heroes arise with near-cliché frequency. In this one, a visitor from St. Louis fills the first role, and the mayor’s prodigal son is the latter. The crisis creates divisions among the townspeople, but they pull together when they have to—with obvious analogies to and lessons for post-9/11 America.

Interesting and worth watching.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 08:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I like opera but don't listen to it much or go to them very often. However, this sounds to me like great news: Sirius Radio is launching a new channel that will play Metropolitan Opera performances, both live and from some 1,500 radio broadcasts recorded during the past eight decades. It would be even better if other productions were included as well, but the Met is very good indeed, and the station should be worth listening to. It's something that I'd visit every so often if I had their service.

Parenthetical rant:

I get XM with my DirecTV subscription, but I never listen to it because the dirtbags at XM dropped their progressive rock station.

Actually, the prog rock station was pretty crappy anyway, as it was dominated by long performances by jam bands and very little prog. I have nothing against jam bands, mind you, but an actual prog rock station is little enough to ask for, people.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 10:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The New York Times has implemented a fairly subtle redesign in its print editions today.

Henceforth the paper's news stories will have justified text, meaning that they have an even margin on both left and right. Stories that include any analysis or opinion will have a ragged right margin, in which most lines end before reaching the right side of the printed column.

The only exception will be the editorial pages, where the justified margins will remain. 

The newspaper's editors say they do not expect the change to be obvious to most readers, but they think that it will have a "subliminal effect" in providing readers unconsciously with the critical distinction between news stories and opinion or analysis.

Perhaps. 

Noting that many readers had expressed confusion and dismay over the frequent inclusion of reporters' opinions in what were ostensibly news stories, and the resulting impression that the newspaper was surreptitiously trying to inculcate readers with a left-wing bias, the Times's "credibility committee" recommended the slight redesign.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 09:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As noted earlier on several occasions in this space, big media companies are doing their level best to extend their current broadcast, cable, and satellite hegemony to the internet. Rupert Murdoch talked about his firm's strategy yesterday. News Corp's approach goes against the grain of current trends, which is for media firms to develop connections with internet portals.

Murdoch said that News Corp, the parent company of the Fox brands, is going to use a moden in which web surfers are expected to go directly to the firm's various sites. AP reports:

Rupert Murdoch told an investor conference Tuesday that he didn't see a need to distribute programming or other media content from his News Corp. conglomerate through Internet portals.

Murdoch, asked why he hadn't made deal with large aggregators of online content like Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news) or Microsoft Corp.'s MSN portal, said he didn't see that strategy as necessary for building Internet traffic.

"We're not sure the portal model is the way of the future at all," Murdoch told a conference sponsored by Goldman Sachs. "We think people are going straight to the sites."

Murdoch, whose acquisition of the hugely popular social networking site MySpace.com has inspired envy among other media moguls, cited the example of Yahoo's HotJobs employment site, but noted that Internet users might go to any number of other Web destinations that also carry job listings.

Given his history, I wouldn't bet against him. 

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 09:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The one thing most certain to destroy a work of genre fiction is for the author to try to "transcend the genre."

You've heard of this many times, I'm sure, from the opposing point of view, as critics praise some author for transcending the genre in which they're working and thereby producing "a real novel."

That is hogwash.

The result of such endeavors is typically a poor example of both genre fiction and mainstream fiction. I won't name names here, but much of what has received the most critical praise in the mystery field qualifies strongly for this dubious distinction.

Read a few of the most recent Edgar Award winners if you want to be fully versed in the infamous results of authors thinking themselves superior to their audiences.

On this point Helen Szamuely has written a good book review for the website of the Social Affairs Unit in Great Britain. Noting the drab results produced by many writers trying to write "real novels" in the mystery genre, Szamuely writes:

I blame the critics, starting with Julian Symons and his seminal Bloody Murder. As the author of a number of extremely interesting detective novels himself Symons ought to have known better. But he and his many successors have been advocating the theory that the best detective story writers ought to go beyond the genre and write "real" novels. Symons, for example, who always prefers thrillers to detective stories, despite his own achievements, repeatedly shakes his head over someone like Ngaio Marsh failing to transcend the genre.

Transcending the genre is all very well but a good detective story is considerably more difficult to write than a sloppily constructed and written "real" novel. In fact, all that happens is that we get a romance with a little detection thrown in instead of a detective story, not a work of literature.

Szamuely is absolutely right to point to Symons and his Bloody Murder as a great offender in this matter. Symons and the American critic Otto Penzler have probably most powerfully and influentially represented the idea that the best kind of mystery novel is not a mystery at all and really not much of a novel, either .

Their intentions were and are good, I am sure, but their ideas are simply wrong. 

Symons, Penzler, and their vast host of slavish followers praise what they call crime stories, which are narratives in which a crime is (perhaps) committed and the minds of the various characters are analyzed from a psychological point of view.

Hence, they are often not really narratives at all and hence not really novels at all.

The opposing point of view is that a novel is first and foremost a story, and that a mystery novel is first and foremost a story with a criminal mystery at the center.

This point should seem obvious to those uninitiated in the occult practices of modern literary criticism. It is obvious because it is true. As George Orwell noted, there are some things that are so silly that only an intellectual could believe them.

The notion that a novel without a real story at the center is the best kind of novel is precisely the kind of idiotic notion only an intellectual could believe.

For more on what a real mystery novel is like, read this.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 08:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As I wrote in The Weekly Standard a few weeks ago, the best way for Christians to affect Hollywood is not to protest but to go to more movies, make clear their love for the medium, and praise Hollywood for what it does right.

(Regular readers of this site and the author's other writings will know that I live by those words.)

Now Fox Entertainment is showing exactly how quickly and surely such a strategy can work. The LA Times reports: 

In the biggest commitment of its sort by a Hollywood studio, News Corp.'s Fox Filmed Entertainment is expected to unveil plans today to capture the gargantuan Christian audience that made "The Passion of the Christ" a global phenomenon.

The home entertainment division of Rupert Murdoch's movie studio plans to produce as many as a dozen films a year under a banner called FoxFaith. At least six of those films will be released in theaters under an agreement with two of the nation's largest chains, AMC Theatres and Carmike Cinemas.

The first theatrical release, called "Love's Abiding Joy," is scheduled to hit the big screen Oct. 6. The movie, which cost about $2 million to make, is based on the fourth installment of Christian novelist Janette Oke's popular series, "Love Comes Softly."

The production costs for this film do not sound exactly stunning, but the picture is obviously an experiment and a way of gauging exactly what the market is for such films on a regular basis, as opposed to big-budget "event" films such as The Chronicles of Narnia and Lord of the Rings series. That makes good business sense for Fox and is good for the Christian audience in that success will not be defined as huge box office grosses but by a much more modest standard:

FoxFaith films, to be based on Christian bestsellers, will have small budgets of less than $5 million each, compared with the $60-million average. The movies each will be backed by $5-million marketing campaigns. Although that is skimpy compared with the $36 million Hollywood spends to market the average movie, the budget is significant for targeting a niche audience, especially one as fervent as many evangelical Christians.

There appears to be a huge market out there for Christian programming, the LA Times story notes:

For instance, "The Passion" grossed $612 million worldwide, thanks in part to its appeal to Christians. Another spiritual odyssey, "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," took in $745 million globally. Most recently, Christians came out for this summer's controversial "The Da Vinci Code," which has brought in $754 million worldwide.

The risk inherent in sending out a stream of low-budget films is that Fox will conclude that Christians will watch any kind of crud as long as it includes a scene in which a major character "accepts Christ into their life," which is what Christian fiction today all too commonly consists of. Fortunately, the studio seems to be after something quite different from that:

"A segment of the market is starving for this type of content," said Simon Swart, general manager of Fox's U.S. home entertainment unit.

"We want to push the production value, not videotape sermons or proselytize."

Aesthetic quality and an understanding of the subject matter will be essential to the plan's success:

"If this is something Fox is doing only to exploit the audience — or if it's something they don't believe in or are doing cynically — then there could be problems," said Brandon Gray, president of Box Office Mojo, a box-office reporting service. "There isn't a huge turnout for these films unless they speak to what Christianity is all about. People want a guide to life and Hollywood has ignored that by saying nothing or dwelling on vices."

