The American Culture

Damages, a legal drama that premiered last week on the FX cable network, follows the now customary FX approach of putting a veneer that is at once glossy and gritty on a basically conventional genre. In addition, like other FX shows, it looks very politically correct on the surface but underneath it all is much smarter than that.

The show initially seems a throwback to the late 1960s and early '70s, with big business figures portrayed as ruthless and indeed murderous, and a crusading attorney, played by Glenn Close, as the heroine. It manages to be both overly talky and absurdly melodramatic, as the grand self-images of several of the central characters threaten to make the show rather silly.

But only to the irredemably naive. 

The show becomes more interesting and sophisticated as the premiere episode progresses. The main innovation is that Close's character, an immensely wealthy tort lawyer whose specialty is class action suits against deep-pocketed businesses, is every bit as scoundrelly as any of the defendants she attacks, and perhaps more so.

The narrative slowly reveals just how manipulative and ruthless she really is, and her actions soon belie her claims of public-spiritedness. She is immensely wealthy, hugely powerful, and ambitious for more of each.

Damages, in short, is no Erin Brockovich, no simple left-wing morality tale in which one side is basically selfless and goodhearted and the other is entirely greedy and irresponsible. Damages is a much more balanced look at its characters' choices, and hence a great deal better in artistic terms.

The show's willingness to depict the moral failings and indeed crimes on both sides of these high-stakes legal games is laudable, and if Damages continues in this direction, viewers might just learn something about how our legal system really works. Now that would be something.

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As in that scene, Bergman was often given to heavy-handedness and pretension, and his films, although often powerful if one is sympathetic to their themes, could be somewhat weak and even risible when the director indulged too greatly in cinematic intellectualism.

Although he made an occasional comedy, such as Smiles of a Summer Night, Bergman's work was in the main fashionably depressive, and even his comedies were labored and rather glum.  He claimed that his upbringing made him so, as Reuters reports:

His cinematic masterpieces often dwelt on sexual confusion, loneliness and the vain search for the meaning of life -- themes he ascribed to a traumatic childhood in which he was beaten by his father, a Lutheran minister.

He told Reuters in a rare interview in 2001 that personal demons tormented and inspired him throughout his life.

"The demons are innumerable, appear at the most inconvenient times and create panic and terror," he said at the time. "But I have learnt that if I can master the negative forces and harness them to my chariot, then they can work to my advantage."

Not surprisingly given this claim, his films reflected an atheism of a particularly astringent and depressing kind, although it is possible to interpret his work as being hostile to religion and not to the concept of God. That seems a bit of a stretch, however.

In large part as a direct result of that attitude, film critics and cineastes greatly admired Bergman, and he received many honors throughout his long career. Among the most celebrated of Bergman's 54 films are The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Smiles of a Summer Night, The Virgin Spring, Persona, Cries and Whispers, Scenes from a Marriage, and Fanny and Alexander.

Bergman was certainly an enormously skilled director, and a healthy person can learn much from his films, about both cinema and life.

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Barry Bonds' 754th home run, one short of Hank Aaron's lifetime record for Major League Baseball, was marred Friday night when, as part of his celebration after hitting the homer, he electrocuted a pit bull.

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One of the most famous lines of movie dialogue of all time is Clint Eastwood's question, "Do you feel lucky?" in Dirty Harry. (Actually, he states it a couple of different ways in that film.)

What most movie fans don't know is that the line is not original to Eastwood's film.

In the 1947 Columbia Pictures Western Gunfighters, starring Randolph Scott (directed by George Waggner from the Zane Grey novel Twin Sombreros), at the climactic showdown between protagonist Brazos Kane (Scott) and secondary villain Orcutt (Forrest Tucker), Kane faces the gunman with his hands raised to shoulder level, poised to reach for his pistol, and says,

"Now, any time you feel lucky."

There's a little fact with which to amaze your friends....

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There's rather too much Lisa for my taste—Lisa represents the cause-y and sentimental sides of the program, which are the aspects I enjoy the least. Similarly, Bart is given an emotional crisis that takes away from his usual humorous role as a force of nature. He's nowhere near as funny here as he was during the show's early years, but Homer replaced Bart as the center of the program a decade and a half ago, so we probably should be used to it by now. But alas, anyway.

The Simpsons family is very much at the center of the narrative, which is to be expected, with the Flanderses having a more central role than usual, which is nice. (Rod and Tod are not given anything amusing to do, however.) In addition,  a few scenes are given over to President Schwarzenegger and his EPA administrator, providing some nice satirical jabs about politics and power.

Unfortunately, all of this means that the townspeople of Springfield don't get nearly as much screen time as they should. It works out to about one funny dialogue line per supporting character. That's an unhappy decision, given that the subsidiary characters are often the funniest thing about the TV program.

There definitely should have been more Ralph Wiggum, in particular. I would certainly be delighted to see The Ralph Wiggum Movie, should such a happy event ever come to pass.

All in all, the movie could have been better, but I'm not complaining. As mentioned earlier, if you like The Simpsons, you should enjoy The Simpsons Movie. That's about all we could have hoped for.

Recommended.

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The best-reviewed movie of the first half of the year was . . .

Ratatouille.

So reports the Rotten Tomatoes website, as noted in the Hollywood Reporter.

The Disney-Pixar computer-animated release directed by Brad Bird (The Incredibles) was joined at the top of the heap by a group of films consisting mostly of critical favorites that did poorly at the box office—with Knocked Up being the major exception.

