The Agonizingly Slow Tidal Change in U.S. Academia
The last bastion of statism and the passion for political coercion, the American academy, is slowly changing as the baby boomers reach retirement age.
For four decades, American college and university campuses have been dominated by an overwhelmingly left-wing professoriate that has been in place since the 1960s generation began to infiltrate the campuses as a result of entering graduate programs in order to avoid the Vietnam War and, among women, in search of full-time jobs that pay well but don't require long hours once one achieves tenure.
Time heals all wounds, however, and that generation is passing by the wayside as they reach retirement age. The low point of the American university has surely been the 1990s and 2000s, with the rise of political correctness, administrative encouragement of sexual license among students, identity-politics curricula, student indoctrination in hatred of whites and males, and other ghastly perversions.
As a recent New York Times article notes, however, the generation that hoped it would die before it got old, and then changed its mind (what was left of it), has indeed got old and is doddering off the stage not a moment too soon:
Baby boomers, hired in large numbers during a huge expansion in higher education that continued into the ’70s, are being replaced by younger professors who many of the nearly 50 academics interviewed by The New York Times believe are different from their predecessors—less ideologically polarized and more politically moderate.
“There’s definitely something happening,” said Peter W. Wood, executive director of the National Association of Scholars, which was created in 1987 to counter attacks on Western culture and values. “I hear from quite a few faculty members and graduate students from around the country. They are not really interested in fighting the battles that have been fought over the last 20 years.”
As a result, the article notes, "there are signs that the intense passions and polemics that roiled campuses during the past couple of decades have begun to fade." The numbers bear this out, the story notes:
[A] new study of the social and political views of American professors by Neil Gross at the University of British Columbia and Solon Simmons at George Mason University found that the notion of a generational divide is more than a glancing impression. “Self-described liberals are most common within the ranks of those professors aged 50-64, who were teenagers or young adults in the 1960s,” they wrote, making up just under 50 percent. At the same time, the youngest group, ages 26 to 35, contains the highest percentage of moderates, some 60 percent, and the lowest percentage of liberals, just under a third.
When it comes to those who consider themselves “liberal activists,” 17.2 percent of the 50-64 age group take up the banner compared with only 1.3 percent of professors 35 and younger.
Don't expect any immediate change, however, as the academy still tends to draw a multitude of big-government poltiical fanatics, weird dreamers, wacky idealists, sex maniacs, arrogant narcissists, people who hate their parents, and other such human tragedies, and the professoriate has done a fabulous job of cruelly and relentlessly running off nearly everyone with any common sense or human decency. The New York Times article notes this stubborn fact:
Gerald Graff, president of the Modern Language Association and author of the 1992 book “Beyond the Culture Wars,” is more skeptical, saying he hasn’t seen evidence of change at the University of Illinois in Chicago, where he teaches English. “You’d think that the further we get away from the ’60s, where a lot of our political attitudes are nurtured, there would be,” he said, “but I have to say it doesn’t seem to be happening.”
Certainly some disciplines, like literary studies, seem more resistant to change. Elsewhere, senior faculty members are more likely to hire young scholars in their own mold, while some baby boomers have adopted the attitudes and styles of their younger peers.
Still, change will come, over time, and it will be very salutary indeed. The only question is whether it will arrive before the American academy implodes entirely.
At present, it appears it could go either way.
As Ned Flanders said in The Simpsons, "Say your prayers, 'cause the schools can't force you like they should!"
The Democrats' presumptive candidate for president is not black enough, nor feminine enough, nor Hispanic enough to represent a real change in American politics.
Analysis by Mike Gray
At present we have two males running for the office of President of the United States. Now, if we are to have a truly representative government in the modern sense of having a wide variety of types of people all representing basically the same political points of view (government=good, liberty=evil), this situation is obviously already skewed in the wrong direction. One of the two parties should immediately field a woman as a Presidential candidate.
According to Census 2000, 281.4 million people were counted in the United States—143.4 million of whom were female and 138.1 million male. The former made up 50.9 percent of the population, compared with 51.3 percent in 1990.
The figure of 50.9 percent is, for all practical purposes, a split down the middle—one guy for every gal—thus my call for a female candidate post-haste. It has also pleased the politicos to run a "person of color" this time around. This individual describes himself as "black" every chance he gets, despite the fact that he isn't fully black, as his Wikipedia entry notes:
Obama was born on August 4, 1961, at the Kapiolani Medical Center in Honolulu, Hawaii, to Barack Obama, Sr., of Nyangoma-Kogelo, Siaya District, Kenya, and Ann Dunham, a White American from Wichita, Kansas. His parents met while both were attending the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where his father was enrolled as a foreign student. They separated when he was two years old and later divorced. Obama's father returned to Kenya and saw his American-born son only once more before dying in an automobile accident in 1982.
