Category Archives: Popular culture

P. Diddy breaks all barriers on ‘Downtown Abbey’

In providing a sneak preview of his star turn on “Downton (or as he calls it, ‘Downtown’) Abbey,” Sean “P. Diddy” Combs breaks the color barrier, the time barrier, the genre barrier and of course the comedy barrier.

PBS denies that Combs has joined the cast of the wildly popular period drama, but “Funny or Die” provides video proof to the contrary. Besides, P. Diddy said it was so on Twitter, so whom are you going to believe?

Yes, there’s strong language, but quite mild compared to his performance in “Get Him to the Greek.”

I don’t know where I’ve been, but this is the first time I’ve run across “Funny or Die,” which according to Wikipedia was founded by Will Ferrell and Adam McKay’s production company, Gary Sanchez Productions.

Good stuff. Since SNL isn’t going to be funny any more with Bill Hader gone, y’all should definitely check it out.

‘Groundhog Day’ in South Carolina’s 1st District

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Our regular Silence, who apparently is way too chipper in the early morning, posted at 7:08 a.m.,

Here it is folks, the big day, the main event! Who will be the champ, and who will be the chump?

To which I responded that most likely, Mark Sanford wins. Again. As he has been expected to do since the beginning, in spite of some polls giving his opponent hope along the way.

But you know, it would be nice to see something different, something new, happen in South Carolina. Getting stuck with Sanford again is SOP here; we expect no better.

I’m reminded of what Bill Murray says at the end of “Groundhog Day,” when a new and different day finally dawns. He notices something that varies from all the previous days, and says, with cautious optimism, “Something is… different.” Andie MacDowell says, “Good or bad?” To which he replies, “Anything different is good.”

Had the film been set in her native South Carolina rather than Pennsylvania, Ms. MacDowell might then have said, “Nothing different ever happens here.” Which would have ruined the movie, but would have been depressingly true. We are famous for our ruts.

I don’t know that Elizabeth Colbert Busch is the electoral equivalent of getting Andie MacDowell in the end. I don’t know enough about her. But I know it would be different. And when the status quo is this well known, different is good.

Here’s hoping for a happy ending in the 1st District. The alternative is another 18 months of Sanford jokes at South Carolina’s expense.

Is Mark Sanford entitled to equal time on Comedy Central?

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The Colbert Report
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I thought this question, posed on Slatest, was intriguing:

As the faux-conservative Colbert Report host, Stephen Colbert has lampooned campaign finance laws and the U.S. electoral system by starting his own super PAC and announcing bids for the presidency and “the president of the United States of South Carolina.” But another Colbert—this one with a hard t at the end—is also vying for the political spotlight: Elizabeth Colbert Busch, Stephen’s older sister, who’s facing off against avid Appalachian Trail hiker and former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford in a May 7 special election for South Carolina’s 1^st Congressional District. Colbert has twice devoted show segments to his sister’s campaign, including one endorsing her candidacy, and has mocked Sanford on countless occasions. With the show’s nightly viewership of 1.5 million and the documented “Colbert bump” in a politician’s support after an appearance, is Colbert violating election laws by blending his hosting role with his sister’s campaign?

Probably not. The central law in play is the Federal Communications Commission’s equal-time rule. Beginning with the Radio Act of 1927, which Congress enacted in response to fears of broadcasters’ ability to sway elections by limiting a candidate’s access to the airwaves, radio and television networks have been required to offer equal airtime (or opportunities to purchase advertising at a reduced price) to all candidates if they request it. Exemptions were later added for documentaries, newscasts, news interviews, and on-the-spot news events.

Since it covers news stories and political issues, The Colbert Report would likely fall under the newscast or news interviews exceptions…

Really? I would have thought it was entertainment.

In any case, I’ve always found the equal-time rule sort of hard to follow. And now that we have “news shows” that are entirely satire, how would you go about giving equal time, anyway? And if you gave it, how could you be assured it would be to the advantage of the one demanding it? When everything is dealt with ironically, how do you make sure your equal time is quality time? Make it an infomercial, so you have total control? Maybe. I don’t know. But even that could backfire, as Comedy Central viewers go there for smart-aleck, not for earnest.

What do y’all think?

Remembering Jonathan Winters

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Just thought I’d share a couple of clips to help us remember Jonathan Winters, in light of today’s sad news.

As it happens, Winters was the same age as Margaret Thatcher, 87. But he was way funnier.

I chose the one above in part to remind us of someone else. In light of the recent Jimmy Fallon news, I thought it would be apropos to look back at the original host of “The Tonight Show.”