It makes great business sense for Fox to pursue a new and strongly defined audience as movie box office intake  has been decreasing in recent years:

Over the last four years, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment has quietly built a network to mobilize evangelical Christian moviegoers in an era of diminishing box-office returns. The network includes 90,000 congregations and a database of more than 14 million mainly evangelical households. 

Other studios are watching and considering whether to follow suit:

New Line Cinema's "The Nativity Story," scheduled to be released in December, tells the story of Mary and Joseph seeking shelter to give birth to Jesus. Legendary Pictures, which has a multi-film deal with Warner Bros., is planning to make a movie version of John Milton's epic 17th century poem about the fall of man, "Paradise Lost."

The latter sounds very interesting indeed, with its clear potential for grand drama and powerful visual imagery.

One hopes that Christians have learned—or relearned—that a customer has much more influence than a scold.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 09:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

Microsoft is developing an online video-sharing service modeled after YouTube. The Seattle Times reports: 

Hopping aboard one of the Internet's white-hot trends, Microsoft introduced a test version of an online video-sharing service Monday night, with hopes it will snatch users away from market leader YouTube and generate revenue through advertising.

Soapbox on MSN Video, released to a select group of test customers, is designed to allow anyone to upload and share original videos on the Web.

Microsoft hopes Soapbox will both enhance and benefit from its other Web services to gain an edge in the explosive user-generated video market.

"The key is going to be getting a lot of users," said Matt Rosoff, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft. "It's one of those services that becomes more useful as more people access it. The biggest challenge will be to get people to use [Soapbox] instead of YouTube or other services."

Microsoft has an existing audience of 465 million monthly users across its various Web properties and aims to integrate Soapbox with its blogging and instant-messaging services, among others.

To keep its ad-funded business growing, it needs not only to grow its audience but also expand each user's involvement with its services, said Rob Bennett, general manager of entertainment and video services for MSN.

This is part of the continuing trend of business giants and government to harmess the Internet, as noted earlier on this site, here, here, and elsewhere.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 09:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

For the second time in the last month, a football film is the weekend's top box-office attraction. The Gridiron Gang, starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, led the way in weekend receipts with an estimated total of $15 million.

The Gridiron Gang is another in a long line of sports movies that show how troubled individuals develop character by participating in sports, where excellence is the pursuit and achieving real, visible results is the only way to succeed.

An important aspect of these films is the leadership brought by a coach who has battles of his or her own to fight. Mentorship and the responsibility of each generation to train the next one are central concerns of such films.

Movies such as Invincible, The Replacements, Friday Night Lights, The Longest Yard, and The Ice Princess all pursue this approach, and the underlying concern is the same: redemption. As such, they can be quite moving despite their often formulaic story lines.

(In fact, a great deal of their power is the direct result of their formulaic nature, about which we will write more in due course.)

The Brian DePalma crime story The Black Dahlia brought in a lackluster $10 mil in its opening week, and attendance overall for the weekend was weak, off 12 percent from the week before.

The E! Online story attributes this to school being back in session and the large number of football games available to watch on TV. The first seems unlikely, given that in most places school started at least a couple of weeks ago, and few people attend classes on weekends (although some do actually do homework over the weekends).

The likely reason for the box office dropoff is the attraction of football. Several football games were in the top twenty rated TV shows last week, with NFL games at the 1 and 3 positions.

I think that's a good thing. If you're like most people, you'll get more enjoyment and learn more about life watching a football game than in watching most movies—and what you enjoy will be the pursuit of excellence and what you learn will be true.

If only more movies were like that.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 09:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The prizes have been awarded at the Toronto Film Festival, and as might have been expected, the Fipresci Prize, voted by an international panel of film critics, went to the political "snuff" film Death of a President. (See story here.)

The top award at the festival, however, went to Bella, a romantic drama by Mexican director Alejandro Monteverde. The People's Choice Award is voted on by festival audiences, and is describe by Reuters as often indicative of future Academy Award nominations.

Bella received little press attention during the festival, and its selection as best picture was described as a surprise.

The film, produced in the United States, tells the story of "two people whose lives converge and turn upside down on a single day in New York," according to Reuters. It is director Monteverde's first film.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 11:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In another manifestation of the trend of major media outlets using the internet to promote their programs, CBS has authorized yahoo.com to show the entire premiere episode of the new TV series Jericho, on demand on the web, commercial-free, for several days before it appears on broadcast television.

The program premieres on Wednesday, September 20, and until then you can see it on the Web here. The page also includes clips and promotions for other CBS shows premiering this fall.

The network's decision to show an important program on the Web before its broadcast debut appears to me a rather significant event in the development of the internet as a broad-based medium.

And in entertainment and aesthetic terms, the premierie episode of Jericho is well worth watching.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 09:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Artists in the twentieth-century increasingly operated on the insight that it is vain, stupid, and boring to paint a beautiful and emotionally moving portrait of a landscape or person or pieces of fruit or a scene from the Bible or a war fight or a group of local burghers gathered for their nightly guarding of the town, and that those who did so were captives of bourgeois values whose work spread false consciousness and destroyed souls (and by the way, there is no such thing as a soul).

This phenomenon has been well documented over the past couple of decades in books such as Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word and in the excellent culture magazine The New Criterion.

Of course, for most people the best response to such things is to ignore them and, when they cannot be avoided, ridicule them.

A Los Angeles art show this weekend shows that the anti-art, anti-bourgeois, anti-social art movement is still strong.

The show, called Barely Legal, is put on by Banksy, a British prankster and graffiti artist, whose work pushes what passes for serious art today into open absurdity. It is the reductio ad absurdum of modern art, which is not much of a reduction at all.

Unfortunately, the show is not meant to satirize the contemporary art world but is in fact simply a cheesy and self-consciously ludicrous manifestation of it.

Banko's installations have a clear "anti-capitalist" (in the words of the Reuters article quoted below), anti-bourgeois message. Too bad, for he really does seem to have an ability to create mildly amusing if decidely unimaginative faux contemporary art scenarios.

Reuters reports:

A live Asian elephant, painted in pink and gold, stands in a makeshift living room.

Giant cockroaches swarm over copies of Paris Hilton's pop CD. A dummy angel wearing a gas mask and a white parachute flaps in the blue skies.

Even in free-wheeling Los Angeles, they'd never seen anything quite like this.

British graffiti artist and prankster Banksy opened his first Los Angeles show on Friday in an obscure warehouse in industrial Downtown, bringing his subversive humor and anti-capitalist message to a city better known for wealth and self-obsession.

"Barely Legal," a free three-day event billed as a "vandalized warehouse extravaganza," opened with the excitement and puzzlement that has come to be the hallmark of the elusive "guerrilla artist."

Banksy keeps his identity secret but has built up a cult following in Europe over the last four years, placing his work in top museums, zoos or on the streets.

"It is really amazing. I think he is hilarious," said Los Angeles graphic designer Manny Skiles, 30, who has spent two years following Banksy's work mostly through the Internet.

Banksy's works show about the usual level of imagination evident in these contemporary art scenarios, which is to say, very little: 

On one wall, a stencil art picture shows bush hunters in loincloths raising their spears at empty supermarket shopping carts. On another, a masked street anarchist with a thrown back arm prepares to hurl -- a bunch of flowers.

But the placid pink elephant takes pride of place. Tai, 38, looms large in a room decked out with a sofa, a television, rugs on the floor and a man and woman sitting reading obliviously on the couch. It is titled "Home Sweet Home."

"We are sitting on the couch not seeing her. From what I understand, the elephant is a symbol of all the world's problems being ignored," said Kari Johnson, Tai's caretaker. Johnson said Tai lives on a private southern California elephant ranch and has appeared in several commercials.

This is all highly reminiscent of much 1960s hippie "art." And the "artist's" politics are just as nuanced and deeply informed as those of his '60s prankster predecessors: 

Banksy, as is his custom, was not around to discuss his show, which followed a prank at Disneyland this month in which he placed a blow-up figure dressed in orange Guantanamo Bay prison overalls beside a roller-coaster ride.