Despite Census Bureau figures estimating that blacks constitute 13 percent of the U.S. population, some would argue that it's only fair that we should have a black President this time around; after all, he would be representing 100 percent of all black people, right? (But would that be only 50 percent of the time? Inquiring minds want to know.) This mind-roasting paradox drove Jason Carroll to the following musings on CNN's American Morning:
Barack Obama is touted as the nation's first major party black candidate for president. Obama identifies himself as black, but his parentage is biracial.... With a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya, Obama is the nation's first biracial candidate for president. The media, however, have continually called Obama the nation's first major party 'black candidate,' saying he could make history as the first 'black president.' But is that accurate?... A columnist examining Obama's background summed up his racial identity into one equation: white + black = black. For me, that said it all. There are some who point out Obama is just as white as he is black. He may be the nation's first black president, but he would also be the nation's 44th white president."
This issue of race has already been used to political advantage in the campaign, and will doubtlessly be used again and again—if Obama does get sworn in next January, we'll probably never hear the end of it. Meanwhile, Carroll plumps for a questionable conclusion based on no observable evidence but redolent of political correctness:
This is a debate that will continue as we watch the presidential race. It seems with an issue like this there's no right or wrong answer.
Sorry to disillusion you, Jason, but almost all "issues" do have right or wrong answers; that's why they're issues in the first place. What is needed is to find the answers.
This takes us back to our starting point, the pursuit of a more equitable representation of ethnicity, sex, and the like. Here Obama fails on another count. The Census Bureau, theoretically a neutral government agency but in actuality not so, proudly informed us in 2005 about what has become known as "the browning of America"
Population: 41.3 million
The estimated Hispanic population of the United States as of July 1, 2004, making people of Hispanic origin the nation's largest race or ethnic minority. Hispanics constituted 14 percent of the nation's total population. (This estimate does not include the 3.9 million residents of Puerto Rico.)
1
Of every two people added to the nation's population between July 1, 2003, and July 1, 2004, were Hispanic.
102.6 million
The projected Hispanic population of the United States as of July 1, 2050. According to this projection, Hispanics will constitute 24 percent of the nation's total population on that date.
This was in celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month:
In 1968, Congress authorized President Lyndon B. Johnson to proclaim a week in September as National Hispanic Heritage Week. The observance was expanded in 1988 to a monthlong celebration (Sept. 15-Oct. 15). During this month, America celebrates the culture and traditions of U.S. residents who trace their roots to Spain, Mexico and the Spanish-speaking nations of Central America, South America and the Caribbean. Sept. 15 was chosen as the starting point for the celebration because it is the anniversary of independence of five Latin American countries: Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. In addition, Mexico and Chile celebrate their independence days on Sept. 16 and Sept. 18, respectively.
Incidentally, why are we celebrating Costa Rican, El Salvadorian, Guatemalan, etc., cultures with taxpayer money instead of emphasizing America's traditions? I don't remember voting on that.
As you can see, with "Hispanics" (an umbrella term that could even be stretched to include the President-for-Life of Libya) reproducing at their current rate, you don't have to be a Karl Rove to figure out the political implications of 102.6 million potential voters by 2050.
So we must conclude that Obama is not only woefully estrogen-deficient (except perhaps in his foreign policy) but also not brown enough. If the Democrat Party truly wishes to honor its stated commitment to represent all of the people, it can and should steal the Republicans' thunder by offering a 100 percent black, 100 percent woman for President and a 100 percent white, 100 percent man for veep.
I shall not comment on the difficulty the latter might present for them.
"He is not a creator, however, but exclusively a destroyer."
I think we use the term "creator" rather too loosely these days—as in "Chris Carter, creator of 'The X-Files.'"
I think a case can be made for the lack of true creativity in any human endeavor--a grim assessment, I know.
To truly create involves starting with nothing ("no thing") and producing something.
"Creators" throughout history have never been able to do that.
They have had to start with preexisting materials and/or ideas formed in their brains (which are themselves also preexisting materials) and rearrange them into something "new."
Like mankind, Satan himself was a created being and by definition incapable of God-like creativity; he could only rearrange what God had already created, in his case destructively. Like Satan, the Joker can't create or even uncreate; he can only disarrange the created order. Satan cannot dissolve a single atomic particle of God's creation, only cause chaos in the cosmos; similarly, the Joker can only threaten to destabilize the established social order—what could be called the "cosmopolis" (the "world of people")—which is admittedly, from the purely human perspective, bad enough, but from God's perspective no real threat.
Broadly speaking, true creation is impossible for humankind.
Physics, chemistry, and biology all deal with preexistent materials; rearranging matter and energy may produce something "new" to human experience, but never something out of nothing.
The time for creation ab initio has passed and may never return.
If a scientist claims to have produced "life" or a new type of matter, don't believe him. He's just gratifying his ego, indulging in a fantasy just as strong but diametrically opposite to the Joker's. Neither the scientist nor the Joker can ever achieve such goals.
But I've gone off on a tangent, I see.
Leave it to you find unexpected insights in a Hollywood film of which even the producers may be unaware.
Abba Movie Musical Surprises with Box-Office Record
The movie musical Mamma Mia! finished a strong second to The Dark Knight in the weekend box office race last week—setting a record for its genre.
The movie musical Mamma Mia!, which is based on a stage play featuring the music of the pop-rock group Abba, set a record for the strongest opening weekend ever for a movie musical, besting the $27.5 million of last year's Hairspray by approximately $100,000.