The thoughtful hedonist: Russell Brand on Thatcher

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You probably don’t want to watch it with your mom, or with your children for that matter, but I have seen few things funnier in recent years than Russell Brand in “Get Him to the Greek.” From his first line, “I’m Aldous Snow, the rock star,” his embodiment of an out-of-control hedonist is so devastatingly spot on, you come away convinced that that is who he really is (of course, his personal biography isn’t that far distant from Snow’s).

But messed up as he may be, he’s a bright guy who can actually be fairly thoughtful (interestingly, there were flashes of that in the Aldous Snow character, tucked among the Jeffrey-induced outrages). He showed that in a piece he wrote for The Guardian a couple of days back. Excerpts:

One Sunday recently while staying in London, I took a stroll in the gardens of Temple, the insular clod of quads and offices between the Strand and the Embankment. It’s kind of a luxury rent-controlled ghetto for lawyers and barristers, and there is a beautiful tailors, a fine chapel, established by the Knights Templar (from which the compound takes its name), a twee cottage designed by Sir Christopher Wren and a rose garden; which I never promised you.

My mate John and I were wandering there together, he expertly proselytising on the architecture and the history of the place, me pretending to be Rumpole of the Bailey (quietly in my mind), when we spied in the distant garden a hunched and frail figure, in a raincoat, scarf about her head, watering the roses under the breezy supervision of a masticating copper. “What’s going on there, mate?” John asked a nearby chippy loading his white van. “Maggie Thatcher,” he said. “Comes here every week to water them flowers.” The three of us watched as the gentle horticultural ritual was feebly enacted, then regarded the Iron Lady being helped into the back of a car and trundling off. In this moment she inspired only curiosity, a pale phantom, dumbly filling her day. None present eyed her meanly or spoke with vitriol and it wasn’t until an hour later that I dreamt up an Ealing comedy-style caper in which two inept crooks kidnap Thatcher from the garden but are unable to cope with the demands of dealing with her, and finally give her back. This reverie only occurred when the car was out of view. In her diminished presence I stared like an amateur astronomer unable to describe my awe at this distant phenomenon…

The blunt, pathetic reality today is that a little old lady has died, who in the winter of her life had to water roses alone under police supervision. If you behave like there’s no such thing as society, in the end there isn’t. Her death must be sad for the handful of people she was nice to and the rich people who got richer under her stewardship. It isn’t sad for anyone else. There are pangs of nostalgia, yes, because for me she’s all tied up with Hi-De-Hi and Speak and Spell and Blockbusters and “follow the bear”. What is more troubling is my inability to ascertain where my own selfishness ends and her neo-liberal inculcation begins. All of us that grew up under Thatcher were taught that it is good to be selfish, that other people’s pain is not your problem, that pain is in fact a weakness and suffering is deserved and shameful. Perhaps there is resentment because the clemency and respect that are being mawkishly displayed now by some and haughtily demanded of the rest of us at the impending, solemn ceremonial funeral, are values that her government and policies sought to annihilate…

Rough stuff. But then there are bits like this:

When I awoke today on LA time my phone was full of impertinent digital eulogies. It’d be disingenuous to omit that there were a fair number of ding-dong-style celebratory messages amidst the pensive reflections on the end of an era. Interestingly, one mate of mine, a proper leftie, in his heyday all Red Wedge and right-on punch-ups, was melancholy. “I thought I’d be overjoyed, but really it’s just … another one bites the dust …” This demonstrates, I suppose, that if you opposed Thatcher’s ideas it was likely because of their lack of compassion, which is really just a word for love. If love is something you cherish, it is hard to glean much joy from death, even in one’s enemies…

I found it interesting because it gave me insight into the attitudes of a young Brit growing up in the Thatcher era — someone whose life wasn’t politics. I think he probably speaks for a lot of people in his generation, those who aren’t inclined to engage in the execrable “Ding-Dong” celebrations, but aren’t at all interested in fitting her with a halo, either.

I was also intrigued by the bits of communitarianism that crept into the writing of this young man best known in this country for playing a narcissist, such as “If you behave like there’s no such thing as society, in the end there isn’t.”

I share it as something from an unexpected quarter that broadened my understanding a bit.

The overshadowed passing of Annette

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Long before there was a Cher, or a Madonna, or a Sting, there was Annette, who preceded them all in needing no surname. Even “Elvis” had “Presley” attached more than Annette used “Funicello” in the early days.

That’s because she was the most famous of the Mouseketeers, and I mean the original, real Mouseketeers, not the latter-day imitations.

We expected the passing of Margaret Thatcher; that movie with Meryl Streep made it seem imminent. But Annette, leaving us at 70, was more of a shock.