Last month, Banksy placed remixed copies of Paris Hilton's debut CD in stores across England. He gave them titles such as "Why Am I Famous?" and "What Am I For?"

In the "Barely Legal" show, the fake Hilton CDs are displayed in a plexiglass case alongside photo-shopped pictures of the hotel heiress and live cockroaches.

What this world needs is an installation that makes appropriate fun of all this nonsense. Banko could be just the one to do it, if he could only get past his own idological complacency. That, however, is one thing that he, like his contemporaries, appears unlikely to challenge.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 10:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

James Pinkerton of Tech Central Station went all the way up to Toronto for the city's annual film festival this year, and he has brought back an excellent article on one of the most vivid manifestations of Bush hatred seen so far, the film The Death of a President. In an article appropriately and only slightly hyperbolically titled "Snuff Cinema," Pinkerton writes:

Five years after 9-11, it's apparent that we all aren't getting along. And the political left is throwing plenty of mean punches. A case in point is that new Bush snuff movie, "Death of a President." Some might say that "snuff movie" is too strong a term -- but how else to describe a movie that clearly revels in the prospect of George W. Bush's being assassinated? . . .

"Death" is a pseudo-documentary that purports to show what happens to America in the year after President George W. Bush is assassinated on October 19, 2007 (stock  market nerds might note that 10/19/07 is the 20^th anniversary of the 500-point stock market crash, for whatever symbolism that's worth).

A few points about the movie: First, it has a "big" look. As film-society types would say, "Death" is fluent in cinematic language; it brings one into the action, it's well paced, the music enhances the mood. Interestingly, the film was made for a mere $2 million; if so, such a large movie on such a small budget could only be possible for an offshoot of a big network, such as More4. The parent company, Channel 4, used its own deep resources to acquire archival footage and to help out on the slick special optical effects. So "Death" looks like a theatrical release, not a made-for-TVer.

Pinkerton sees extremely sinister motives at work here: 

In the 12^th century, King Henry II grew distinctly weary of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas à Becket. "Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?" Henry asked, and the next thing he knew, four loyal knights did just the ridding Henry was hoping for. Now fast-forward nine centuries: Is it really all that hard to believe that the "Death" filmmakers hope that somebody gets a "bright idea" to rid the world of a troublesome president?

I have no reason to think that the film is an open call to action, but certainly on the symbolic, wish-fulfillment level it is a manifestation of a truly appalling level of hatred, well beyond even what President Clinton's most fevered opponents dared to express during the 1990s, and was made by a national television network, no less.

After the imagined murder of President Bush, the film posits an authoritian regime imposed by his sinister successor, current U.S. vice president Richard Cheney, whose administration promptly blames a Syrian-American for the murder and decides to invade Syria.  (Just like real life!)

But the Syrian-American, although full of hatred, is not the killer, of course. [Note: plot spoiler ahead!] An African-American veteran of the 1991 Gulf War whose son was killed in the current War in Iraq is the real killer. And the film affirms the assassin's decision, Pinkerton writes:

The film, of course, suggests that the black man was justified—partially, if not fully—in what he did. As the man's wife explains, "He loved the Army, proud of serving America. . . . He felt that Bush destroyed all of that." So the cosmology—make that demonology—of the film is clear: Bush is so bad that even a loyal patriotic man is driven to kill the president. But the Cheney-ized feds aren't interested in this inconvenient truth, because they are intent on blaming the Syrian, and Syria.

The interesting angle here is that unlike many dramatic films about politics, this one depicts a real, living U.S. President currently serving in office (even superimposing Bush's face on an actor's body, through a cgi effect), when it would have been perfectly simple to provide a fig leaf by fictionalizing the President by at least giving him a different name. But they deliberately chose not to do that, in order to target Bush directly. Pinkerton writes:

And of course, the filmmakers, too, have a predetermined target: Bush. As producer Finch put it, "We would really engage people" by killing President George W. Bush onscreen, as opposed to just President John Q. Public.

Finch is right: When trying to drive home a point, it's always best to use specific images and proper nouns, if possible. Be vivid and lurid, that's the ticket. As vivid as the blood flowing from Bush's chest, and as lurid as the headlines that "Death" has already generated.

Finally, Pinkerton points out that the film is not intended to reach a big audience but only to inflame further the passions of anti-Bush fanatics: 

Finch and Range know that vast majority of Americans won't like this film; even as they hope that a small minority of Americans will make it profitable for them. To make money, and to make a splash, they are willing to hurt American feelings.

The great irony, of course, is the idea that America is a heartbeat away from authoritarianism—when our domestic hatred of the sitting President is so open, unhinged, and accepted that even an endeavor such as this is already receiving spirited defenses in the media.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 09:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The rumors are flying, that the left-wing radio network Air America is about to shut down. The New York Post reports:

All-liberal, all-the-time Air America is denying intense rumors that the ratings-challenged radio network will declare bankruptcy this week and attempt to reorganize to stay on the air for the November elections.

A high-level source told The Post that Rob Glaser, the Real Networks founder who rescued the 2-year-old network from its first financial crisis, "walked away last week" and took his moneybags with him.

Earlier this week, as first reported in The Post, Air America laid off six people and shuffled its on-air lineup - including deleting Jerry Springer and returning him to independent syndication.

Radio Equalizer, a blog that closely monitors Air America, claims the lefty net hasn't been able to pay its Associated Press bill and that staffers "have been bracing for the worst possible news."

Late yesterday, Air America spokeswoman Jaime Horn denied rumors of doom.

"If Air America had filed for bankruptcy every time someone rumored it to be doing so, we would have ceased to exist long ago," Horn told The Post. "No decision has been taken to make any filing of any kind."

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 01:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I am regrettably rather late in mentioning the actor Brad Pitt's enlightening recent comment regarding why he has not yet married the acclaimed actress Angelina Jolie, a subject which he believes should have an important effect on the nation's political process.

USA Today reports the tragic, earth-shattering news:

Brad Pitt, ever the social activist, says he won't be marrying Angelina Jolie until the restrictions on who can marry whom are dropped. "Angie and I will consider tying the knot when everyone else in the country who wants to be married is legally able," the 42-year-old actor reveals in Esquire magazine's October issue, on newsstands Sept. 19.

I think he's referring to domestic animals here, but I'm not entirely sure, as he has neglected to provide specifics. In any case, let's get together and change the laws to Brad's liking so that he and Angelina can move in together and have kids and whatnot, OK?

It's little enough to ask a country to do, after all, for such an important person.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 12:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Numerous writers and analysts have pointed out that large media conglomerates' purchases of movie studios, magazines, and book publishing companies have had a deleterious effect on the quality of production in these media by forcing them to bring in higher profits than were historically attainable.

I suspect that the decline of American education has had a much more important effect on the quality of popular culture in the past half-century, but there were always two additional interesting questions regarding media conglomeration that needed to be asked and seldom were.

Question one was whether these two industries would remain as appealing to corporations as they had become during the 1970s and the two decades thereafter.

Question two was whether the decline in quality and increasing sameness of product from corporatized major publishers and film studios would cause a rise in competition from independent producers and publishers. And if the latter happened, might not the answer to question one be that the big corporations might wish to unload some of these firms?

That does appear to be the case, with the well-documented rise of independent media productions, proliferation of new magazines (which has slowed only in the past few years), and increasing success of university presses, small book-publishing houses, and other such ventures.

We are seeing some signs of a reversal of the media consolidation of the past couple of decades.

In today's news, for example, The Wall Street Journal reports that Time-Warner is jettisoning numerous magazines "as it looks to prune its portfolio of smaller, less-profitable titles."

This move is significant because it includes very popular titles such as Popular Science, Field & Stream, Outdoor Life, Skiing, Parenting, and Babytalk. Of course these will all be sold to other big investors, because they are still worth a lot of money, but this looks to me like part of what may be a continuing devolution to a more reasonable scale of organization for these publications.