The worst-reviewed movie was Because I Said So, and other critical disasters included The Number 23, Premonition, and The Reaping, suggesting critics have had about enough of the supernatural genre.

Also predictably coming in for critical disdain were wacky comedies such as Norbit, Are We Done Yet?, and Code Name: The Cleaner.

The full top and bottom ten lists are available in the Hollywood Reporter story.

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Not all rock stars are  mindless sybarites. Brian May, the superb guitarist for the hugely popular 1970's and '80s rock group Queen, is about to finish work on his Ph.D. in astrophysics.

The sixty-year-old musician-scholar suspended his studies in the early 1970s when Queen became an international success. May's guitar was as important a part of the band's sound as Mercury's voice, although the group could not survive the loss of the latter when Mercury died in 1991. May continued to record music, mostly on a variety of solo albums that didn't set the world on fire. Meanwhile, he continued work on his doctorate, and now plans to submit his thesis within a couple of weeks. 

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"Bubba," a regular reader of this site, has sent us his thoughts on the new TNT TV program Saving Grace, in a comment on my article on that show and AMC-TV's Mad Men. I think readers will benefit from Bubba's analysis, so I append it here with gratitude to their thoughtful author.

Sam: I was wondering whether you would review Saving Grace and what your opinion would be.

I looked at the show from a few angles (from the couch, from the kitchen grabbing a snack, from the recliner)and generally liked what I saw. For what its worth, I offer a few of my observations.

a. I was pleasantly surprised at the manner in which Christianity and the professed believers in the show were depicted. Holly Hunter's character has a brother who is a Roman Catholic priest. He was not depicted in the typical Robin Williams-like characterization, but was depicted as a sincere, honest person, who had been trying to push and drag his sister back onto the straight and narrow for a long time, and was therefore having a difficult time believing his sister's tale about meeting an tobacco-chewing angel by the name of Earl.

Likewise, Laura San Giacomo's character "Rhetta Rodriguez", another believer, was also not depicted as the usual whacked-out nut-job.

In addition, the awesome love of God and the incredible Gospel message that He wants to give us a second chance, that death and destruction is His "strange work, ...His alien task" (Isaiah 28:21) was repeated in an understated, yet clearly unsubtle manner.

b. Holly Hunter's "Grace" portrayed a life-like character who struggled with the desire to change her current lifestyle, which left her sad, depressed and unfulfilled, for one that was God-pleasing. When the angel Earl wrapped his wings around her and she felt the love of God, she seemed to really want that for her life, however, the old lifestyle was comfortable and had such a strong hold on her. Grace struggled when faced with the temptations of her old lifestyle, a fair dramatization of St. Paul's lament in Romans 7:15 "...I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do...".

d. The plot of the show, unlike the most recent episodes of "Monk", had a few plot twists and turns. For example, the character of "Leon Cooley" the death row inmate, portrayed by Bokeem Woodbine, who was the man Grace ran down and killed with her car. Depending on the writing of future episodes, the possibility of a little mental stimulation while I am eating my snacks will bring me back at least for a few more shows.

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The Adam Sandler comedy I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry was the top U.S. box office attraction this past weekend, as expected. The film brought in $34 million, edging out the previous week's top draw, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, by $2 million.

It will be interesting to see whether Chuck and Larry can sustain its appeal. Adam Sandler  has strong box office appeal when appearing in silly comedies, and this film had the additional draw of the curiosity factor, as its subject matter, homosexual marriage, is in the news and seems to promise rich ground for humor.

Unfortunately, the film tries to be all things to everybody and hence should please hardly anybody.

It starts out with a barrage of humor strongly dependent on the recognition of the true oddness of homosexuality. It's pure incongruity humor, as Chuck and Larry act like husband and . . . husband, and that part of the movie is effective. It's meant to be funny, and it is funny.

But of course the filmmakers couldn't simply present such a film unadulterated in the current cultural environment of aggressive support for homosexuality. Hence the second half of the film constitutes a boring and mindless morality play meant to convince viewers that homosexuality is something to be seen as equal to heterosexuality, not just to be tolerated but to be accepted with enthusiasm.

The humor of the first half of the film, of course, is thoroughly muted in this part.

These immorality plays never work, either logically or aesthetically, as the call for people to embrace a rigid standard of not having standards just doesn't make any sense.

One cannot imagine the teenage boys (of all ages) who make up Sandler's audience will enjoy this aspect of the film, and hardly anybody else will enjoy the first half.

I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry would have succeeded if the filmmakers had called up the courage to make it one thing or another.

It would have been a critical success if they had made it openly pro-homosexual.

And it would have been a box-office success if they had made it unapologetically funny.

What it ends up being is something that won't really please anybody.

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Summer has become the main season for cable TV networks to premiere new series and specials, as the broadcast networks give themselves over to reruns and game shows on the assumption that nobody wants to watch television on warm summer nights.

That's probably a good bet—and certainly a good thing if true—and it has a further benefit in that the cable networks tend to be a little more creative than the broadcast majors in the kinds of series they offer. Chasing a smaller audience allows them to be more adventurous in what they'll try—and sometimes they succeed. Two good examples are AMC-TV's Mad Men and TNT's Saving Grace, both of which premiered in the past few days.

Mad Men, which began last week and runs Wednesday nights on American Movie Classics, was created by a former writer for HBO's The Sopranos and tells the stories of late 1950s-early '60s advertising people in New York City, the "mad men" of the title. The program shows a critical time in America's transition from a morals-based culture to one centering on personal pleasure and fulfillment.