I suspect you have to be almost exactly my age — one whose preschool years were entirely contained within the ’50s — to get this completely. Later, seeing her in the beach movies, I’d form another picture of her, and that one probably stuck better — that of a young woman rather than a child, although still a squeaky-clean image. (Alas, she was not my favorite character in those films; that honor belonged to Eric Von Zipper.)

John Updike used a passage, early in Rabbit Run, in which Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom watches the “The Mickey Mouse Club,” which comes across as a way of assuring us that this is, indeed, a quintessentially American novel. But Harry could never connect with the Mouseketeers the way we did. Harry was spoiled goods; he wasn’t one of us. Harry, in that and subsequent novels (OK, so I really only made it through Rabbit Redux before I gave up on him), was always too old for the cultural passages he was experiencing. Yet he plunged through them anyway, which for me imbued him with a certain falseness.

How did we get on Updike? Oh, yeah, Annette…

The Mouseketeers, Elvis, Mickey Mantle and Andy Devine were my first celebrities. It was years and years before I learned from Dumas there had been something in history called a musketeer, which at first looked to me like a misspelling.

Annette! If only once more we could see her standing by Jimmie as he led us through:

M-I-C (see you next week!)
K-E-Y (Why? Because we LIKE you!)
M-O-U-S-E

… and know, with a child’s certainty, that yes, we would see them next week, and that they did indeed like us as much as we liked them…

Bang, bang! Your hashtag shot me dead…

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At first, I was going to launch into a rant about the stupidity of the people, here in the celebrity-addled West, when I took an additional few seconds to ponder this:

What do you see when you read this Twitter hashtag?

#nowthatcherisdead

It’s supposed to be about Monday’s death of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and looks to have been popularized by the website “IsThatcherDeadYet,” which was not upset to hear about the Iron Lady’s passing. “It’s fair to say that we are not fans,” site co-creator Jared Earle told The Guardian.

When Thatcher died, the website asked readers “how are you celebrating?” and suggested they use the #nowthatcherisdead hashtag.

Monday at 7:58 a.m. ET, just after the news broke of Thatcher’s death, the hashtag popped up on Twitter. The first tweet from someone who seemed to have read it wrong came four minutes later:

“So sad to hear that Cher is dead. #nowthatcherisdead.”

That then led to some confusion and amusement. Comedian Ricky Gervais as among those who tried to straighten things out:

“Some people are in a frenzy over the hashtag #nowthatchersdead. It’s ‘Now Thatcher’s dead’. Not, ‘Now that Cher’s dead’ JustSayin’ ”

Idiots! I thought, and then I looked at the hashtag as though I were seeing it without the setup, and realized the natural way to make it out was to read “now,” then “that,” then whatever else one could make of the letters that remained.

So the stupidity, I now think, was on the part of the Thatcher-haters who devised the hashtag. The Cher interpretation makes for a better-written statement. The mind sort of wants a “that” after “now.” I mean, really, the thing would have made more sense, been easier to make out, had it read, “#nowthatthatcherisdead.”

Anyway, so much for the “Cher is dead” rumor. Which turned out not to be nearly as much fun as the “Paul is dead” one. That one had all those clues to look for…

A very bad photo Cher posted on Twitter after rumors spread of her death. Come to think of it, she does have a sort of Elvira, Queen of the Dead thing going there. I don’t know who the kid is.

Top Five baseball movies, 2013 version

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Marking the start of the season and the release of the new movie about Jackie Robinson, the WSJ offered a slideshow of stills from baseball movies this morning, which was fun to flip through.

It didn’t really make judgments or rank them. It just grouped them into categories: One Last Shot (“The Rookie,” “Mr. 3000″); The Church of Baseball (“The Natural,” “Field of Dreams”); Game Changers (“Moneyball,” “A League of Their Own”), etc.

But what’s a list without a Top Five? So I quickly drew one up. And only after drawing it up, while feeling a bit of déjà vu, did I realized I’d done this before. (When I realized that, I almost trashed this post, but then thought maybe some of y’all would enjoy it anyway.) The new list differs slightly from what I said before, indicating that list-making is affected by mood. Or something. Here’s what I came up with this morning:

The Natural — I don’t care how sappy it is. Baseball is sappy. I don’t care that it’s nothing like the cynical novel on which it’s based — which I hated. I like that it’s a celebration. I like the gauzy sentimentality. Not in all movies, but in this one, because it fits the subject matter. Roy Hobbs is what we want our baseball heroes to be, and we have a right to want that.
Major League — Silly, yes, but it captures the fun of the game. I watched it again recently, and wondered what had happened to Wesley Snipes. Turns out he’s in prison. I had no idea.
Eight Men Out — A baseball tragedy. Or morality play. It’s like the entrance of the Serpent into the Garden of Eden that was baseball. Still, there’s so much innocence among the guilty, and so many gradations of corruption, that you find yourself sympathizing (for some of them), even if they can’t honestly say it ain’t so. Nice ensemble of actors, too.
The Sandlot — Very much like my childhood, since I never played organized ball until senior Little League when I was 15. I spent a lot of time on sandlots. Yes, this is about mythmaking (although on a less heroic level than “The Natural”), but its cliches and stereotypes are so lovingly drawn, and they ring true.
Field of Dreams — You know what? I changed my mind about this. See below.