Equally significant in today's news is the announcement by the New York Times Co. that it is selling off its television stations:

"The decision to explore the sale of our broadcast stations is a result of our ongoing analysis of our business portfolio," said Janet L. Robinson, president and CEO. "These are well-managed and profitable stations that generate substantial cash flows and are located in attractive markets. We believe a divestiture would allow us to sharpen our focus on developing our newspaper and rapidly growing digital businesses, and the synergies between them, thereby increasing the value of our Company for our shareholders."

The stations that comprise the Broadcast Media Group are:

• WHO-TV in Des Moines, Iowa (NBC);
• KFSM-TV in Ft. Smith, Ark. (CBS);
• WHNT-TV in Huntsville, Ala. (CBS);
• WREG-TV in Memphis, Tenn. (CBS);
• WQAD-TV in Moline, Ill. (ABC);
• WTKR-TV in Norfolk, Va. (CBS);
• KFOR-TV in Oklahoma City, Okla. (NBC);
• KAUT-TV in Oklahoma City, Okla. (MyNetworkTV); and
• WNEP-TV in Scranton, Penn. (ABC).

Leftist critics complained about the corporatization and consolidation of the media as an unwelcome phenomenon in the '70s and thereafter, and they were correct to point out that there would be deleterious effects.

Market-oriented analysts simply replied by saying that the consolidation would be good because people wouldn't do it if it didn't make sense.

That was not the correct response, however.People do stupid things, and corporations do stupid things too.

The sensible response should have been that the media consolidation that began in the 1960s was most likely part of a societal and technological transition that would ultimately work toward everybody's benefit, as free markets typically do over the long term.

And that appears to be what has happened and is happening today.

Contrary to the leftists' claims, competition among media providers actually increased during the period of consolidation, as a simple glance at the current media landscape should make abundantly clear. In response to that competition, big media companies are beginning to divest themselves of some of their media holdings in order to make themselves leaner and more effective at responding to competition, as the New York Times statement makes clear.

That process will increase media competition further, and will create increased capacity for variety, efficiency, and customer satisfaction in our communications media.

That is what markets do, and it is always to the good in the long term.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 09:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Season one of one of the most appealing and enjoyable TV mystery series goes on sale today, as the DVD set of Diagnosis: Murder becomes available. Starring Dick Van Dyke as Dr. Mark Sloan, the series ran for several seasons on CBS during the 1990s. The first season, released on DVD today, is the best season, but the show was always very entertaining. The mystery plots were fairly strong during this first season, and often played reasonably fair, giving enough clues at least to keep the viewer guessing, even if there weren't enough actually to solve the mystery.

Van Dyke's character is immensely likeable, with a puckish sense of humor and an evident joy in life—so different from the glum protagonists of most network TV mystery-crime shows today! His supporting cast—including his son Barry Van Dyke as Mark's son Steve, Victoria Rowell as pathologist Amanda Bentley, and Scott Baio surprisingly good as up-from-the-mean-streets Dr. Jack Stewart—is likewise appealing.

It's interesting that Van Dyke was so well cast in this show, as it is a strange fact that comic actors often make very good TV mystery sleuths. Consider, for example, just working from memory here:

Rock Hudson and Susan St. James in McMillan and Wife

Tony Shaloub in Monk

George Peppard in Banacek (one of his early films was Breakfast at Tiffany's, and he brought his great flair for comedy to The A-Team later)

Bruce Willis in Moonlighting (as our friend Cris Rapp of south Florida has reminded us), who is an expert comic actor as well as a superstar action dude

Hugh Laurie in House

Leo McKern as Rumpole of the Bailey

Ian Carmichael in the BBC's Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries

Bill Cosby in The Cosby Mysteries

Kenneth More as Father Brown

Jim Hutton as Ellery Queen

Tom Bosley as Father Dowling

Peter Lawford in The Thin Man

George Segal in the short-lived and underrated Murphy's Law

Alan Davies in Jonathan Creek

Robbie Coltrane in Cracker (and Robert Pastorelli in the U.S. version)

Darren McGavin in Kolchak: The Night Stalker (and as Mike Hammer in the late 1950s!)

Gerald McRaney in Simon and Simon

Tim Daly in Eyes

Jack Klugman in Quincy, M.E.

In addition, numerous performers not known mainly for comedy have shown a great flair for it in mystery programs, including Peter Falk in Columbo, Robert Wagner and Stephanie Powers in Hart to Hart, Helen Hayes and Mildred Natwick in The Snoop Sisters, Angela Lansbury in Murder, She Wrote, Dennis Weaver in McCloud, Robert Conrad in the genre-hopping Wild Wild West, Ian McShane in Lovejoy and The Dick Francis Mysteries, and Pierce Brosnan in Remington Steele.

Why? Perhaps it's because if one is to be successful at comedy it helps to be fairly intelligent. Could be. We can leave it there as a preliminary hypothesis, anyway.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 03:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Part 2 of the ABC miniseries The Path to 9/11, which aired last night, was, if anything, more critical of the Bush administration's obliviousness to the threat of al Quaeda than it was of the Clinton admin. Yet I hear no complaints about it, nor any threats of censorship.

The film's critique of the Bush administration is basically that it didn't get up to speed quickly enough (which is rather to be expected when the enormous White House bureaucracy switches parties) and was too devoted to political correctness prior to 9/11.

Regarding the former, then-National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice comes off as manipulative and unprepared to run a big office. That may be true or it may not be, but it certainly does not suggest that she is responsible for 9/11. Hence: no harm, no foul. 

Regarding the Bush administration's continuation of the previous team's concern for political correctness, throughout the narrative leading up to Sept. 11, 2001, a concern over "racial profiling" prevents the nation's defense and policing agencies from picking up and holding obvious terrorists. This was a huge error, of course, and was something many people had warned was posing a serious danger. Now we know.

In a very revealing scene in episode 2, a terrorist who has been taken in for questioning insists that the agency release him, stating, "I have rights!" The agents accept this and ultimately release him. This was a disastrous policy.

Fortunately, the notion that aliens have the same constitutional rights as citizens has been set aside, as it should, in the years since 9/11. I recommended this less than a week after that day, in fact.

The lesson to learn from this aspect of the 9/11 story is clear:

People without moral courage hate to make distinctions.

The making of distinctions is central to human reason and is a good thing that should never be suppressed. In real life, relativism is not an option. And, based as it is on relativism, hard multiculturalism is not an option.

An alien is a person of different status from a citizen, and that is a distinction that society must accept. Certainly vistors to our country should not be mistreated, but holding an obvious terrorist in custody for more than 24 hours is not an atrocity; it is simple common sense.

The other impression one gets from last night's episode is that the sub-agencies of the Bush administration had more than enough information to suspect that the 9/11 attacks were coming and could have prevented it by grounding all air traffic on that day. That appears to be more than a bit of a stretch, but it makes for compelling TV drama and fulfills the central purpose of a docudrama. That is, as I mentioned yesterday, "to tell a whacking good story through the use of historical events" and thereby afford us insights into human nature and the world around us, in addition to helping us  understand the issues surrounding the matter at hand.

The big lesson to learn from The Path to 9/11 and the real life events that inspired it is the need for moral courage. A people without it is a people doomed to destruction.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 09:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Part 1 of ABC's The Path to 9/11 two-part docudrama aired last night, and reactions from political types were largely as expected.

Supporters of former president Bill Clinton complained about some scenes in advance copies of the program  (which were altered before airing, to reflect their concerns), some on the political right were disgusted by leftists' calls for censorship and retaliation against ABC, and others on the right took what they apparently considered to be the high road, claiming that the film's condensation of certain events into dramatic scenes was outrageous. The latter included Bill Bennett, Bill O'Reilly, John Podhoretz, and John Fund.

Fund, in his Opinion Journal article on the film, even goes so far as to say that it is fundamentally dishonorable to make docudramas: "Their rules simply aren't good enough when dealing with events that are still fresh in the minds of so many. At worst, they can be used by ideological gunslingers like director Oliver Stone, who smeared the reputations of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon in paranoid fantasy films."