That's a very impressive performance given the record number of people who flocked to see The Dark Knight. The Mamma Mia! success represents a triumph of what might be seen as a theatrical version ot counterprogramming, a common strategy employed in television.
In counterprogramming, a TV network responds to a popular show on another network by trying to appeal to a different audience demographic, as when a network counters a series popular with young males by running in the same time slot a program geared toward young females.
Certainly The Dark Knight appealed to a very wide audience, but its weakest segment was probably women over thirty. That was the group Mamma Mia! grabbed most effectively. As USA Today reported, "According to distributor Universal Pictures, 75% of the Mamma Mia! audience was female, 64% of them 30 and older."
According to the USA Today story, the weekend's movie slate shattered the previous audience record: "more than $258 million poured into the box office, Nielsen EDI reported. The old record was $218 million over the weekend of July 2, 2006."
The studio's choice to open Mamma Mia! on a weekend when multitudes of people would be going to the movies to see others among this year's strong slate of summer release clearly was a smart one, but I think a good deal of the credit for the film's opening-weekend success must go to Abba. Upon first seeing the trailer for Mamma Mia!, I was fairly certain it was not something I'd enjoy seeing, as it looked appallingly hokey, pseudo-earthy, cute, and estrogen-laced.
Seeing Meryl Streep dancing around in the trailer was a huge turnoff for me.
If you ever want to draw me to a Meryl Streep movie, show her jumping a brand-new Jaguar off a crumbling wooden ramp over a flaming river and crashing through a window of a burning warehouse while firing a shotgun at al Quaeda drug runners, and I'm there. Otherwise, no.
That is what I thought until I found out that Mamma Mia! was based on and used the music of Abba.
The fact is, Abba was a terrific pop group that made quite a few classic songs. My favorites include "Take a Chance on Me," "SOS," "Knowing Me, Knowing You," "Super Trouper," "Dancing Queen," and "Waterloo." If your favorites list differs, that only shows how many superb songs this band released.
Hence, I will see Mamma Mia! despite the distinct lack of explosions and delightful mayhem. Apparently wonders will never cease in the American culture.
The main villain of The Dark Knighthas interesting theological implications.
Given the unprecedented box-office success of The Dark Knight, it's appropriate to consider what effect its themes and ideas will have on audiences. After setting the single-day box office receipts record last Friday, the film set the weekend record as well, bringing in $155.34 million, besting the $151.1 million take for Spider-Man 3's opening weekend last year.
Like that film, The Dark Knight is both dark and edifying, and it presents mature themes handled with intelligence and real sophistication.
Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker, as I noted last week, certainly was a big factor in the film's huge box office success in its opening weekend. The Joker character provides a fascinating antagonist for the Caped Crusader.
It is important, however, to give due credit to director and co-screenwriter Christopher Nolan and cowriter Jonah Nolan for creating a brilliantly conceived character which Ledger then brought to life with astonishing vividness.
The similarities between the Joker and the Batman create a certain fascinating tension, of course. Both operate outside the law, both find it difficult to develop close relationships with other people, both lost loved ones at an early age (if anything the Joker says can be believed; he makes two different claims about how his face became disfigured), and, quite interestingly, neither one asks for any return for their life's work.
But for all their similarities, they have chosen very different paths, of course. This confirmation of the reality of moral choice is a powerful aspect of the film. It is confirmed and strengthened in the case of District Attorney Harvey Dent, who is quite torn between two possible futures: one as a hero, and one as a villain. We endure Dent's anguish and literally see the two sides of him in his face as he struggles with his choice.
That makes Dent's character a truly important element of the film, and may be one reason why his presence never seems an imposition and does not strike the viewer as a waste of screen time that could be spent on the Batman and the Joker: in his character we see the struggle between the hero and villain played out in a single person's soul. It is a subplot that gives us further perspective on the themes of the main story.
Unlike Dent and like Batman, the Joker has made his choice. He does not want power, money, or adulation; he simply wants to destroy other people's happiness and freedom. His means to this evil end is to create chaos and destroy things. And at that he is a true genius.
In this way the film powerfully brings out an important philosophical and theological idea about the nature of evil: that it is the absence of good. Evil is parasitic in not having any true nature of its own but simply functioning as the negation and destruction of what is good.
That is vividly evident in the Joker's lack of interest in obtaining anything good. Criminals, after all, typically commit their crimes in order to get things that we all consider good, such as money, power, gratification, etc. The Joker will have none of that. His every impulse is simply a nihilistic desire to destroy things, create disorder, and spread unhappiness.
Yet he does not appear to derive any real joy from it. In this the character differs strongly from other modern film villains: he is not a sadist, for he apparently does not derive pleasure from his actions. There is a certain powerful melancholy at the heart of the character which Ledger establishes brilliantly. (Note the photo at the top of this article.)
The Joker's wish regarding Batman, notably, is to bring him down to his level, to make the hero into the villan the Joker is sure the Batman really is in his heart of hearts.
Even his calling card, used several times in the film, adds to this meaning. It's a joker, of course, the card with no fixed value. Everything about the character suggests a deliberate and detailed personification of nihilism in its most sadistic form.