Initially, I was going to say sorry, ladies… I couldn’t include “A League of their Own” because there was crying in it, and there’s no crying in baseball. That was my first thought this morning. Last time, I included it at number five, on account of the deep flaws in “Field of Dreams.” Such as Ray Liotta being nothing like Shoeless Joe Jackson. (D.B. Sweeney in “Eight Men Out” was a thousand times better.) And the famous writer not being J.D. Salinger, which is who he was in the novel.

And because its gauzy sentimentality seemed more forced and artificial, unlike in “The Natural” and “The Sandlot.” Like the difference between sugar and saccharine.

So, never mind. I think I was right in 2011… In fact, the only reason I’m posting this is to celebrate the season, and give any of y’all who missed the previous post a chance to voice your opinions.

The amazing thing about newspapers, as interpreted by ‘George Costanza’

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Romenesko shared this, which he got from The Harvard Crimson. It’s from an interview with Jason Alexander, best known for his role as George Costanza on “Seinfeld”:

The first time I really thought, “Oh my god, Jerry Seinfeld is brilliant” was when he did a joke about newspapers, and how relieved the editors of a newspaper must be when exactly the right amount of things happen everyday to make the paper come out perfectly, so that at six o’clock at their deadline, you don’t go, “Oh, one more thing happened,” and now you have a blank page with two paragraphs.

I’ve always loved that joke, too. Because while it is meant to be seen as ridiculous, it taps into a sense of wonder I had about newspaper from an early age.

When I was in second or third grade, I read a book of short stories aimed at people my age. It had a theme — each story opened a window on some different aspect of the big wide world, meant to show kids the possibilities for when they grew up. One story, the one I remember best, was about a kid who went to work for a newspaper as a copy boy (which would be my first newspaper job, at the Memphis Commercial Appeal, years later). The reader followed the boy as he learned about everything it took to publish a newspaper each day.

I was struck with awe at the enormity of such a task. I couldn’t believe any group of people, no matter how experienced or talented, could get all of those things done in a day, every day. And yet there was the proof, on my doorstep each morning.

Decades later, after I had mastered every aspect of the process, I used to wonder sometimes at the complaints we’d get from readers. Someone would be griping at me about some small thing that, in his or her opinion, wasn’t quite right in the paper, and I would remember that story and how it impressed me. And I’d think, Hasn’t this person ever thought about what a miracle it is that the paper comes out at all? Obviously not, or they’d have backed off a bit.

I’ve never thought a single actual error in any paper I worked for was excusable. And readers deserved to demand the same high standard from us. But occasionally, when they were going on and on about some tiny thing that had gone wrong (or that they saw as having gone wrong), I’d find myself wishing they’d pause, just a moment, to be impressed by everything that was right, against all odds…

Oh, wait, one other thing… Having spent a lot of years making the news fit the paper, ruthlessly wielding a light-blue felt pen (which humans could read, but the camera that shot the page when it was done could not pick up) in composing rooms, or trimming with marginally greater delicacy on a computer screen, I found myself puzzled that Yahoo paid a high-school kid tens of millions for an app that… well, here’s the description:

Yahoo was attracted to Summly’s core technology for automatically summarizing news articles. The technology, which included an algorithm for deriving the summaries, was created with help from SRI International, a Silicon Valley research-and development firm that has an artificial-intelligence lab and has an ownership stake in the startup….

In 2011, Mr. D’Aloisio founded his company, at the time called Trimit. He redesigned the app to automatically boil news articles down to 400-word summaries and re-launched it as Summly in late 2012 with help from SRI…

I thought, hey, I could have done that for Yahoo for half the money. And I wouldn’t have needed an app for it. It only takes seconds per story. I’ll admit, the slashing I used to do in composing rooms (and on computer screens) wasn’t always a work of art when I was in a hurry (which was most of the time) — but I kind of doubt this app is any more respectful of the writers’ precious words…

The passing of Roger Ebert, a great movie critic

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33ebert

This from his paper, the Chicago Sun-Times, a few minutes ago:

For a film with a daring director, a talented cast, a captivating plot or, ideally, all three, there could be no better advocate than Roger Ebert, who passionately celebrated and promoted excellence in film while deflating the awful, the derivative, or the merely mediocre with an observant eye, a sharp wit and a depth of knowledge that delighted his millions of readers and viewers.