That seems to me to be a serious overreaction to this film, as indeed were the reactions of the Democrat opponents of the film. The rules for dramas are different from the rules for histories, and they should be.

It's a movie, people.

Everyone involved seems to have no idea whatever of the purpose of a docudrama.

It is this: to tell a whacking good story through the use of historical events.

That is a very good thing to do, contra Mr. Fund. The telling of stories gives us insights into human nature and the world around us, in addition to helping us  understand the issues surrounding the matter at hand.

The main purpose of a docudrama is to tell an enlightening story. It is acceptable to condense the sequence of events, conflate several characters into one, and make other changes to the historical record in order to bring out the inherent drama of the central conflicts.

Shakespeare's history plays and tragedies do this routinely, and no one but an ugly fool would suggest that the world would be better without them.

What is not right is to distort major events in a story so as to create an impression contrary to the facts or the greater truth behind the story.

All of this is basically a matter of degree: if the invented scenes do not distort the real-life story or characters significantly, there is nothing at all wrong with including them. Niggling about details, as the political critics of The Path to 9/11 have done, simply shows ignorance of literary history and is a blatant attempt to prevent people from seeing the greater truths a particular docudrama may present.

The Path to 9/11 is not Shakespeare by any means, but it is a compelling drama that gives us real insights into how the minds of its characters worked.

Does Bill Clinton come off as something of an ass when it came to dealing with terrorism? Yes. But he was something of an ass in that regard. His administration did indeed bungle the response to the challenge Bin Laden posed, and that did indeed lead to 9/11. And the Bush administration has made countless mistakes in its handling of the run-up to the tragedy and especially in the aftermath, which will reportedly be depicted in tonight's concluding episode of The Path to 9/11.

The important thing for a docudrama, in being true to the events it depicts, is to get the characters' motivations and reactions right.

The Path to 9/11 does this admirably. The real conflict in the film is the central problem we still face today in fighting terrorism: that the values our nation holds most dear  are the very things that prevent us from most effectively fighting terrorists. And terrorists astutely exploit this, as the film makes clear.

The Path to 9/11 depicts this conflict in numerous ways, weaving it throughout the story. We see FBI agents, for example, waiting until just a few hours before a planned December 31, 1999, terrorist attack because in America a person arrested must be charged with a crime within 24 hours or be released.

The need to wait until the very day of the planned attack poses an awful risk on innocent attendees of the New York City millennial New Year's celebration, of which they are entirely unaware, but the film makes no evident comment on this. It is simply a fact of the way we do things here, and it is an important part of what makes America what is is.

In this way, The Path to 9/11 gets the important things very right, and if Sandy Berger comes off as perhaps a jot less reponsble and attractive than he may have been in real life (and I certainly do not know that to be so), that is surely an acceptable choice on the part of the filmmakers in telling the bigger story: that America's greatest advantages are also its greatest vulnerabilities.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 07:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Another item for our ongoing Everything Happens in the Omniculture department:

Shortbus, a film that is highly sexually explicit but allegedly not salacious according to its director, has received a distribution agreement to appear in mainstream theaters in the United States and elsewhere. It is not clear at this point how widely it will be distributed in the United States. Reuters reports:

Three months after John Cameron Mitchell showed his sexually explicit film "Shortbus" out of competition at the Cannes film festival, he said it had attracted distributors in dozens of countries, including the United States, Canada, Japan, France and Singapore.

"People are ready for change. There is a thirst for something different," Mitchell told reporters on Friday at the Toronto International Film Festival, where "Shortbus" was set for its North American premiere before an October opening in the United States.

Mitchell aims to use sex as a metaphor to tell a story about people looking for solace and searching for something more in their lives in a post-September 11 world.

"What pissed me off was that it was ... generically identified of as porn," Mitchell said of his film. "We are not trying to do anything salacious here. That is just the language which we speak."

The film is graphic: Scenes include a man being whipped by a dominatrix as he masturbates and a straight couple having sex in a variety of positions.

But pornographic? Mitchell argues not.

"Porn is really to arouse. This film explores the other areas of sex," he said.

The story revolves around two couples, one straight and one gay, accompanied by a few other lonely souls.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 12:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

E! Online reports that ABC is carrying on with its Path to 9/11 miniseries despite complaints by former president Bill Clinton and threats of retaliation from high-ranking Democrat politicians:

Don't believe the hype. Or believe it. Either way, don't decide either way until you've watched all five hours.

That's pretty much the gist of ABC's message to potential viewers of the network's two-part miniseries The Path to 9/11, which airs commercial-free Sunday and Monday. (Ironically there will now be a 20-minute break Monday at 9 p.m. to accommodate a speech from President Bush.

While ABC has stated that the $40 million production is still in the editing process and is being slightly tweaked in response to concerns that it unfairly attacks the Clinton administration for failure to act on terrorist threats in the years leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the network has not bowed to pressure from former Cabinet members and left-wing groups to "dump," "yank" or otherwise pull the movie from the schedule.

ABC has altered at least some of the scenes that have been criticized:

According to reports, a scene alluding to the idea that then-National Security Adviser Sandy Berger put the kibosh on an order to kill bin Laden has been "toned down."

"That sequence has been the focus of attention," a source close to the production told the Los Angeles Times.

ABC has also altered the credits to say that the film is "based in part" on the 9/11 Commission Report rather than "based on" the document.

An ABC executive told the Washington Post that any changes that were made "intended to make clearer that it was general indecisiveness, not any one individual," that left the United States vulnerable to attack on 9/11.

Hopes of opponents of the miniseries were disappointed when 9/11 commission member Tom Keane not only refused to condemn the film but instead strongly endorsed it:

Ex-New Jersey Governor Thomas Keane, who chaired the 9/11 commission and served as a consultant on The Path to 9/11, was asked to pull his weight with the filmmakers to have the project scrapped, but he has since spoken out in support of the picture.

"It's something the American people should see," Keane said during an interview on Good Morning America Friday. "Because you understand how these people wanted to do us harm, developed this plot and how the machinations of the American government under two administrations not only failed to stop them, but even failed to slow them down."

Keane did ask the filmmakers to take some of the complaints into consideration, however.

"These are people of integrity," Keane told the Post. "I know there are some scenes where words are put in characters' mouths. But the whole thing is true to the spirit of 9/11."

My opinion: The events that led up to the 9/11 attack are an important matter for public discussion which greatly merits further analysis, as we should all want to know exactly what in American policy worked and what did not, and the presentation of this miniseries will be a very good thing if it stimulates such a discussion.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

CBS Home Video has announced that volume two of season one of Perry Mason, the popular 1950s-'60s TV series based on the character created by Erle Stanley Gardner will go on sale on November 21.

The five-disc set will include the last twenty episodes of the first season. Volume 1 included the first 19 episodes. 

That is all the information about the new DVD set available at this time. For information on the Perry Mason Season 1, Volume 1 DVD, click here.

For more on Perry Mason and author Gardner, see my Weekly Standard article on "The Case of the Bestselling Author" here. For more information on the Season 1 Volume 1 DVD and an important addition to my Weekly Standard article, see this Karnick on Culture post.

Here's the cover art for the DVD edition:

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 09:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's sad to see wonderfully successful people move away from what they do best, in search of greater approbation than they already have. At the Venice Film Festival yesterday, one of my favorite entertainers, movie action hero Jackie Chan, claimed he was going to work hard for critical respect and to impress audiences instead of merely delighting them.

Reuters reports:

Tired of his image as all-action hero, Hong Kong film star Jackie Chan said on Friday he wanted to be taken as seriously as Robert DeNiro.

In Venice for the premiere of his new film "Rob-B-Hood," the master of the choreographed fight compared how he was greeted by fans gesticulating and shouting wildly, whereas he imagined De Niro commanded something closer to subdued awe.

"When they see me, 'Ah, ah Jackie Chan!"' the actor told a news conference after the press screening of Rob-B-Hood.

"I say, why does nobody say 'Robert De Niro!'," he added, speaking in English and waving his arms about excitedly.

"So I want to change, so that some day they say 'Wow, Jackie Chan' and not move again and again. So I want a change," he concluded with a smile, to warm applause from reporters.