The consumer culture really began at the start of the twentieth century, and was strongly in place by the 1920s. But it was only after World War II that the pursuit of pleasure was openly touted as the purpose behind life in America. The American advertising industry quickly learned to pitch its appeals directly to the sense, bypassing the reasoning process altogether whenever possible, and television made such an approach even more effective than printed media had allowed.

Mad Men depicts this transition vividly, with the people who led these changes placed right at the center of the story. It's well worth watching, and watching critically.

The consequences of the transition from a rule-based society to a pleasure-oriented one are vividly depicted in Saving Grace, which premiered tonight on Turner Network Television. In this program, Holly Hunter gives a superb performance as Grace Hanadarko, a cynical, sensual, tormented Oklahoma City police detective.

Hunter shows an impressive emotional range in this role. Grace drinks too much, sleeps around (presented in extremely vivid detail in the opening episode), flouts authority, uses foul language, and generally acts in a thoroughly trashy way. After killing a pedestrian while driving drunk, however, she sinks to her knees in despair and asks God to help her—not at all sincerely, as she does not believe in God, but desperately and without hope.

God does answer, however, in the form of a disheveled, tobacco-chewing angel named Earl (played by Leon Rippy of HBO's Deadwood). Grace is understandably appalled and unwilling to believe in this intervention, but her subsequent investigation proves it to be real. Nonetheless, she remains resistant to the angel's ministrations and wishes only to go on with life pursuing her own will as always. This is both admirably realistic and dramatically smart.

Yet Grace really does want to be good, and Hunter and the show's other creators depict that struggle admirably, with sympathy, understanding, good sense, and humor. The show is about more than just one woman's struggle; it depicts the struggles we all go through, to greater or lesser degrees, in a culture that says we can do anything we want while we live in a world where that is anything but true—and wouldn't be good if it were.

Mad Men: Recommended.

Saving Grace: Recommended.

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The many Americans who think atheistic, socialistic Europe is the greatest place in the world and the United States is a putrid backwater populated overwhelmingly by hicks and weirdos will be awfully dismayed by the latest news from Europe. The Wall Street Journal reports that the Continent has increasingly been getting religion, especially of the Christian variety:

After decades of secularization, religion in Europe has slowed its slide toward what had seemed inevitable oblivion. There are even nascent signs of a modest comeback. Most church pews are still empty. But belief in heaven, hell and concepts such as the soul has risen in parts of Europe, especially among the young, according to surveys. Religion, once a dead issue, now figures prominently in public discourse.

God's tentative return to Europe has scholars and theologians debating a hot question: Why? Part of the reason, pretty much everyone agrees, is an influx of devout immigrants. Christian and Muslim newcomers have revived questions relating to faith that Europe thought it had banished with the 18th-century Enlightenment. . . .

Some scholars and Christian activists, however, are pushing a more controversial explanation: the laws of economics. As centuries-old churches long favored by the state lose their monopoly grip, Europe's highly regulated market for religion is opening up to leaner, more-aggressive religious "firms." The result, they say, is a supply-side stimulus to faith.

This explanation is supported by a wide variety of evidence, including the fact that the rise of religious belief is manifesting in rapid growth of churches not supported by the government in countries where almost nobody attends the state-supported churches  and most of those who do so are elderly:

Consider the scene on a recent Sunday at Stockholm's Hedvig Eleonara Church, a parish of the Church of Sweden, a Lutheran institution that until 2000 was an official organ of the Swedish state. Fewer than 40 people, nearly all elderly, gathered in pews beneath a magnificent 18th-century dome. Seven were church employees. The church seats over 1,000.

The big reason there are so few people in the pews is that many of the people leading the state-supported churches are not Christians, they are government bureaucrats enjoying a cushy, easy sinecure:

Hedvig Eleonara has three full-time salaried priests and gets over $2 million each year though a state levy. Annika Sandström, head of its governing board, says she doesn't believe in God and took the post "on the one condition that no one expects me to go each Sunday." The church scrapped Sunday school last fall because only five children attended.

Just a few blocks away, however, an American-style evangelical church is thriving, the story notes.

As in the United States, a lot of these new European churches are rather eccentric and hold some doctrines of dubious theological merit, but the presence of more sensible and grounded churches means that Europeans who want the real thing are increasingly able to find it. And increasing numbers of people there want to do so.

[Thanks to David Theroux of the C. S. Lewis Society for calling our attention to this article.]

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I am one who does not. For some reason these award shows and the actual choosing of winners hold absolutely no interest for me, except of course in my capacity as a scientist of social diseases, I mean social phenomena.

Probably my main dispute with these things is that the awards are so clearly not based on true merit, but given that it's reasonable to disagree over what merits praise or condemnation in a cultural artifact, I suppose that's a lost cause.

Nonetheless, it always gets my goat when blatantly insane and disease-bearing rubbish garners praise because it fits a particular political-cultural agenda, especially given that the agenda thus supported appears to me to be so toxically stupid and damaging as to merit not awards but a public horsewhipping or the pillory.

So, just a few brief thoughts on this year's nominees, and then we can each go to bed with a cold compress on our forehead.