“No good film is too long,” he once wrote, a sentiment he felt strongly enough about to have engraved on pens. “No bad movie is short enough.”

Ebert, 70, who reviewed movies for the Chicago Sun-Times for 46 years and on TV for 31 years, and who was without question the nation’s most prominent and influential film critic, died Thursday in Chicago. He had been in poor health over the past decade, battling cancers of the thyroid and salivary gland.

He
lost part of his lower jaw in 2006, and with it the ability to speak or eat, a calamity that would have driven other men from the public eye. But Ebert refused to hide, instead forging what became a new chapter in his career, an extraordinary chronicle of his devastating illness that won him a new generation of admirers. “No point in denying it,” he wrote, analyzing his medical struggles with characteristic courage, candor and wit, a view that was never tinged with bitterness or self-pity…

Ebert had announced a few days ago on his blog that cancer had struck again, and that he would be taking a “leave of presence,” dialing back his own involvement and running mostly reviews from others on his website. “I am not going away,” he said.

If only he could have kept his promise.

I had come to appreciate Ebert more than ever in recent years, as I embraced social media. He was an avid practitioner, Tweeting all hours of the day and night on all topics, using the new medium to make up for his inability to speak. I thought it great that he could do that, and not be cut off from the world.

But now he has been cut off from it. That’s sad news, and I thought I’d share it.

Why can Jagger still do it, but McCartney can’t?

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You younger folks will just have to bear with me for a few minutes. I’m a boomer, and to me this is a burning issue.

The news that the Rolling Stones are launching a new tour causes me to think again about something that’s been preying on my mind since last year.

Remember when Mick Jagger hosted “Saturday Night Live,” almost a year ago? Remember how awesome the two live sets he did were? He didn’t even have the Stones behind him — his accompanists were Foo Fighters on “19th Nervous Breakdown,” and Arcade Fire on the “The Last Time.” (I’d provide video, but for some reason — probably a complex set of reasons actually, having to do with multiple intellectual property issues — I can’t find any such clips.)

It was amazing. There he was, 69 years old and wrinkled as a prune, and he hadn’t lost a step. He could have done “Wild Horses” or “Angie,” but instead he went with high-energy songs from when he was a kid, and he was as good as ever. If anything, he was far more into the songs than he was in his 20s, when his stage presence was more on the cool side.

I know what you’re thinking — it’s drugs. Drugs that only a Rolling Stone can afford. Well, whatever it was, it was amazing.

And if it was drugs, then for some reason Paul McCartney doesn’t have access to them. Have you seen him the last couple of times he’s been on SNL? It’s really sad. The poor guy can’t sing anymore, which is tough to see. I mean, I’m rooting for him the whole time, because I know that no one loved being a Beatle more than he did, and he apparently wants so badly to have the same magic he had then, but he doesn’t. (He still had it when he performed here at Williams-Brice Stadium, and I’m glad I was there. But he doesn’t have it anymore.)

It hardly seems fair.

Top Five TV Shows about the Cold War (I’ll stop now)

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tinker-tailor-soldier-spy-alec-guinness_brownsuit

Alex Guinness as George Smiley.

Just to beat the topic from yesterday totally into the ground, here are my Top Five TV Shows About the Cold War:

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy – The Alex Guinness version, of course.
Smiley’s People – The sequel to Tinker, Tailor. I have both series on DVD at home.
Game, Set and Match – A series cobbled together from the first three novels in a Len Deighton trilogy of trilogies. It took some liberties, and I seem to recall hearing that Deighton hated it. This is possibly because the character that Ian Holm created for the series was quite different — a more tormented, stressed-out character — from the Bernard Samson in the novels. But I enjoyed the series anyway.
The Missiles of October – Worth watching if only for Martin Sheen’s version of Bobby Kennedy.
The Day After – A huge TV event at the time when it came out. Sort of the Cold War equivalent of “Roots.”

There’s sort of a lack of variety in this list, I’ll admit — the first three are spy series, and two by le Carre with the same chief protagonist. But I have to work with what TV gives me. And I really believe the first two are among the best things ever made for the tube.

“The Day After” — nuclear apocalypse in Kansas.

Top Five (and other) Cold War Movies

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Richard Burton as Alec Leamas in “The Spy Who Came In From The Cold”

Bryan Caskey has drawn up his Top Five Cold War Movies over at his blog, and I feel compelled to answer it. My perspective is a little different from his, because I grew up in the ’50s and ’60s, giving me not only different cultural touchstones, but a different feel for the Cold War itself.