The star of the "Rush Hour" series said he had already begun to branch out into different roles, and in Rob-B-Hood he plays a character on the wrong side of the law.

The film, in which Chan co-stars with Louis Koo, is a high-speed and humorous story about three dysfunctional crooks who kidnap a baby to deliver to a sinister tycoon but gradually fall for the infant.

That certainly ought to inspire comparisons to DeNiro.

Certainly Chan at age 52 cannot hope to equal the kind of action work that he has done in the past, and he is wise to look for new roles to play:

"I've been looking to change my roles for quite some time," Chan said through a translator. "I'm quite fed up with what I've acted so far in movies.

"So after going back to Hong Kong and setting up my business, you probably already have had a chance to observe this already happening, from the movie 'New Police Story' and 'The Myth' and now this one, Rob-B-Hood."

Chan, 52, seen as the successor to martial arts legend Bruce Lee, added he had done well to work in the genre for so long.

"We all know that the career of an action movie actor is quite short so I already consider myself a legend for still being around today."

To some degree, Chan is simply going through the same process as fellow martial arts action star Jet Li, who has taken on more challenging roles in more ambitious films in recent years. Li, however, as always been a bit more artistically ambitious than the appealingly sanguine Chan. Chan could easily make a transition away from heavy action and take on more varied roles while still retaining his great personal charm and expressing the same values he has always stood for.

It's interesting to see Chan claim to be dismayed by the fact that audiences feel a great emotional attachment to him whereas they seem greatly impressed by DeNiro. Such an attachment is just as hard to obtain as critical respect, if not even more difficult. Of course, the desire for respect is entirely understandable—but Chan has that, even if the respect is more on the part of movie audiences than among critics.

The most dismaying thing here is the possibility that Chan will begin to take on roles and movies that don't fit his talents, in search of respect he'll never get unless he goes against the values he holds most dear. Sure, he'll get critical respect if he can successfully play a serial killer like Hannibal Lecter, but we have quite enough of those, don't we? The kind of good-natured hero Chan specializes in is rare enough, and very good to have.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 03:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

In a furor echoing conservatives' continuing claims of left-wing bias among the media, Democrat Sen. Harry Reid (NV) and other senate Democrats have joined former U.S. president BIll Clinton in pressing ABC to cancel its showing of The Road to 9/11, the network's docudrama based on the 9/11 commission report and other factual sources.

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada denounced the five-hour television movie, set to air in two parts on Sunday and Monday nights, as "a work of fiction."

Reid and other leading Senate Democrats wrote to Robert Iger, president and CEO of ABC's corporate parent, the Walt Disney Co., urging him to "cancel this factually inaccurate and deeply misguided program."

Chronicling events leading to the September 11 attacks, the movie suggests the Clinton administration was too distracted by the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal to deal properly with the gathering threat posed by Islamic militants.

The furor comes as Democrats and Republicans jockey for political position in advance of the November 7 congressional elections over who can best secure the United States from another attack. . . .

In recent days, former members of the Clinton administration also lodged complaints with Iger, urging ABC and Disney to fix or eliminate what they called errors and fabrications.

ABC issued a statement saying the production, "The Path to 9/11," was still being edited and that criticism of the film's specifics were thus "premature and irresponsible."

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 11:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The commercialization of eccentricity continues to reach new levels of absurdity. Charismatically nutty Cincinnati Bengals receiver Chad Johnson is marketing his goofy new hairstyle, AP reports:

Chad Johnson, the master of the touchdown dance and the locker room list, is branching out into the field of marketing.

Marketing what? Himself, of course.

The Pro Bowl receiver changed his hairstyle this season -- instead of the shaved head, he's got a blond-dyed Mohawk -- and is helping the Cincinnati Bengals sell his new look at their gift shop.

For $30, fans can buy a rubber scalp with a blond Mohawk to slip on the tops of their heads, a sign of unity with the most colorful Bengal. The "Chad Mohawk Head" will be available at the team's gift shop before the home opener against Cleveland on Sept. 17.

"You don't have to cut a Mohawk anymore," Johnson said, in a late-night infomercial tone. "You can just go buy the hat. You can buy the head. It's me."

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 11:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In our ongoing Everything Happens in the Omniculture department, British filmmaker Kenneth Branagh has made a movie version of the Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart opera The Magic Flute, set in the trenches of World War I. The picture premiered yesterday at the Teatro La Fenice opera house in Venice. Reuters reports:

The $27 million production opens with Tamino as a soldier in the trenches and, instead of the snake that almost kills him in the original libretto he is pursued by a trail of mustard gas.

Papageno, the bird catcher, becomes the keeper of canaries used during the war to test for gas and the Queen of the Night's triumphant first appearance is astride a tank.

"I was surprised when I first started listening to it (the opera) of the scale of it, the intensity of it, the drama of it," Branagh told reporters after a press screening of "The Magic Flute" at the Venice Film Festival.

"It seemed that in the music there was a kind of plea for peace and it evolved into a sense that perhaps this utterly fascinating and appalling situation of the First World War ... was something where the music could meet and the one not overwhelm the other."

In the production notes for the film, Branagh also points out that the opera has been given other unusual settings:

"It's been set on the moon, in the circus, at Stonehenge, on the beach, and Mozart can live in all of them," he said.

And so Tamino, Papageno and Pamina are caught between fighting factions led by the Queen of the Night and Sarastro in his bombed-out castle.

Computer-enhanced sequences soar over battlefields that conjure up the devastation in northern Europe during World War One and graveyards with row upon row of simple white tombstones that mark the battlefields today.

Branagh engaged comedian and writer Stephen Fry to translate the libretto into English, and says, "It would be so wonderful if we could get opera goers to come to the cinema and cinema goers to perhaps go to the opera as a result of seeing the film, if either is not something they normally do."

This sounds like one way of doing that, I suppose.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 09:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The New York Post reports that former President Bill Clinton has sent ABC president Bob Iger a letter protesting the network's depiction of his administration's response to terrorist threats as shown in the upcoming miniseries, The Path to 9/11, to be broadcast by the network this coming Sunday and Monday at 8-10 p.m. EST. The Post reports:

A furious Bill Clinton is warning ABC that its mini-series "The Path to 9/11" grossly misrepresents his pursuit of Osama bin Laden - and he is demanding the network "pull the drama" if changes aren't made.

Clinton pointedly refuted several fictionalized scenes that he claims insinuate he was too distracted by the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal to care about bin Laden and that a top adviser pulled the plug on CIA operatives who were just moments away from bagging the terror master, according to a letter to ABC boss Bob Iger obtained by The Post.

The former president also disputed the portrayal of then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright as having tipped off Pakistani officials that a strike was coming, giving bin Laden a chance to flee.

"The content of this drama is factually and incontrovertibly inaccurate and ABC has the duty to fully correct all errors or pull the drama entirely," the four-page letter said.

The movie is set to air on Sunday and Monday nights. Monday is the fifth anniversary of the attacks.

The docudrama does indeed include some fictionalized scenes to help compress the story into a manageable form, as such productions customarily do, but appears to be accurate overall. It is based on the comprehensive 9/11 Commission Report and other factual sources. The cast includes Harvey Keitel, Patricia Heaton, Penny Johnson Jerald (of Fox's 24), Amy Madigan, and Donnie Wahlberg, none of whom will ever work in Hollywood again if the former president has anything to say about it, as he clearly wishes to do.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

David Broder points out in his column today, "One Leak and a Flood of Silliness," that the press owe Karl Rove a big apology for their asinine treatment of him in the Valerie Plame leak incident.

I agree entirely with Broder's indictment of the press's rush to judgment in this case.

The media's overheated and absurd reaction to the Plame case reflects a common but utterly irresponsible and unacceptable phenomenon in journalism today: the assumption that people are guilty simply on the say-so of someone the members of the press want to like, as in the outrageous public execution of the Duke lacrosse team, or because the accused is an individual they are disposed to dislike.

Regarding the press's mistreatment of Rove in the Plame case, I will let David Broder speak for himself in the following excerpts:

For much of the past five years, dark suspicions have been voiced about the Bush White House undermining its critics, and Karl Rove has been fingered as the chief culprit in this supposed plot to suppress the opposition.