1. There were 463 nominations overall. Hence, anyone in the industry who did not get a nomination must feel like a real ass.
2. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee had the most nominations, with fifteen. According to the HBO website, the TV movie "powerfully explores the tragic impact that the United States' westward expansion had on American Indian culture, and the economic, political and social pressures that motivated it." I haven't seen the film, but it sounds perfect for Emmy recognition. I'll take a glance at it when the oppo arises, however, as the book on which the film is based can be seen as having an interesting and important angle: the observation that it was government, not white people in general, that was responsible for the outrageous depredations against the American Indians during the 19th and early 20th centuries. As the Wikipedia notes, the book by Dee Brown "chronicles the changing and sometimes conflicting attitudes both of American authorities such as General Custer and Indian chiefs, particularly Geronimo, Red Cloud, Sitting Bull, and Crazy Horse, and their different attempts to save their peoples, by peace, war, or retreat." Of course, Hollywood people and other repugnant leftists see the treatment of American Indians as an ethnic/racial issue, but the real truth behind it is that it's just another example of democide, the tendency of governments to run roughshod over people and even institute mass killings if they deem it necessary to their plans. It will be interesting to see if the movie reflects this. Given the civil-libertarian leanings of producer Dick Wolf (the  various Law and Order series), this seems a distinct possibility.
   
3. The Sopranos grabbed fifteen nominations. Of course.
4. Not a single major nomination for Friday Night Lights. That is an enormous pity, for the show could really use a boost. It's one of the best things on TV, but most Hollywood people are in Hollywood in the first place because they couldn't get recognition from their high-school peers in the prom-royalty voting and on the athletic fields, so of course they would be unlikely to appreciate the great merits of this superb program. There's so much more to the show than just football, however, and if only they could get past the central subject matter, those who have little to no interest in football would find that they still can enjoy the show.
5. There really is an enormous amount of talent in Hollywood. If only they could be better educated about what is good and healthy for human beings and what is not. Well, that's what we're here for, and baby steps are better than nothing at all.
   

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The producers of the highly rated and critically acclaimed Fox medical-mystery drama House are already facing the same dilemma as the producers of Monk (see entry immediately below), as the Fox program enters its fourth year. The producers are initiating major changes to keep the program from going stale.

Season three included another of those annoying "House gets his comeuppance but doesn't learn anything or change at all" story arcs, this time with a police detective (played by David Morse) hounding him with drug abuse charges. It was boring, stupid, and unnecessary, but at least the producers had the good sense to drop it after a few weeks. In addition, the story showed the stupidity of many of our drug laws and the stubborn asininity of the people who enforce them.

We should give the show's producers credit for trying to breathe new life into the program in only its third season.

And there was more change to come. In the final episode of the season, all three of House's interns left his team, voluntarily or otherwise, although whether the departures are permanent shall remain a mystery for the time being. The producers have signed five new actors and actresses to serve as whipping boys and girls for the irascible medical genius during the next season. The new season begins September 25.

E! Online reports that the performers have been signed for eight episodes, but that has yet to be confirmed.

Whether the scheme works in the ratings wars, of course, will probably determine who stays and who goes and whether any of the previous interns returns.

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As I mentioned in my post last week on the season premieres of USA Network mainstays Monk and Psych, TV series tend to go a bit stale during their fifth and sixth seasons, and smart producers combat the problem by making significant changes while retaining the show's most appealing aspects.

I stated my hope that Monk would concentrate more on the mystery aspects of the show and less on the kooky character stuff, while of course retaining the core of the concept, Monk's eccentricities.

Unfortunately, the season premiere episode, while amusing and watchable, went in the opposite direction, emphasizing a goofy character played by comedienne Sarah Silverman.

It was not a good choice, as both Monk and the mystery receded into the background, and the narrative drive of the episode was consequently very weak. The producers really must return to the show's original blend of strong mysteries investigated by engaging characters, and I for one would appreciate some progress on Monk solving the murder of his late wife Trudy. That plot element has dragged on far too long. The producers would be well advised to get that done and move on.

Even more importantly, they should look into the great Ed Hoch's huge catalog of mystery stories written over the past half-century—nearly a thousand stories in all, and the vast majority including strong puzzle plots. The producers of McMillan and Wife used some of Hoch's stories in their 1970s program, and the results were very good indeed.

The producers of Monk would do well to follow suit and bear in mind my dictum that the best thing about a mystery series is the mysteries.

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The film is indeed "darker" than the previous ones, as many critics have noted, but it's certainly enjoyable even by young children. In addition to the sheer imaginative inventiveness evident in the concept and settings, as has been widely noted, the book and film series have benefited from themes that resonate strongly with their target audiences.

Children, for example, can easily embrace the idea of Harry having a different set of real parents who are much more interesting than the ones with whom he is living, as that is believed to be a common childhood fantasy.

Older kids, for their part, can relate to the series' reification of the typical adolescent feeling of being misunderstood and possessing great powers and knowledge of which other people, especially adults (muggles, one and all), are unaware.

For adults, political and spiritual themes are particularly prominent in the present installment. The prevalence of political corruption and power-greed in the wizards' world is all too reminiscent of today's political culture in the United States, and the vulgarity, rampant irresponsibility, and bias of the wizards' newpapers are all too familiar to U.S. and British audiences. In addition, the takeover of the Hogwarts school by "progressive" educators (with the wizarding equivalent of the "new math" and "whole language learning" and the institution of a plethora of behavioral regulations like contemporary political correctness codes) would be comical if the real-world counterpart were not so tragic.

In addition, the film has very evocative religious overtones. In its strenuous insistence on the issue of whether the wizards believe in the existence of Lord Voldemort, the film evokes the waning belief in the devil among self-professed Christians that took place during the twentieth century, and it shows the importance that such belief has in motivating religious believers to fight for their faith.

Those are some strong themes for a fantasy story to bear—but perhaps their very power means that this sort of fanciful environment, far removed from our everyday concerns, is particularly suited to such contemplation.