In this joyless impulse toward destruction, the Joker strongly evokes the Judeo-Christian conception of Satan. The Devil, after all, is an accuser, an adversary to humans, who wants to harm them both in this world and in the next. He is not a creator, however, but exclusively a destroyer.
The Joker's passion for destruction, his insistence that others are just as corrupt as he but not honest about it, and his clear lack of joy in anything he does all make the character much more than just a cartoonish movie villain. For that, both Ledger and the Nolans deserve much credit.
Will Smith Is Most Consistently Popular Actor Today
A side note in a story about a new study of Hollywood actors' salaries shows that Will Smith has become the most consistently popular actor of our time.
An interesting tidbit turned up in an E! Online story today about the top money-earners among Hollywood movie stars: Will Smith, the number one moneymaker at a gaudy $80 million in the past year, really does earn the mind-boggling amount of money he takes in: with his box-office success in Hancock, Smth became the first actor to have eight straight movies earn more than $100 million apiece at the box office.
That's an astonishing run of popularity. It certainly reflects the actor's talent and charisma, but also suggests sound judgment and a real respect for his audiences, which are not nearly so common as the other two things. In addition, I believe this success with audiences strongly reflects the healthy (and traditional) values reflected in his films, as noted in several previous reviews and analyses on this site.
Two new Sherlock Holmes film adaptations are taking very different approaches to the classic detective series.
Two forthcoming films featuring Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's classic character Sherlock Holmes will take very different approaches to the material. Judging by the reports, each could be either very good or very bad.
Jud Apatow (The Forty Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up: Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby) is producing a comedy film featuring Sacha Baron Cohen as Sherlock Holmes and Will Farrell as Dr. Watson. This obviously could be very funny if well-written, and just horrible if not. In addition, let us hope desperately that the two lead actors do not kiss in this film as they did in Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby and subsequently upon receiving an honor at the MTV Movie Awards.
Variety quoted a studio executive as being highly enthusiastic about the project:
"Just the idea of Sacha and Will as Sherlock Holmes and Watson makes us laugh," said [Columbia Studios] co-prexy Matt Tolmach. "Sacha and Will are two of the funniest and most talented guys on the planet, and having them take on these two iconic characters is frankly hilarious."
The idea of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore as Holmes and Watson must have seemed a sure thing in 1980, and Paul Morrissey's The Hound of the Baskervilles is somewhat amusing, but it would have benefited greatly from a better screenplay.
Although Farrell and Cohen are major comic talents, so were Cook and Moore. Ultimately, the quality of the script will decide whether the Farrell-Cohen film will be more like the classic Young Frankenstein or the not-classic Dracula: Dead and Loving It.
By the way, Without a Clue is a terrific comic film about Holmes and Watson, starring Michael Caine and Ben Kingsley. What's even better is that its zany central idea actually comports with the real Sherlock Holmes canon—by turning the entire thing on its head. Definitely recommended.
The other forthcoming Holmes film likewise takes a somewhat unusual approach to the material.
Directed by Guy Ritchie (who made the excellent crime films Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch), Sherlock Holmes will star Robert Downey Jr. as the great detective. Ritchie's film will emphasize a side of Holmes and the stories that has too often been forgotten: his superb physical abilities and the strong doses of action in many of the stories.
These were, after all, the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, as author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle titled the first volume of short stories about the character.
Thus there's validity in Ritchie's approach, and the only question is whether the script by Anthony Peckham and others will do it justice.
In addition to Conan Doyle's tales, Ritchie's film will also incorporate the Sherlock Holmes comics series, which painted the detective as more of a muscly action hero who just happened to be far more brilliant than his peers—and, most importantly, his adversaries
Although depicting him as "a muscly action hero" would not be quite faithful to the books, one could certainly see Downey bringing off both sides of Holmes: the man of genius and the man of action.
Few adaptations thus far have managed to do so, which makes this effort very interesting indeed.
The two films are expected to reach theaters in 2010.
In front of 1,000 cheering fans one recent Saturday night, Sazhin moved his bishop to go in for the kill and won the world championship of chess boxing, a weird hybrid sport that combines as many as five rounds of pugilism with a game of chess.
The combatants switch back and forth between boxing and chess—repeatedly putting their gloves on and taking them off, so that they can move the pieces around the board without clumsily knocking them over—in a sort of brains-and-brawn biathlon.
"It's the No. 1 thinking game and the No. 1 fighting game," said Iepe Rubingh, the sport's 32-year-old founder. . . .
If you knock your opponent out, the chess is over, too, and you win the match. If you beat your opponent at chess, then the boxing is over, and you are the victor. In the case of a draw at the chessboard, the boxer with more points in the ring is declared the winner.
The AP story notes that Rubingh was inspired by a 1992 French comic book. I shall make no comment.
Matches have been played in Amsterdam and Berlin, to audiences reported at 800-1,000 people.
As noted regularly on this site, this is more proof of Karnick's Law: everything happens in the Omniculture.
Two episodes of TV drama series on the same night showed a mature, thoughtful understanding of romantic relationships.