Now at least one count in that indictment has been substantially weakened—the charge that Rove masterminded a conspiracy to discredit Iraq intelligence critic Joseph Wilson by "outing" his CIA-operative wife, Valerie Plame. . . .

No one behaved well in the whole mess—not Wilson, not [Lewis "Scooter"] Libby, [Vice President Cheney's chief of staff,] not special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald and not the reporters involved.

The only time I commented on the case was to caution reporters who offered bold First Amendment defenses for keeping their sources' names secret that they had better examine the motivations of the people leaking the information to be sure they deserve protection.

But caution has been notably lacking in some of the press treatment of this subject -- especially when it comes to Karl Rove. And it behooves us in the media to examine that behavior, not just sweep it under the rug. . . .

In fact, the prosecutor concluded that there was no crime; hence, no indictment. And we now know that the original "leak," in casual conversations with reporters Novak and Bob Woodward, came not from the conspiracy theorists' target in the White House but from the deputy secretary of state at the time, Richard Armitage, an esteemed member of the Washington establishment and no pal of Rove or President Bush. . . .

[Salon.com, Newsweek, The American Prospect] and other publications owe Karl Rove an apology. And all of journalism needs to relearn the lesson: Can the conspiracy theories and stick to the facts.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The college football season started last week with a great set of games, and continues this week with a showdown between no. 1 Ohio State University and no. 2 Texas. And the NFL season starts tonight, with a game between the reigning Super Bowl champion Pittsburgh Steelers and the up-and-coming Miami Dolphins.

The Steelers will be without the services of quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, recovering from an emergency appendectomy. The Dolphins, under second-year coach Nick Saban, are attempting to return to respectability after a long drought. With Daunte Culpepper at quarterback, they should be better, even though the former Minnesota gunslinger is still recovering from knee surgery.

Tonight's game aptly represents one of the great strengths of the NFL as a sports entertainment venture: parity.

Parity—the relatively small gap in ability between the league's best and worst teams—in the past decade has made the NFL in some ways an even more exciting proposition than before. Only one team in the NFC, for example, has reached the playoffs the last two years in a row (the Seattle Seahawks).

Hence in week 1 nearly everybody starts out with both optimism and great concern: we can almost imagine that anybody might end up anywhere. There is great drama as teams struggle for position and some players and organizations rise while other perform less impressively than expected and fall into the also-rans.

It's America in microcosm.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 11:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here's a publication no one should be without: Four Weeks is a new monthly magazine that includes a variety of articles in four categories customized for the four weeks of a woman's menstrual cycle.

In week 1, the magazine informs us, ladies like things to be "Fun, Familiar," and in subsequent weeks "Exciting, Exotic," "Indulgent, Introspective," and "Cautious, Caring," respectively.

Also of great interest is the magazine's Hormone Horoscope, which deftly combines two things of utter inscutability into an easily understood guide to life.

Thanks, gals!

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 10:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The British-made film Death of a President, which uses computer generation to create a vivid depiction of the assassination of President Bush, leads a significant roster of films critical of the president and his policies at this year's Toronto Film Festival, Reuters reports. The 10-day festival opens Thursday, and in addition to the political issues there will be plent of star power with appearances by Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, Penelope Cruz, Russell Crowe and others. Reuters reports that 352 films from 61 countries will be shown.

Festival offerings will certainly reflect the visceral hostility many in the entertainment industry feel toward the current U.S. president. Reuters reports:

British-made "Death of a President," . . . is one of a number of films with a decided political focus.

The documentary-style film raised hackles last week, as several British newspapers ran photos of the fictional assassination it depicts. The controversy elicited a terse "no comment" from the White House.

But it is not the only Toronto entry likely to raise eyebrows in Washington, particularly with U.S. midterm elections looming in November.

The festival will premiere the documentary "Dixie Chicks: Shut up and Sing," which focuses on the aftermath and fallout of Dixie Chicks singer Natalie Maines' criticism of Bush at a concert in London in 2003.

As well, controversial filmmaker Michael Moore will discuss the reaction he's had to his anti-Bush documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11," and show parts of upcoming release "Sicko," which takes aim at the U.S. healthcare system.

But that is by no means all that the festival entries will reflect, as films such as Christopher Guest's For Your Consideration and Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn will premiere as well.

The festival will close strongly with a showing of Michael Apted's Amazing Grace, a historical drama about William Wilberforce, the devoutly Christian British parliamentarian who led the nation's crusade to end the slave trade. The film has a strong cast including Ioann Gruffudd and Albert Finney, and an important story to tell.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 11:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

John Wilson of Books and Culture has an excellent article on the socialist American author Upton Sinclair in today's edition of National Review Online.

Sinclair is best-known, of course, for his 1906 novel The Jungle which brought public attention to the unpleasant working conditions in the nation's meat-packing industry.

Wilson's article includes some things I hadn't known or had forgotten, such as Sinclair's authorship of three series of novels centered on adventure. Wilson provides a balanced view of the author and even includes a suitable moral to Sinclair's story:

Unwieldy and imperfect as our democracy may be, Sinclair’s life testifies to the genius and robustness of the American polis. And impervious to irony as he often seemed, I suspect that Sinclair himself came to recognize his good fortune: to live and work for 90 years in a country that honored its principled critics instead of shooting them.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Walt Disney movie Invincible won the box office competition again last weekend, bringing in a gross of $15.2 million.

The film merits attention. More than just a sports movie, Invincible tells the true-life story of Vince Papale, a 30 year old bartender who made the Philadelphia Eagles in an open tryout that then-new Eagles coach Dick Vermeil meant as mostly a publicity stunt and a way of motivating players.

Set during the economically depressed late 1970s among the working class in Rust Belt South Philadelphia, the film presents the theme of hope in several different ways.

First, of course, there is Vince's hope—vague at first but increasingly real—of making the Eagles as a wide receiver and special teams player. (Mark Wahlberg's portrayal of Vince is very solid and affecting.) Second, there is Vince's hope of finding a woman who will love him and stay with him through good times and bad. Third, there is the hope of Vince and his working class brethren that they will find permanent work that pays decently. (The film regularly cuts to brief scenes showing union members on strike, in the bar discussing job cuts, and so on.) Fourth is the hope of Eagles coach Dick Vermeil (excellently played by Greg Kinnear) to bring some pride and intensity to the team. Fifth is the way the exploits of professional football players bring hope to people who follow the team. The film makes a point of telling how the memory of a great play by an Eagles player got Vince's struggling, blue-collar father through 30 years of hard times.

That may be a bit of an exaggeration, but not much. People in difficult conditions, especially men, do often find inspiration from the unlikely successes of sports heroes, especially underdogs. That is what athletic competitions bring most richly to the culture, and it is why we care about them. The moral drama of individuals trying through hard work to overcome others' advantages is a microcosm of American life, and it provides inspiration to all those who care to find it.

That insight is what makes Invincible such an inspiring and impressive film.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 08:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Famed "Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin was killed yesterday when he was stung in the heart by a stingray over which he was swimming in Australia's Great Barrier Reef for a video shoot.

Irwin, 44, apparently frightened the creature by getting to close, bringing on the animal's self-protective attack.

Stingrays have a poisonous, barbed tail which can cause excruciating pain if a person is struck by it, but such attacks are only very rarely fatal. Irwin was struck in the chest, however, and the barb appears to have pierced his heart. It was an extremely rare and strange incident.

In his television programs and theatrical movie, Irwin gained great fame for engaging in close contact with crocodiles, poisonous snakes and spiders, and other dangerous creatures. His continual message was that we should respect nature, understand it, and protect animals from abuse and extinction.

Irwin frequently had highly dangerous encounters with animals, always warning his TV viewers of what the dangers were but telling us we should not be afraid of nature and should understand it and live in harmony with it. Part of his appeal, however, was the daredevil nature of his exploits, and the number of times he placed himself in jeopardy almost guaranteed that he would eventually be hurt or killed during one of these encounters. Yesterday it happened.