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With "how to" shows being so popular on television, it was only a matter of time before somebody created a narrative fiction form of the series. The new program is exactly that, right down to having a voice-over narrator fill us in on how it all works.

What "it" is that the show teaches us is how to dispense of confidence tricksters, mobsters, and other such miscreants. 

The series tells the story of Michael Westen (Jeffrey Donovan), an international spy who is suddenly blacklisted by the U.S. agency handling him (the "burn notice" of the show's excessively obscure title) and set adrift in Miami with no money and no way of making a legitimate living, his identity having been destroyed by his erstwhile employers. Under the watchful eye of the FBI, Westen tries to find out who put the burn notice on him and why, in hopes of having it reversed.

In the meantime, Westen helps people who are in trouble and cannot get help from the authorities. In the most recent episode, he protected a single mom from a Colombian drug trafficker who wanted her dead so that she could not testify against him in an assault trial. In the previous episode, he foiled some identity thieves who were preying on old people.

Westen uses his spy training to defeat the villains, all of whom are apt to resort to violence when their schemes are threatened. Westen, as a former spy, is very skilled at both armed and unarmed combat, and uses it well when necessary, but his real gift is at planning. In each episode, he creates a scheme that lures the villains into not only incriminating themselves but also ensuring an additional benefit.

In the case of the drug trafficker, who is directly responsible for numerous deaths, Westen's counter scheme results in the drug dealer's execution by the dealer's own associates. In the case of the identity thieves, Westen tricks their leader into providing him with their bank account numbers so that he can clean out their accounts and return the money to those from whom it was stolen.

That episode, "Identity," is strongly reminiscent of Erle Stanely Gardner's excellent Lester Leith stories. That's a huge compliment, and Burn Notice refreshes the spy genre by giving it some of the panache and optimism evident in the Leith stories. Donovan, last seen in the USA Network series Touching Evil, appears much more comfortable in this role than in the previous program, and his ability at comedy is used to great effect here. Gabrielle Anwar, Bruce Campbell, and Sharon Gless anchor the supporting cast with strong comic performances that also work well in the dramatic moments.

But the real attraction of the show is the plots. Combining the complexity of the schemes in the old Mission Impossible TV series with the benevolent, sticking-up-for-the-underdog spirit of The Equalizer, the plots are pleasing both to the aesthetic sense and the moral one.

The program's prominent theme of the breakdown of legitimate authority in American society is a perennial one, having provided the foundation for vigilante fictions for more than a century. Its particular, unusual mix of old and new elements makes Burn Notice both new and interesting.

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Tonight brings the season premieres of the mystery-comedy shows Monk and Psych on USA Network. I've written extensively on thse two programs, on this site and elsewhere, and am looking forward to the new season of each. (See articles here, here, here, here, and here, for more info on these two programs.)

It will be interesting to gauge the quality of the new season's episodes. Psych, now going into its second year of production, was pretty good at the beginning and got better as the season went on. I think we can expect continued improvement.

Monk, on the other hand, is now going into its sixth season. Most fiction TV series start getting a bit stale by the fifth year, and Monk did seem slightly less inspired last season. To overcome that problem, series tend to change some characters and major situations around the fifth and sixth year.

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When I first saw the ads and trailers for the new movie License to Wed, it appeared to me that there was an anti-Christian agenda behind it, with Robin Williams playing a minister, Reverend Frank, who puts a young couple through a series of "tests" to ensure that they are indeed ready to be married.

It seemed to me that Williams's character was intended to be shown as a hypocrite with perverse, voyeuristic impulses and a strong strain of sexual jealousy.

Williams has long made evident his hatred of Christianity and Christians, so it seemed obvious to me that this was not going to be a nuanced portrait of the religious implications of marriage, much less a positive portrayal of the importance and sanctity of marriage.

As a result, I put it on my list of movies to avoid watching in the theater even for scientific purposes, and perhaps catch it on cable TV down the road.

It appears that my initial impression was correct.

As the Christian Science Monitor critic reports, the film does indeed have the nasty subtext I saw in the previews:

Aided by a creepy pint-sized kid (Josh Flitter) whom he is mentoring in the Ministers For Tomorrow program, Rev. Frank puts Sadie and Ben through a series of rigorous test apparently designed to test their love.. . . .

On the surface, Frank is simply preparing the couple for the worst, but in fact he seems intent on breaking up the engagement. His bedchamber espionage is, at best, smarmy— the little kid joins in on the eavesdropping—and so is his barely suppressed ogling of Sadie. Director Ken Kwapis and his screenwriters don't seem to be aware of what they are perpetrating here. They want us to embrace Frank as a lovable eccentric who wants only the best for Ben and Sadie. He's a cutup with a collar—a do-gooder.

But Williams makes this impossible, the critic notes: 

As for Frank, his would-be good-heartedness is belied by Williams's performance, which is full of tics and sneers. Williams is too sharp a comic not to know what's going on here but the script requires him to be lovable. So he ends up trying to have it both ways: He's a huggy bear with sleazeball vibes.

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At least two companies have pulled their ads from the upcoming July 25 premiere of the Black Entertainment Television (BET) program Hot Ghetto Mess which is based on the popular website of the same name.

Expressing the same attitude as the website, the program will show viewer-submitted videos of stupid things people do, with an emphasis on the black community. It will also feature comedy, pictures, music, and man-on-the-street interviews to "shine a spotlight on prevalent images in pop culture and examine what role they play in American lifestyle," as the BET web page for the program puts it. It will feature, according to the BET site, "shaking booties, thug life, baby-mama drama and pimped-out high schoolers."