Here’s my Top Five:

The Spy Who Came in from The Cold — This defines the genre. Starts and ends at the Berlin Wall. A lot of bad movies were made from good books in the ’60s, but this wasn’t one of them. It did a great job of capturing the atmosphere, the moral ambiguity and the deception-within-deception-within-deception plotline of LeCarre’s book.
Dr. Strangelove — I was torn between this and Fail-Safe, which was the same story without the comedy. But this was such an awesome piece of film-making, it had to go on the list. Strangelove got us to laugh at the things that caused our hair to stand on end in Fail-Safe. The link is to my favorite scene: “Now, then, Dimitri, you know how we’ve always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the Bomb…”
Our Man in Havana — I’m going for satirical again with this spoof of the spy genre. Both Alec Guinness and Ernie Kovacs. How do you beat that? Based on Graham Greene’s most enjoyable “entertainment” (which is what he called his less serious novels), which inspired le Carre’s The Tailor of Panama.
The Mouse That Roared — Yes, I’m going for the more obscure reference because Barry in High Fidelity (the ultimate authority for the science of Top Five lists) would sneer at any Top Five list that didn’t have one that no one else would think of. I’ll even admit that the movie wasn’t very good — although I enjoyed the book. This is about a tiny country with a medieval military capability that becomes the world’s greatest power by stealing a Doomsday Machine from the U.S. For Strangelove fans, this also has Peter Sellers in multiple roles.
The Manchurian Candidate — Paranoia is a huge part of what the Cold War was about, and this is the classic of that genre.

Another Five, in case you’d like a Top Ten:

Seven Days in May — In a way not really about the Cold War, except for the paranoia thing.
Fail-Safe – I initially had this in the Top Five, trying to be cool by picking on the less-obvious choice. I was going to say that “Awesome as it was, Strangelove was more about a sort of smartass 60s cultural sensibility than it was about the way real people felt about nuclear annihilation.” But I changed my mind.
The Ipcress File — Perhaps the all-time best Michael Caine vehicle, based on Len Deighton’s very best novel. Deighton’s book is breezily ironic, very hip, yet far more realistic than Bond.
The Lives of Others — A look at what life was like on the other side of the curtain.
WarGames — More of a movie about the then-new phenomenon of computer hackers than about the Cold War, but it still fits in the genre. Ferris Bueller meets Fail-Safe.

Also-rans, in no particular order:

The Third Man — This might have made the list, but I think it’s more about postwar black-marketeering than about the Cold War proper.
Stripes — Great fun, but too silly to make the Top Five list.
The Right Stuff — Not what you think of as “Cold War,” maybe, but what was it all about? Trying to prevent the godless Russkies from being able to drop nukes on us from space, like rocks from a highway overpass. An amazing job of turning a book that is mostly about the narration into an engaging film.
Red Dawn — A high school kid’s fantasy of World War III. I mean, wouldn’t every adolescent boy like to see the boredom of school interrupted by a shooting war in which he is the hero?
Twilight’s Last Gleaming — Didn’t we see Burt Lancaster play this character before, in “Seven Days in May”?
The Quiet American — The jaded European view of Americans as blundering do-gooders.
Blast from the Past — Bomb-shelter anxieties transformed into romantic comedy.
2010 — The sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey, this one wrongly guessed that we’d still be goin’ toe-to-toe with the Russkies nine years later. Best parts: Both Dave and Hal show up.

Ernie Kovacs playing minibottle chess in "Our Man in Havana."

Ernie Kovacs playing minibottle checkers in “Our Man in Havana.”

REALLY? Netflix thinks these are ‘like “Zero Dark Thirty”?’

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Some fret that the algorithms that surround us know too much about us. I don’t. Not yet.

Over the last few years, I’ve rated 2,383 movies on Netflix — so I really think I can claim to have given this thing a chance — and the service still doesn’t have a clue what I’m likely to like.

I guess there are just too many variables in what makes a motion picture enjoyable.

I find that Pandora does a somewhat better job of throwing me an occasional song I haven’t heard before, but like upon hearing. Don’t get me wrong — it’s not batting 1.000 or anything. But every once in a while, something I didn’t ask for makes me think yeahhh. It manages this more often than Netflix does. At least it seems that way. I haven’t kept a spreadsheet on it or anything.

Really, I like Netflix very much. It’s a great service, for what it does (both the DVD and instant sides). But what it does not do is understand my preferences. And I hold out little hope of it achieving that feat when it doesn’t have a clue what sorts of movies are “like ‘Zero Dark Thirty’.”

You’ve got to be kidding me. “Universal Soldier?” “Batman Forever?” “Kinky Boots?”