Last night two episodes of TV drama series presented the same, mature, laudable point of view on the moral way to deal with romantic relationships. In fact, one could say that each, in its own way, shows a certain tragic sensibility.
In recent episodes of the USA network show In Plain Sight, lead character Mary Shannon's black-ewe sister, Brandi, has been hovering around Mary's boyfriend, Rafael, while Mary is hard at work dealing with her duties as a federal marshall working in the witness-protection program. While Rafael recovers from an injury, Brandi helps him out by buying him groceries, driving him to therapy sessions, and the like.
Although she was intially somewhat hostile toward him, Brandi has warmed greatly toward Rafael as she has come to know him better, and in last night's episode ("Don of the Dead") she pushed the relationship to become physical.
That's when it became really interesting. Rafael does his best to deter Brandi's advances, but it doesn't work, and she persists and increases her efforts. Finally, Rafael tells her that they can't see each other at all any more, because it's just a bad idea.
His loyalty to Mary is impressive, as is his wisdom in not allowing this to go any further. One point for Rafael.
Brandi, furious, storms away and later asks her mother, Jinx (no paragon of virtue herself, but a basically kindhearted person trying to muddle through life as best she can), why a man and a woman can't simply be friends. Jinx points out that Rafael is right: there are always those issues in the background in male-female relationships, and in a situation where one person is pledged to another, thre's no way a third party can become close to one of them without starting trouble. That's just the way the world works.
That's a wisely nuanced and morally astute look at a common real-life situation, and what's even more impressive about it is that it's a subplot of the episode, not the main story line. The main plotline also has to do with male-female relationships and beautifully deals with the kinds of sacrifices we sometimes have to make when we truly love another person.
The interesting coincidence is that on that same Sunday night in the United States, the excellent BBC-PBS coproduced series Foyle's War included a situation very similar to the nascent and barely averted In Plain Sight triangle.
In the Foyle's War episode, "Broken Souls," a young English woman whose husband has just come home after escaping from a German prison camp finds herself troubled in trying to resume her relationship with her now disturbed, angry, injured husband. Complicating the situation is the fact that in her husband's absence, the local POW camp has assigned a German prisoner of war to help her maintain the family's small farm.
The German soldier, a quite pleasant, likeable fellow, inspires fierce jealousy and suspicion in the newly arrived husband. The husband is certain that his wife has been having an affair with the POW—although the narrative makes it clear (indeed, it makes it as certain as we can ever be about such things) that this is not true. After an angry confrontation between husband and wife, the woman tells the German soldier that she won't be able to allow him to help out at the farm anymore.
He is disappointed, of course, and she is clearly both saddened and somewhat humialiated by the entire matter. Yet she recognizes—as Brandi Shannon did not and Rafael did in the same night's In Plain Sight episode—that placing undue strain on a romantic relationship is a very stupid thing to do.
The Foyle's War episode makes it clear that the decision is a very difficult one for the wife and brings her great anguish, but it also is obvious that it's the right choice.
Thus two TV series on the same night depicted praiseworthy instances of self-sacrifice in romantic relationships. That certainly goes against the grain of much of what we've been taught by both the schools and the culture in the past three decades or so, and it's just another small indicator of what I believe to be a true cultural tide change.
The Dark Knight, the new Batman movie, brought in a record-breaking $66.4 million in its first day, according to Warner Bros, the film's distributor.
That's an impressive $6.6 million more than Spider-Man 3 took in during its first day of release in setting the previous record last summer.
Two factors appear predominant in the film's record-setting pace: one, the strongly positive audience response to Batman Begins, which delighted audiences despite its liberal employment of action film cliches (or perhaps precisely because of that), and two, curiosity about Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker.
Regarding the former, I can confirm that the film is a very, very good one of its kind, and in fact better than Batman Begins.
Regarding Ledger, I can confirm that his performance is absolutely brilliant. The creativity, ingenuity, intelligence, sensitivity, and realism (yes, there is powerful realism in his portrayal of the character's motivations) is truly astonishing and does indeed merit acknowledgment with a posthumous Academy Award. I suppose it's possible someoe will turn in a better supporting performance this year, but it's certainly not likely. Ledger's portrayal of the character is that good.
Reuters reports that the quality of Ledger's performance may not matter enough to bring him the Oscar, because Oscar voters are afraid "to hug the dead," according to columnist Tom O'Neill as quoted in the story.
If so, that's another of the many great reasons to ignore the damn Oscars.
New episodes of USA Network's excellent mystery-comedy series Monk and Psych start tomorrow.
Summer was once the worst time to watch television, but now it's arguably the best. Although the broadcast TV networks show even worse programming in summer than during the rest of the year, cable/sat channels take advantage of the situation to present their best programs against the weaker competition from the big boys.
Consider: The Closer, Mad Men, Saving Grace, Army Wives, Damages, Monk, Psych, The Cleaner, Burn Notice, In Plain Sight, Eureka, The Middleman, Charlie Jade, and Law and Order: Criminal Intent, and compare that with the slate of awful game shows and tired "reality TV" glop offered by the broadcast networks, in addition to a very few, very weak dramatic entries (Swingtown, Fear Itself).