In short, in showing the stupidity and ignorance of many Americans, Hot Ghetto Mess will do precisely what a good many shows directed at a broad audience do, but will be directed toward black Americans.

Naturally, this has resulted in a huge amount of criticism toward the website and the forthcoming TV program. State Farm Insurance and Home Depot have decided that the pressure is too much and have dropped their sponsorship. Other sponsors remain in place at present.

Black Americans tend to have a rule that it is unwise to air their dirty linen in front of whites, lest opinions toward all blacks be diminished. This is an important and valid concern. However, people who do not engage in regular, honest self-criticism find it all to easy to fall into lazy habits and waste their lives. It is this that the website and TV program are intended to convey.

The series will consist of six episodes and is hosted by Charlie Murphy of Comedy Central's The Chappelle Show. The Hot Ghetto Mess website was founded by a 34-year-old black lawyer who calls on the site for "a new era of self-examination" among black Americans. In a news release, BET said the program is meant to challenge and inspire "viewers to improve themselves and their communities."

The website makes this abundantly clear. The slogan on home page is "We Got to Do Better."Items such as "Mess of the Month," "Celebrity Mess," and "Playboys", "Queens," "On the Town," and "Just Sad" document the myriad of stupid and wrong things all too many people in the black community do. Quotations from great black Americans on each page challenge blacks to reach their full potential to do good in this world.

A page called "Do Better" challenges black Americans to do exactly that, and provides some guidance as to how to accomplish positive change.

The page featuring a "Token White" further demonstrates that the site creators' interest is in personal character, not color. The TV program will include people of all ethnicities, according to BET representatives.

The page titled "Not Ghetto" likewise places the emphasis on character instead of colr. The current page, an item on charitable work by the singer-musician Alicia Keys, exemplifies the site's concerns. It praises her for her work to raise money to help those afflicted by AIDS in Africa, but it also criticizes her for too often going out in public looking like a slob. For the "Hot Ghetto Mess" producers, actions speak loudly, and everyday ones are, if anything, more important than grand gestures.

That is an attitude that is most likely to help build character in oneself and one's neighbors, and it is one that smart business people should support, not run away from.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 09:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The mega-budget sci-fi action film Transformers hit theaters this week as the top box-office attraction of all time, according to media reports. The film took in $156.2 million during its first week, the studio reported.

It deserves it. Transformers has raised a good deal of attention for its giant-robot characters, but the real strength of the film is the human element.

Transformers director Michael Bay is known for his skill at creating over-the-top action sequences that defy logic but still impress the senses, but his real strength is in creating characters we really care about and then testing their courage and moral strength.

What is even more important, I think, about Bay's films is that his characters rise to the occasion. Bay is no cynic, and his protagonists, although raffish and full of human flaws as the rest of us, are basically good and want to do what's right. They also tend to have a good deal of fun while doing so, as in Bad Boys and Bad Boys II.

As in those two films, along with Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, and Transformers, the image of the protector is strong in Bay's films. Evildoers threaten, and protectors always arise to save those who aren't able to do so themselves. Bay's films create a straightforward moral universe in which some people want to exploit others, and other people step forward to try to stop them—and Transformers is more explicit and direct about this than in any previous Bay film.

Self-sacrifice is a powerful element of most of Bay's films, and is a central aspect of Armageddon. It is also a critical theme of Transformers, where one of the "autobots" of the film's title offers itself for a Christ-like death that will save the human race from the evil Decepticons.

As in Armageddon, The Rock, and, if I recall correctly, most of his other films, the writers also intersperse religious notions through the story, as in the instance noted above, which constitutes a central element of the plot. In fact, the entire central battle between Autobots and Decepticons, with its great, powerful beings battling over the very existence of humankind, repeatedly evokes notions of angels and demons engaged in spiritual warfare.

Bay's films tend to intersperse comical scenes of American bourgeois domestic life among the action sequences. This serves an important thematic purpose, in showing precisely what the good characters are fighting for and what the evildoers are trying to destroy. It also helps us to understand them better, and thereby identify with them and feel more emotional involvement in the film.

In Transformers Bay seems to take special care to provide even more of these scenes than usual, and it is a very wise decision indeed.

Sure, audiences will come for the Autobots and Decepticons, but what really makes Transformers interesting and effective is the human beings at the center of the story.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 06:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

In an article ostensibly considering the literary legacy of science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein, John Derbyshire veers off into an interesting discussion of the current American culture. Derbyshire's conclusion is that a great separation of American society has taken place since the 1950s:

America has always had elites, of course, and we have always had an underclass of some kind. Both seem to be much bigger now than they were then, though. Furthermore, if you subtracted off the elites and the underclass in Heinlein’s time, what was left—the great middle—was far more homogenous then than it is now, its members much better acquainted with each other. The social distance between (say) a doctor and (say) a cop, was smaller then than it is now

I have said in the past that the great change in American society and culture actually began shortly after World War II, and that the 1950s were in fact the leading edge of this change (which commonly is erroneously attributed to the 1960s), but I agree that the broad outline of Derbyshire's account is true.

After mentioning this Great Disruption, to use Francis Fukuyama's term, Derbyshire quotes a note Derb wrote on NRO's The Corner blog, to explain why this change occurred:

The main reason the 1950s looks so good to so many of us is that in moving from the old order to the new, we lost much of our civilizational confidence. You may say that that confidence was misplaced, or an illusion; you may even say that it was obnoxious, and good riddance to it; and you may be right on all points. There is something awfully attractive about civilizational confidence though. Like innocence, once gone, it can't be recaptured. Those of us who recall it shouldn't be blamed for missing it.