Irwin was an immensely likeable personality, and his many fans and admirers will miss him. The message he tried to send, that nature is dangerous but is no threat to us if we let creatures go their own way and don't disturb them, is one that he ironically disobeyed in his work and which eventually killed him.

Nature is dangerous indeed and will often kill indiscriminately if we let her go her own way. The only thing that saves us from wanton destruction is our natural human inclination to harness the forces of nature to our own advantage and increased safety.  Knowledge, reason, and a sense of benevolence are essential to such stewardship, as Irwin continuously pointed out in his life's work. But only through harnessing nature can we live well. That is the message we may best take from Irwin's life and tragic death.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 09:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Looking for something to read over the three-day weekend? I have some writers for you to investigate.

Jon Jermey, a mystery aficionado and moderator of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction Mailing list on Yahoo, has composed a set of humorous rules for the writing of Golden Age detection fiction, the sort of tale that was made immensely popular by authors such as Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, Dorothy Sayers, John Dickson Carr (aka Carter Dickson), Erle Stanley Gardner, H. C. Bailey, Rex Stout, and so many others during the 1920s and  '30s.

The Golden Age, traditional, puzzle mystery style thrived in Britain and America between the two world wars, but was driven out by publishers and critics after World War II when it was arbitrarily decided that a pretense of realism should be paramount in the genre. I say a pretense because the styles that superseded the puzzle form, the hardboiled and police procedural approaches, were just as much romances (in the literary sense) as the puzzle form was. In addition, the importation of ambitious literary devices (as in the non-series novels of Ruth Rendell) to create Serious Crime Fiction did nothing to change the fact that the books were romances at heart. Crime and Punishment, The Bothers Karamazov, and Bleak House are serious, important novels; Road Rage is not.

The Golden Age writers wrote to entertain and enlighten, and they embraced the fact that what they were writing was intended to be fun to read, recognizing that genre fiction could be well worth reading if done well. The works they wrote within their chosen form were every bit as real and true to life as the hardboiled genre (so beloved of left-wing critics) and the police procedural form (which so often descends into a mundane preoccupation with physical evidence that can be read more than one way but which is presented as entirely dispositive).

In recent years, the Golden Age style has found its way to television in series such as Monk, Murder, She Wrote, Midsomer Murders, Nero Wolfe, Psych, and other puzzle-based programs that center their attention on human devices and desires, as opposed to currently popular but fanciful notions about the unambiguity of physical evidence and the desire and ability of the police to pursue all conceivable leads.

With all that in mind, here are Jon's rules regarding the type of crime fiction we both enjoy most: 

Ten rules for writing Golden Age Detective Fiction

1. The victim shall be someone who, despite being universally loathed, has no difficulty in surrounding themselves with friends, relatives, employees and colleagues.

2. The murderer shall kill the victim using a method that a) is clearly murder and b) is available only to a small circle of individuals. Genuinely untraceable murder methods (such as anonymously hiring a hit-man) shall be avoided at all costs.

3. To compensate for their poor choice of murder method, the murderer will  evise an elaborate plan to cast suspicion away from themselves and on to one or more other people. Despite being based on detailed and untested assumptions about human behaviour, this plan shall succeed perfectly.

4. The investigator shall be a bright and wealthy person with an international reputation who is thrilled by the prospect of spending a great deal of their own time and money prying into the sordid affairs of perfect strangers.

5. The aforesaid perfect strangers will not question or resent this intrusion but – after some initial grumbling – will bare their souls to the investigator and reveal compromising secrets that they have never before told anyone.

6. These witnesses and suspects will be perfectly willing to spend their time and money on investigating the death of a person they loathed, including acting in a dramatic reconstruction of the circumstances of the crime, and coming back together at considerable inconvenience for the dénouement.

7. The witnesses and suspects will be able to remember and recount with perfect clarity everything they said and did days, weeks, months or years ago. Any deviation from the truth on the part of a witness shall be a deliberate attempt to deceive and not forgetfulness or simple ignorance.

8. The death of a second or third victim shall not be taken by anyone as a reflection on the competence of the investigator, but rather as an encouraging sign that he or she is getting close to a solution.

9. Low-level police operatives will be well-meaning but slow. Mid-level police operatives will be active but hostile. High-level police operatives will recognise the sterling qualities of the investigator and allow them full access to any evidence gathered by officials.

10. When confronted with their guilt the accused shall not point out the paucity of the evidence against them or the threadbare nature of the detective’s reasoning, but shall instead engage in some dramatic act which makes their capture or demise a certainty.

Yes, all of this is precisely why we enjoy them.

Golden Age detection fiction is an acquired taste—so aquire it! (Use the author links above.)

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 10:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Just FYI, the 2006 MTV Video Music Awards took place in New York City last night. I have no idea who won or even who attended, but I will note, for your edification, that it did indeed happen.

Here's a photo of the performance by Christina Aguilera, who once said, "Beauty is shit!" in a determined effort to prove that she is a singer and not just a pretty hunk of flesh:

I'm convinced.

Here's a photo of Shakira proving that MTV is truly multicultural:

Here's a shot of a band called the Pussycat Dolls, which won an award for something:

For an organization allegedly dedicated to free expression, I sense a certain sameness of theme here. Perhaps I'm just missing something.

And lest you fear that these photos are not truly representative of what went on there last night, we present the following picture of Beyonce performing at the ceremony:

Finally, here's a shot of stylish rap star and big businessman Sean "Diddy" Combs at the ceremony.

Oh, the glamour!

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 02:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner (D) yesterday appeared in a popular on-line video game, the user-created online world Second Life. Wagner James Au reports in New World Notes that staff members of Warner's exploratory campaign staff contacted him to ask if he'd "be interested in interviewing Governor Warner in Second Life."

Au reports on how it came about:

“Well,” Nancy Mandelbrot (RL info here) explains, “we were sitting in our offices one day and kind of goofing around, just geeking out about social technologies, gaming, that sort of thing, as we're wont to do. Someone made a joke about how great it would be if we brought an avatar of Governor Warner into Second Life.

“When we all quit laughing, we kind of looked around and said, ‘Hey, that's not a bad idea.’

“One of Governor Warner's operating principles is to go where the voters are,” she continues, “not make them come to you. We saw how rich an environment [SL] was. I mean, you can sit next to someone's avatar, strike up a conversation, and forget that you're not in the same room. We started to see that in Second Life, people can get together and talk politics with other folks without the obstacles of real life.”

Au, known as Hamlet in Second Life, agreed to interview Warner on the site, "But it’s still a bit vertiginous to be in-world standing there in front of the avatar of a man that leading Democratic Party financier Chris Korge (speaking to Bai) pronounced as, '[T]he one to watch as an outsider in this race. He seems presidential.' ”

The proprietors of the site are understandably excited about Warner's appearance in the online world, and are characterizing it as a history-making event. However, it is nothing of the sort. 

Instead of slaying a gigantic robot or inventing a new kind of staple food, Warner's avatar simply sits in a comfy chair and answers questions about contemporary politics in the former governor's usual smarmy way.

The interview shows conclusively that politicians are politicians whatever the medium, and that empty suits are empty suits even when they're computer-generated.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 09:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The United Kingdom is cracking down on violent pornography, after a campaign led by the family of a 31-year-old teacher killed by a man obsessed with watching websites showing necrophilia.

The Home Office said on Wednesday that it will "make it an offence to own images featuring scenes of extreme sexual violence," according to Reuters:

The new law would outlaw any material that featured violence that was, or appeared to be, life-threatening or likely to result in serious and disabling injury.

This type of material was already illegal in the United Kingdom, but websites were ignoring the law and the government was doing nothing about it: 

Although it is already illegal to distribute or publish such images under the Obscene Publications Act, the material has become increasingly available via the Internet.

"The vast majority of people find these forms of violent and extreme pornography deeply abhorrent," Coaker said.

"Such material has no place in our society but the advent of the Internet has meant that this material is more easily available and means existing controls are being by-passed -- we must move to tackle this."

Presumably, the government will now enforce the law fully and equally. We'll see.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 09:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)