Two of the best cable/sat shows return with new episodes tomorrow night, both on the USA Network: Monk (now entering its seventh season) at 9 EDT and Psych (starting its third year) at 10 EDT.
Both are mystery series with likeable but far-from-pefect central characters brilliiantly portrayed by their lead actors, accompanied by very appealing supporting casts. Both feature strong comedy premises that work best when they're least forced, and strong mystery elements that work best when they're most prominent. Both deal with interesting contemporary characters and issues and purvey solid, healthy values in the doing. And both feature smart writing with occasional flashes of real wit.
Sure, this is formula fiction, but the producers provide enough novelty to make them quite enjoyable, and the fact is, we like formulas because they satisfy our need for stability. That's why television and other media employ fomulas: because people enjoy the interplay between the familiar and the new.
Both shows are well worth watching—which is more than can be said about the broadcast networks' summer programs.
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The new series The Cleaner represents the A&E network's long-overdue return to fiction series television.
The Cleaner, the first new drama series on the A&E Network in several years, premieres tonight at 9 EDT.
Starring Benjamin Bratt (Law and Order), the show tells the story of a group of reformed drug addicts who "intervene" with people to try to get them off of various addictions, such as drugs, alcohol, gambling, and sexual activity. Led by Bratt, the group of "extreme interventionists" steps in and works with the addicts to persuade them to kick their bad habits.
In the meantime, team leader William "The Cleaner" Banks helps the police by solving crimes and catching criminals. Naturally, all of this wreaks havoc on his personal life, in the great TV cliche of our times, but he has a serious reason for his devotion: he is pursuing this work as a result of a promise he made to God while mired in his own addictions after the birth of his daughter.
Although the show seems likely to be awfully earnest, the descriptions available so far suggest its values are in the right place. It appears to be well worth a look.
As noted above, this is the first new drama series on A&E in several years. The network had made quite a name for itself as a prime source of solid drama series, including British-American co-productions such as adaptations of classic novels, and the superb Nero Wolfe.
Several years ago, however, the network decided to cut costs by concentrating on documentary-style programs and "reality TV," which is much cheaper to produce than fiction series. That may have been good for their bottom line, but it was bad for the culture, as A&E simply duplicated what countless other channels were doing.
Thus the decision to produce a new drama series is a good sign if it means that the network may be getting back in the fiction game. Interestingly, the series is based on the exploits of a real-life extreme interventionist, Warren Boyd, who serves as a co-producer of The Cleaner. Hence it has a strong relationship with what A&E has been doing in the past few years and makes for a plausible transition.
We should all hope for the program to be successful so that A&E and other networks will delve into more dramatic programming of this sort, and comedies as well. That would increase the variety of programming on cable/sat TV quite beneficially.
Adventure fantasies with conservative values are maintaining their grip on American movie audiences.
Opening its theatrical run with a very strong first weekend, Hellboy II: The Golden Army brought in $35.9 million in estimated U.S. box office receipts. That's $12.7 million more than Hellboy took in on its opening weekend (more than a 50 percent bump—very impressive, and indicative of the first Hellboy's long-term audience appeal). It was good enough for a first-place finish this time around.
Directed and written by the talented Guillermo del Toro (Hellboy, Pan's Labyrinth), the film tells the story of a demon fighting to save the world from a "golden army" of invincible mechanical soldiers led by a mad, power-hungry elf. Despite the highly fanciful nature of the story line and bizarre characters, the film shows a real concern for its characters, and del Toro makes sure they become real enough to us so that what happens to them really matters.
Although the action is big and the events world-shaking, del Toro never loses sight of what's really important: individuals and the choices they make.
Coming in second over the weekend was Hancock, which totaled $33 million. That's an impressive amount, as it's less than a 50 percent dropoff from the film's first-weekend take, which is an unusual and highly desired achievement. Clearly Smith's appeal and the movie's thematic strength (see last Monday's article on the film) overcame the generally poor reviews it received.
Also in the adventure-fantasy realm was Journey to the Center of the Earth, starring Brendan Fraser, best known for his performances in the Mummy movies. This 3-D adaptation of the charming and wholesome Jules Verne novel brought in a solid $20.6 million.
Eddie Murphy's Meet Dave was the only prominent release to stumble, snagging only $5.3 million, in seventh place for the weekend. That's very poor for an Eddie Murphy movie, and it appears that the concept—Murphy as a miniature space alien humanoid trapped on earth—just didn't grab people. Even though the competition was strong, the film's poor take makes it likely theaters will start dropping it, thus pushing its performance even lower.
Interestingly, The Incredible Hulk fell out of the top ten, during the same week in its run that its predecessor, Ang Lee's Hulk, fell out, and has earned almost exactly the same amount of money in its fifth weekend—$129.8 million versus $128.1 million. The lesson must be that people just don't like the Hulk character as much as they like most other Marvel heroes.
That's particularly notable when the protagonist of the week's hottest movie is a demon and the number two film is about an ill-tempered superman.
Two superb TV series, The Closer and Saving Grace, both return this evening, on Turner Network Television (TNT), at 9:00 and 10:00 EDT, respectively.