Derb traces this to a loss of connections among the "little platoons" of society: 

the "social capital" Heinlein describes—the neighborliness and mutual assistance, the networks of clubs, associations, friendly societies, and volunteer organizations that hold communities together—was a key underpinning of that civilizational confidence.

With those ties greatly diminished, he says, the U.S. elites have been able to rush in an further divide the masses to conquer them more thoroughly.

Derbyshire does not say, however, what tore those ties asunder. I would say that government did so, from the Progressive incursions of the first couple of decades of the twentieth century, bolstered by the nationalization of many government functions during World War I, and then, after the brief respite of the 1920s, an increasingly aggressive takeover of all things by the national government during the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War.

It is this inexorable increase of government that destroyed the natural bonds among the American people.

Derb accurately describes the current situation:

Our political system is now run by the Big People for their own interests. If they ever deign to notice the Little People, it is with disdain and contempt. . . .

This indifference, this disdain and contempt, is mostly hidden behind smokescreens of bogus “compassion” and ostentatious, self-serving religiosity — especially around election time. Elites know that when their group protectiveness shows itself openly through the smoke, it is greeted with widespread public disgust.

He accurately identifies the model for this kind of government: the banana republics of Latin America: 

As the separating-out of our society continues—as we get ever closer to the Latin American model—our rulers will no longer need to bother with smokescreens. They will be able to attend to their self-interest undisturbed, as the elites to our south do, bribing or outwitting the commoners if discontent rises to uncomfortable levels—or perhaps, like Mexico’s current elite, just exporting them.

Without identifying the basic cause of the problem, however, Derb cannot prescribe any remedy, and the entire piece evidences a powerful pessimism. He appears to believe that the whole process was simply inevitable and its continuation all but immutable.

It is not. We can turn this around by resisting further incursions of government into our lives and turning back those that have accumulated over the past century. That means a return to the classical liberal, English Whig values that the founders of this nation established as our natural political order.

This is entirely within our power, and if we fail to accomplish it, we have no one to blame but ourselves. Not the elites, not history, nothing. Just ourselves.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 10:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The BBC TV program Mayo, now showing on BBC America as The Gil Mayo Mysteries, is an exemnplary TV mystery program. Based on a series of novels which I have not read, the show has engaging detectives and a little romance, and is light on blood and gore and explicit violence but strong on creating plausible suspects with interesting and revealing motives.

It also has a nice central mystery: whether police homicide detective team leader DI Gil Mayo, an amusingly literate and in fact pedantic character played well by Alistair McGowan, will get back together romantically with his new subordinate, DS Alex Jones (Jessica Oyelowo), an appealingly good-natured, comely, and stylish detective who was Mayo's first love many years before.

The four-member detective team engages in the sort of comical, character-based byplay that makes NCIS: Naval Criminal Investigation Service so enjoyable, and their characterizations are kept appropriately light, without the kind of miasmic delving into the detectives' past that mars so many TV and book mystery series.

Given the lightness of tone and straightforward narrative drive, American audiences should find that the program crosses the pond very well. It's definitely not pretentious Masterpiece Theater stuff.

A recent episode set in a working-class neighborhood and taking place in part in a beauty shop should remind Americans of many places in our larger cities, and the salon milieu is highly reminiscent of similar working-class East Coast locales we've seen both in real life and in U.S. TV programs. The episode also includes some highly comic scenes in which DS Jones gets a makeover in the frilly '80s floozy style popular among the neighborhood's denizens. It's a very effective bit of social comedy and fully understandable for U.S. audiences.

BBC America shows two episodes each Friday night beginning at 8 EDT.

Recommended.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 04:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I am by no means an unalloyed admirer of British Conservative Party leader David Cameron, who seems rather too much of a trimmer, in my view, and whose self-description as a "modern compassionate conservative" is a remarkably tin-eared characterization and confirms the impression that he is dedicated more to gaining power than to pressing any classical-liberal or modern-conservative principles.

Particularly off-putting are his support for the UK's inept National Health Service, legal recognition of homosexual "marriage," the fictional concern over catastrophic manmade global warming, unlimited immigration, nation-building in foreign countries, and his excessive willingness to allow the EU to run roughshod over British sovereignty.

Nonetheless, Cameron is better than his Labour counterparts, as his statements about economic policy have been oriented strongly toward freer markets and lower taxes. In addition, he opposes the nation's absurd and unjustifiable fox-hunting ban.

Also very sensible are Cameron's recent comments on the social responsibilities of the media, and what should or should not be done about toxic cultural outpourings. Our friend Bill Evans, a U.S. recording industry figure currently studying in the UK, saw Cameron speak on the subject yesterday and was suitably impressed:

I was at the annual BPI convention yesterday in London, and UK Conservative Party leader David Cameron spoke to us. I can't judge a politician from one speech, but I really liked what he had to say.

"You, the recording industry, have asked Parliament to pass a law on your behalf. We will. Here's what I want in exchange: stop producing music that promotes a broken society, especially for young people." 

He then described our cultural and moral failings from the compassionate perspective of a liberal, and the bottom-line fix-it attitude of a conservative. I realize that sounds very generic, but we all follow politics, and we all know the BS talking points buzzwords that politicians use. This guy was very specific, and very real about what he thought the problems were, what the solutions were, and how we (the music industry) should play a part in fixing it. He thoughtfully addressed the arguments against this thinking, adding that government control and censorship were not the solution.