Here are some movies I would say are actually like “Zero Dark Thirty:”

“Black Hawk Down” — A true story featuring U.S. Special Forces troops in action.
“Body of Lies” — Also fictional, but it involves dusty, gritty intelligence work on the ground in the same region. It even has torture scenes, as I recall.
“Green Zone” — Much in the same genre as “Body of Lies.”
“Homeland” — OK, it’s TV and not the big screen, and fictional, but the main female character has a lot in common with the lead in “Zero,” and may actually be based on the same real-life woman.
“The Hurt Locker” — Same director, also set in the region, very similar feel (and a better movie, although “Zero” is good).

See where I’m going with this, Netflix? Probably not. Anyway, I see little reason to worry, based on this at least, that machines are reading my mind…

‘Jumping the shark:’ You keep using that phrase. I do not think it means what you think it means…

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In today’s WSJ, under the headline, “Jumping the sequester,” columnist Kimberley A. Strassel writes the following:

The phrase “jumping the shark” describes that gimmicky moment when something once considered significant is exposed as ludicrous. This is the week the White House jumped the sequester.

The precise moment came Tuesday, when the administration announced that it was canceling public tours of the White House, blaming budget cuts. The Sequesterer in Chief has insisted that cutting even $44 billion from this fiscal year will cause agonizing pain—airport security snarls, uninspected meat, uneducated children. Since none of those things has come to pass, the White House decided it needed an immediate and high-profile way of making its point. Ergo, it would deny the nation’s school kids a chance to view a symbol of America.

The act was designed to spark outrage against Republicans, yet the sheer pettiness of it instead provided a moment of clarity. Americans might not understand the technicalities of sequester, but this was something else entirely. Was the president actually claiming there was not a single other government item—not one—that could be cut instead of the White House tours? Really?

Yeahhh… I don’t think that’s jumping the shark. Do y’all.? That sounds to me like somebody wrote the headline first, and tried to force the column to fit it. Let’s look at the Wikipedia definition:

Jumping the shark is an idiom created by Jon Hein that is used to describe the moment in the evolution of a television show when it begins a decline in quality that is beyond recovery, which is usually a particular scene, episode, or aspect of a show in which the writers use some type of “gimmick” in a desperate attempt to keep viewers’ interest…

And here’s the origin:

The phrase jump the shark comes from a scene in the fifth season premiere episode of the American TV series Happy Days titled “Hollywood: Part 3“, written by Fred Fox, Jr.^[4] which aired on September 20, 1977. In the episode, the central characters visit Los Angeles, where a water-skiing Fonzie (Henry Winkler) answers a challenge to his bravery by wearing swim trunks and his trademark leather jacket, and jumping over a confined shark. The stunt was created as a way to showcase Winkler’s real life water ski skills.^[5]

For a show that in its early seasons depicted universally relatable adolescent and family experiences against a backdrop of 1950s nostalgia, this incident marked an audacious, cartoonish turn towards attention-seeking gimmickry. Initially a supporting character, the faddish lionization of an increasingly superhuman Fonzie became the focus of Happy Days. The series continued for seven years after Fonzie’s shark-jumping stunt, with a number of changes in cast and situations. However, it is commonly^[who?] believed that the show began a creative decline in this era, as writers ran out of ideas, and Happy Daysbecame a caricature of itself. As a nod to the episode, Henry Winkler’s character again jumped a shark in the 2003 show Arrested Development…

To me, that’s a pretty clear definition that the Strossel example doesn’t fit. You can call the White House cancellation of tours all kinds of things — in these parts, we’d call it a “Big Bird defense” — but it’s not jumping the shark.

That said, the very same Wikipedia entry I quote above gives an example, also involving Barack Obama, that I don’t think fits either:

In 2008 during the Obama presidential campaign, at a meeting of Democratic governors in Chicago, each governor was identified with a name plate while Senator Obama had a large seal – that looked official but was not.^[11] The New York Times op-ed columnist Frank Rich wrote “For me, Mr. Obama showed signs of jumping the shark two weeks back, when he appeared at a podium affixed with his own pompous faux-presidential seal”.^[12]

So what do I consider to be a perfect example of jumping the shark? This: When the Beverly Hillbillies went to England. Actually, that series jumped the shark several times; it was sort of a defining characteristic. It sort of did so when Jethro received his draft notice and costumed himself as Patton and bought a tank. It really, really did so when the whole cast jumped fictional universes, going to Hooterville to interact with characters from “Petticoat Junction” and “Green Acres.” (A radical change of venue can be a good sign that a shark is being jumped.)

In fact, those examples are so good that I have trouble coming up with any others that illustrate the concept so well, as I understand it. It’s not limited to iconic sitcoms, of course. And it can be translated to politics. When Bill Clinton played saxophone on Arsenio Hall seems a pretty clear example. If you go way back, there’s Richard Nixon’s “Sock it to me?” on “Laugh-In.”