My analyses of The Closer are available here and here. My look at Saving Grace is here, and TAC correspondent Rebecca Cusey's interview with Saving Grace creator-producer Nancy Miller is here.
More information on the two series is available on the TNT website, along with previous episodes suitable for viewing on computer.
New Episodes of 'Top Gear' Coming to United States
The best nonfiction comedy program now on television is back with new episodes tonight.
The best current nonfiction comedy show on television, the BBC program Top Gear, is presenting another series of episodes not yet seen in the United States, starting tonight at 8 EDT on BBC America.
The show, for the unitiated, is all about cars, and is immensely funny. The hosts, three very funny Englishmen, make fun of the cars (of course), other aspects of driving and transportation, and of the general habits of the Brits, Americans, and just about everybody else.
Each of the hosts has a distinctive, humorous personality: blustering, gruff Jeremy Clarkson, ditzy James May, and cheerful, optimistic, diplomatic Richard Hammond. Together they hit all the right notes as they compete against one another for the audience's laughter and to win bizarre contests designed by the show's producers to test the cars and the hosts.
They've raced cars against a parachutist and people on foot, played soccer in Toyota Aygos chasing around a giant ball, and done all sorts of other wacky things.
In one episode the hosts entered a car in a twenty-four hour road race. In order to conform with BBC's nonprofit status, they invented sponsors whose names they could paint on the vehicle, painting the words Penistone Tires and Larsen's Biscuits prominently on its sides. Thus when the car was in the pit area and shown from the front with its doors open, the two sides read "Penis" and "Arse Biscuits."
Sophisticated British humor indeed.
One particularly enjoyable thing about Top Gear is that it is quite bold in its political incorrecness. The presenters regularly express contempt for environmentalists, government regulators, and other harmful do-gooders. It's a welcome relief from the dreary leftism of our nation's news media.
Although the presenters of Top Gear do mock us Americans a good deal, they also make fun of their own country, and after all, we deserve a good comical kick in the backside, given the prevalence here of environmentalists, government regulators, and other such pestiferous busybodies.
More information about Top Gear is available from BBC America.
USA Network's Burn Notice, one of the best shows on television, returns tonight at 10 EDT. The espionage comedy-drama features Jeffrey Donovan as a fired CIA agent—the "burn notice" of the title refers to his termination, which continually threatens to take on the unpleasant, deadly, espionage connotation of the latter term.
Joining Donovan's character, Michael Westen, in helping him to get by without an identity (which was taken away by the spy agency upon his termination), avoid being killed by his former employers, and make a meager living helping people menaced by various villains, are ex-girlfriend and superspy Fiona (Gabrielle Anwar) and buddy Sam Axe (Bruce Campbell), a former superagent, "all-around Cold Warrior" (as the USA Network PR description charmingly puts it), and current FBI informant.
As I noted in my review of the show, the series harks back wonderfully to a long tradition of adventurous do-gooders operating outside the law, such as Erle Stanley Gardner's Lester Leith and the '80s TV show The Equalizer, while revitalizing the espionage genre with a much-needed dose of panache and high spirits.
USA Network has announced that in addition to this summer's eight-week run, Burn Notice will return in January with another set of new episodes, as the network's shows Monk and Psych have been doing in recent years.
Reports have surfaced claiming that the show's producers are going to feel the need to increase the tension in the show's situations and reduce the lightheartedness that has made the program such a breath of fresh air, in order to compete with network TV during the January-February run.
I have my doubts about that. The show has plenty of tension already, and the producers, writers, directors, and performers have shown great skill in balancing the various aspects thus far. They should only get better at it.
If anyone should be worried and looking to change their ways, it's the broadcast networks, which have been putting out gloomy, dank crime dramas for a full decade now. That style has surely run its course, and audiences may well start looking for something new. Burn Notice should appeal to them.
Chinese Artists Call for More Freedom, Citing 'Kung Fu Panda'
Chinese artists are calling for less govenment control over culture—thanks to a cartoon bear. Americans can learn from this as well.
The animated comedy hit Kung Fu Panda has inspired some serious soul-searching among Chinese artists, Reuters reports.
The film, which tells the story of a chubby panda who cannot reach his real potential until he realizes that he already has the ability in him, ironically has prompted some Chinese artists to take the message seriously and call for government reform and removal of strictures on the nation's cultural providers:
"The film's protagonist is China's national treasure and all the elements are Chinese, but why didn't we make such a film?" Wu Jiang, president of the China National Peking Opera Company, was cited as saying by Xinhua news agency on Saturday.
Lu Chuan, a young film director, applauded "Kung Fu Panda" as a fresh and rich take on Chinese culture, mixing references to martial arts films with classic legends.
"I cannot help wondering when China will be able to produce a movie of this caliber," he wrote in the China Daily on Saturday.
Lu argues that government interference is the problem, Reuters notes:
Lu said the government was stifling the creativity of China's filmmakers, explaining how he had been asked to make an animated film for the Olympic Games, which will be hosted by Beijing in August, but decided to walk away from the project. "
"I kept receiving directions and orders on how the movie should be like," he said. "The fun and joy from doing something interesting left us, together with our imagination and creativity."