I only hope that we, the industry, listen.

I'm not pleased with Cameron's proposal to extend copyright terms even further, as far too much material is unavailable today because the people who own copyright don't think it worth publishing but will charge absurd, impossible rates for anyone wanting to distribute old books, movies, TV shows, music, etc. That turns on its head the very premise behind copyright, which was meant to ensure that such works were widely distributed, not held off the market by greedy green-eyeshade types.

On the other hand, Cameron's comments about the nature of the current UK culture—which apply equally well to contemporary American culture—are quite accurate:

We’ve got a real cultural problem in our country; and it’s affecting the way young people grow up.

It’s an anti-learning culture where it’s cool to bunk off, it’s cool to be bad, it’s cool not to try.

This affects what’s happening on our streets and with our kids.

Educational achievement and aspiration is pushed aside by the dream of instant material gain.

Cameron called on the industry to take responsibility for their wares. Government censorship, he said, is not the solution, but personal and corporate responsibility can heal the nation's culture:

Put simply, we have to acknowledge that all of us—as politicians, as teachers, as parents, as television producers, video game manufacturers and yes, as record industry executives—need to understand our specific responsibility in not promoting a culture of low academic aspiration or violence but instead to inspire young kids with a positive vision of how to lead their life.

That’s why I am not calling for censorship, legislation or the banning of content.

I am calling on you to show leadership, exercise your power responsibly and to use your judgement.

Of course, such a "call" has no teeth whatsoever, but Cameron is correct to observe that the national government is not the proper sphere for remedying cultural ills. Parents, communities, and people in the culture business are the ones who have the right and responsibility to regulate what comes into our homes. Yelling "freedom of speech" solves nothing, and national-government intervention usually does more harm than good (and is largely unconstitutional in the United States).

It is incumbent upon the "little platoons" and the invisible hand to step up the hard work of remedying our cultural ills.

Cameron's speech is available online here. 

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 01:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Fairness Doctrine, which allows Congress and the Federal Communications Commission to interfere in broadcasters' programming decisions, was established in the early 1930s and finally cast aside during the Reagan administration. Since then, media diversity has blossomed impressively, notably through the proliferation of talk radio programs.

This increase in diversity proves that the original point of the Fairness Doctrine was government control over political speech, and that it was quite effective. Little wonder, then, that Democrats tried to reinstate it in the current congressional session. Fortunately, their effort was soundly defeated, as James Gattuso reports at National Review Online:

Victory was fast and shockingly easy. The battle over the Fairness Doctrine ended last week when the House of Representatives voted 309-115 against allowing the Federal Communications Commission to re-impose the regulation on broadcasters. The vote almost certainly means that the long-dead rule will not be revived anytime soon. That’s good news. But the celebrations should be tempered: the real battle over media regulation is still to come, and won’t involve the words “Fairness Doctrine.”

Given its manifest effectiveness at suppressing free speech, it should not surpise us that a gang of leftist Democrats tried to reinstate the doctrine during this session. It was defeated when Republicans went on the offensive in correctly characterizing it as a blatant assault on freedom of speech, which it obviously was.

All of this means that the Democrats will return to the issue with much less obvious suppressive measures, as Gattuso points out: 

The odd Dennis Kucinich aside, few on the Left ever seriously thought the Fairness Doctrine could be reinstituted. Last week’s win was mostly over undefended ground. But the Left has been very active in promoting a number of much more subtle “reforms” meant to alter what broadcasters do and say.

These approaches were detailed in report jointly released last month by the liberal advocacy groups Free Press and the Center for American Progress. Entitled “The Structural Imbalance of Talk Radio,” many conservative commentators mistakenly assumed the report endorsed the Fairness Doctrine. Far from it: The authors dismiss the doctrine as “ineffective.”

Instead, they propose an alternative agenda, including:

• Strengthened limits on how many radio stations on firm can own, locally and nationally;
• Shortening broadcast license terms;
• Requiring radio broadcasters to regularly show they are operating in the “public interest;”
• Imposing a fee on broadcasters who fail to meet these “public interest obligations” with the funding to go to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

The goal of the reforms is the same as the Fairness Doctrine: to reduce the influence of conservative talk radio. Limiting ownership, the authors believe, will eliminate many of the owners who favor conservative causes. Public interest requirements can be defined almost any way a regulator wants—up to and perhaps even beyond that required by the old Fairness Doctrine. And the proposed fee provides regulators with a quite effective stick to compel compliance—as well as to direct funds to more ideologically compatible public broadcasters.

As Barry Goldwater would have noted, eternal vigilance is required in this fight to keep our media relatively free.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 11:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Disney/Pixar movie Ratatouille led in box office take over the weekend but opened weaker than expected. The animated film took in $47.2 million in its first three days, handily outdrawing Live Free or Die Hard at $33.2 million, but that still constituted one of the weakest openings for a Disney/Pixar film.

Ratatouille is still expected to be very successful at the box office over time, in that its early numbers were held down by the fact that it opened only two days after the hotly anticipated Bruce Willis action film and just before today's nationwide release of Transformers. The previous weekend's winner, Evan Almighty, slipped to third with a disappointing $15.1 million. Its weak performance may give Hollywood execs an excuse to avoid financing films with a strong appeal to Christians.

Ratatouille was directed and scripted by Brad Bird, director of The Incredibles, and largely reflects the same positive themes of that film: an admiration for excellence and positive achievements, the value of hard work, the belief that each of