But closing the White House to tours? Not so much…

Regret is hard to live with, even for a storm trooper

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Just thought I’d share this image, which I ran across while looking for a link for an earlier thread.

Regret is indeed hard to live with. Which make me wonder how Lucas can stand himself after making Episodes I-III…

Sorry, but ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ wasn’t Best Picture

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The Wall Street Journal editorial board has been upset with U.S. senators Feinstein, Levin and McCain for criticizing the makers of “Zero Dark Thirty” for making it look like torture was essential to getting Osama bin Laden.

Now, the editors blame the senators for the movie’s poor showing at the Oscars:

As no one should forget, Senators Dianne Feinstein, Carl Levin and John McCain wrote letters to Sony Pictures and the CIA charging that “Zero Dark Thirty” was a “grossly inaccurate and misleading” portrayal of the interrogation of al Qaeda detainees. Ms. Feinstein’s intelligence committee opened an inquiry into what the CIA told the filmmakers, and the letters coincided with a media attack led by those great believers in artistic free expression at the New Yorker magazine.

Well, mission accomplished. The film was among the best reviewed of 2012 and has done well at the box office. But the attacks had their desired effect of intimidating Hollywood. Director Kathryn Bigelow was denied an Oscar nomination and the film won only a single (shared) award for sound editing. The Oscar ceremonies were Sunday night.

A day later, Reuters reported that the Senate is dropping its investigation of the film and CIA cooperation with the filmmakers…

The WSJ’s reasoning seems to go like this: Feinstein and Levin are liberals (McCain and his experienced-based objections to torture are conveniently forgotten). Hollywood is full of liberals. So Hollywood was cowed into stiffing ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ by fear of straying from liberal orthodoxy. Or something.

But the editors are ignoring something: “Zero Dark Thirty” didn’t deserve Best Picture honors, or Best Director. It was good, even important (important enough that I don’t blame senators at all for taking a political stand on it). But Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker,” which did win the Best Picture honor in 2009, was a more impressive, highly original film.

And the torture scenes? Speaking artistically and not politically, they went on too long. Long enough that it’s perfectly understandable that someone who doesn’t want our national defense to depend on the mistreatment of prisoners to think a political point was being made, and to object to that point. If this had been a work of fiction, devoid of political content, I think most critics would say the interrogations scenes were a drag on the storytelling.

I actually think the point being made by the filmmakers was neutral. I don’t think they were saying torture is good or necessary. I thought they were just saying (oversaying), it happened. And it sorta kinda maybe helped find bin Laden. It’s something to throw into the mix of how we feel about all that. War, including asymmetrical war, is filled with moral ambiguities.

I think they thought it would have been dishonest to leave out that part. Maybe they were right. In any case, they did not make this year’s best picture. Not this time.

Now, changing the subject slightly — what should have been Best Picture? Well, I can’t judge that, because I haven’t seen “Argo.” But I can say with all confidence that I wouldn’t have given it to “Zero Dark Thirty” in the same year that “Lincoln” came out. And if a director was slighted this year, it was Steven Spielberg.

Stephen Colbert, promoting his sister’s candidacy

Macfarlane on the Oscars: Funny, offensive, both, or neither?

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Everyone’s buzzing about Seth Macfarlane’s performance hosting the Academy Awards last night. Such words as “sexist” and “racist” have been used.

But what did anyone expect? If anything, his material was significantly toned down from the stuff you can hear, and see depicted in cartoon form, on “The Family Guy” before prime time each evening. To call Macfarlane’s brand of humor sophomoric is to promote it several years past its middle-school level. That is, it’s the kind of humor you’d hear from a middle-schooler who was demonically quick and witty. Admittedly, Macfarlane’s material is the sort that makes people laugh, even if they’re feeling guilty while doing so.

Racism (we are all invited to laugh at Brian, the racist dog), graphic violence involving children, incest, and mockery of religion are pretty much standard fare on “The Family Guy.” (And at this point, I’m feeling pretty embarrassed for knowing all that.) Ditto with “Ted” — it’s funny, but don’t be fooled into letting the kids watch it just because it’s about a Teddy bear.

So explain to us why anyone would be shocked at his “We Saw Your Boobs” bit last night? From him, that’s pretty mild stuff.

At one point, a joke was made about how it would have been better to have engaged the services of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, who co-hosted the Golden Globes. Hey, no joke — they would have made people laugh without cringing.

But seriously, if you engage the services of Seth Macfarlane, this is what you get, at the very least. No sense moaning about it afterward.

Brad Warthen

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