In addition, the story noted, the Chinese People's Political Consultative Congress—an advisory body to the Chinese parliament—debated why no film like Kung Fu Panda has been made in China. Their conclusion: the government should allow more creative freedom.
There's a lesson here for Americans, too: loosening government's grip on the economy would enable us to unleash vastly more human creativity and greatly increase the nation's material prosperity.
Thus even whimsical films such as Kung Fu Panda can help in the grand work of recreating a culture of liberty in this nation.
The new Will Smith movie, Hancock, is a big success at the box office, despite derision from the critics. They're wrong, and Smith is right (mostly).
Despite receiving largely negative reviews, the Will Smith adventure-comedy Hancock opened very strongly at the U.S. box office, snapping up a highly impressive $66 million over the three-day July 4 weekend. The film has earned $107.6 million since its opening last Tuesday.
This the fifth film starring Smith to open in the number one slot on an Independence Day weekend. The others were the two Men in Black films, Independence Day, and Wild Wild West.
The audiences are right to like Smith's film despite its extremely bizarre premise, lack of logic, and unpleasant characterization by Smith in the lead role. What the film has going for it are very good performances by Jason Bateman and Charlize Theron, plus a serious and positive portrayal of the importance of personal responsibility and individual moral accountability.
Thus even though the character Smith plays is quite unattractive throughout much of the film, the redemptive nature of his personal story and the positive values the film projects should enable it to continue to do well.
One idea the film expresses quite strongly is absolutely wrong, however. Bateman's character is on a personal crusade to make big corporations more appealing to the public by enlisting the companies in a grand scheme to devote a certain portion of their revenues to "good works."
This idea rests on an entirely false notion which, unfortunately, all too many people believe: that businesses take resources away from society and should "give something back" in the form of public charity in order to compensate for their takings.
Nothing could be more false. Businesses contribute to the public good by giving the products and services people want. If a business is not doing some good, people won't pay for their product or service. Resources sitting around on or in the earth or sea are worthless until somebody "exploits" them for our behefit.
Hence, the business of business really is business. And that's what makes businesses good and should earn them the public's appreciation. To ask for more is in fact to be truly greedy.
The really greedy people are those who call on businesses to divert their resources from goods the public wants toward those that self-appointed elite do-gooders think we ought to have.
That kind of greed for power is always bad. We should roundly condemn such arrogance, not praise it.
Pixar's WALL-E led a strong slate at the U.S. box office that resulted in the biggest-grossing weekend of the year.
Disney/Pixar's latest animated production, WALL-E, opened very strong at the U.S. box office this past weekend, grossing an estimated $62.5 million in domestic ticket sales. That's about $10 million more than industry pundits had expected and is not far short of the company record of $70.5 million, set in 2004 by The Incredibles.
Coming in second on the weekend was the opening of Wanted, the new Universal Pictures actioner starring Angelina Jolie. It brought in an impressive $51.1 million, which makes it the third highest opening weekend for an R-rated action film, behind only The Matrix Reloaded and 300.
It will be interesting to see whether Wall-E will be able to sustain its strong performance. Unlike The Incredibles and other popular animated or computer-generated films, Wall-E is not fully successful in humanizing its central characters, two robots in a world seven centuries from now. The filmmakers clearly tried mightily to show the two machines as having reactions resembling human emotions, but the characters never really become personalties to the viewer. That would seem to be a very bad weakness in a film geared toward children. (It has never hurt Steven Seagal's movies, by contrast.)
On the plus side, however, WALL-E does stress the optimism and can-do attitude typical of recent Disney and Pixar animated pictures, and has numerous amusing moments, an intersting story line, and a strong affirmation of the value of loyalty, compassion, and personal responsibility. The messages it will send children are solid, which parents will appreciate.
One particularly interesting aspect of WALL-E is the filmmakers' choice of what kind of future to depict.
Although one might have expected them to present a largely optimistic view, so as not to scare the kiddies unduly, the filmmakers follow the typical approach of adult-oriented movie sci-fi in recent years and present a serious dystopia. Humans have abandoned Earth, as the accumulation of our race's garbage has made the world uninhabitable—plants will no longer grow on the planet. Everyone has migrated to an artificial planet floating out in space somewhere.
Thus the film presents a charmingly obsolete, early 1970s attitude of environmental gloom and doom, reflecting the once-prevalent but entirely false notion of a coming environmental catastrophe.
This central aspect of the film's premise harks back a full three decades to a time when few people other than serious economists understood that the West was rapidly leaving behind its period of greatest human impact on the environment. Since the 1960s, the environment in the developed world has become cleaner and cleaner, thanks in great part to technological advances that have occurred in spite of government mandates, not because of them.
What is directly on target, by contrast, and brilliantly satirical, is the film's amusing depiction of human life in the future. Everyone is enormously fat, and they all ride around in hover-chairs and spend all their waking hours eating, watching video screens, conforming to instantly changing fashions, and shopping for junk they don't need. Great stuff. Parents and children alike will recognize that world, and will enjoy the satire.
Perhaps that will be enough to keep WALL-E performing well at the box office.
By the way, 
