Recently in Journalism Category

U.S. Senate apologizes for slavery and segregation: http://bit.ly/G46Cu. Bob Byrd breaks down on Senate floor. "Too soon. Too soon."

I think that's a funny joke. Normally, I find set-up/punch-line jokes the lowest form of humor (far below puns and slapstick in their paucity of imagination), and I regard them warily, not unlike the way Thoreau viewed "all enterprises that require new clothes." But I cracked up when I saw this tweet from Robert A. George. To find it funny, I guess you'd have to know that Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) is very, very old, and that he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan in his youth. But in the ad hominem '00s, many people would first look at the identity of the joke teller before deciding if it was humorous.

Robert A. George, eh? Wait a minute -- he's a conservative and a libertarian! He's black! He's a naturalized American citizen, born in Trinidad (and Tobago)! He's a Catholic! He's a blogger, a Twitterer, a Facebooker, a New York Post columnist, a stand-up comedian, a comic-book geek! Soooooo, of course he's going to make that joke about Bob Byrd, right?!?!

Saturday afternoon. Conservative/libertarian columnist, comic, blogger and self-proclaimed geek Robert A. George tweets and posts on Facebook: "Cripes! Iran is falling apart and even CNN Int'l is showing a packaged piece on a water-skiing squirrel!! #tcot #iranelection."

This is the world we live in. BBC had some real breaking news from Iran, which reportedly caused the Ahmadinejad regime to kick some of its reporters out of the country, block its satellite feeds, and otherwise hamper its coverage. But most of the real news was coming directly from the cell phones and laptops of Iranian citizens who found ways to circumvent Ahmadinejad's attempts to block access to unprocessed, "unofficial" information, especially on the Internet and sites like YouTube.

On Twitter, where #CNNFail and #Iranelection were top topics, tweets relayed options for bypassing government censorship:

PLEASE RT Functioning Iran proxies 218.128.112.18:8080 218.206.94.132:808 218.253.65.99:808 219.50.16.70:8080 #iranelection

good Web proxy!: http://orcade.ncad.fr/poxy-0.5b2/ #iranelection

CNet reported:

Even as Twitter became the best source for rapid-fire news developments from the front lines of the riots in Tehran, a growing number of users of the microblogging service were incredulous at the near total lack of coverage of the story on CNN, a network that cut its teeth with on-the-spot reporting from the Middle East.

For most of Saturday, CNN.com had no stories about the massive protests on behalf of Mir Hossein Mousavi, who was reported by the Iranian government to have lost to the sitting president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The widespread street clashes--nearly unheard of in the tightly controlled Iran--reflected popular belief that the election had been rigged, a sentiment that was even echoed, to some extent, by the U.S. government Saturday.

On Facebook and Twitter, many Iranians -- and supporters worldwide -- changed their profile pictures to the image above in solidarity. In an international gesture of protest, people were encouraged to wear green -- color of candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi's opposition party, which claims to have actually won the election -- on Monday.

UPDATES: Marc Armbinder offers advice on how we should always approach news, whether from newspapers, radio, network television, websites, blogs or Twitter: "Follow The Developments In Iran Like A CIA Analyst."

Armbinder again: "The Revolution Will Be Twittered":

Why hasn't Mousavi been arrested or killed? Iran's regime is thuggish, but I don't think it wants to risk further alienating Europe or China. And I surmise that because the Iranian government knows that the opposition -- maybe we should call them the silent majority? -- has ways of communicating and organizing outside of their control. Mousavi would become an instant martyr. Twitter, Facebook, blogs -- and the mainstream media -- are all colluding to keep hope alive for the Iranian people.

Tweeted (and Re-Tweeted) news flashes and "official news" from Fars News late early Monday (PST) below. Compare and contrast:

Nathan Lee was doing his job. He reviewed Kirby Dick's documentary "Outrage" for NPR.org and accurately reported that the film criticized former Idaho senator Larry Craig and Florida Governor Charlie Crist as hypocritical politicians with anti-gay voting records.

That is not news to anyone who listens to NPR, nor are the rumors about both men's sexuality. Craig is infamous for having been arrested for soliciting an undercover officer for gay sex in an Minneapolis airport restroom. Crist has publicly faced direct questions about his sexual orientation since 2005. Both are elected officials, public figures, who have -- by their own actions -- made their sexuality relevant to their job performance.

What would pundits and stand-up comedians do without their "Star Wars" analogies? Maureen Dowd liked to refer to the former vice president as "Darth Cheney." She recently asked George Lucas if that comparison was a mischaracterization:

Lucas explained politely as I listened contritely. Anakin Skywalker is a promising young man who is turned to the dark side by an older politician and becomes Darth Vader. "George Bush is Darth Vader," he said. "Cheney is the emperor."

Amy Davidson, at the New Yorker's News Desk, is having none of it ("Close Read: Dark Forces"):

Ryan Van Duzer reports for the Boulder Daily Camera from the heart of pot country: the University of Colorado. Bill O'Reilly's gonna love this.

Ah, reality. So malleable. I've seen a few documentaries and reality shows in my day, and I always enjoy watching how the filmmakers set about shaping "characters" and narratives from carefully chosen bits and pieces of footage, dialog and narration.

Take Susan Boyle, one of the hottest celebrities in the Western World since her appearance on BBC ITV's "Britain's Got Talent" last Saturday -- a performance that has now been seen by untold millions on YouTube. (One clip alone -- several are posted -- registers nearly 14 million views as I write this; a similar one of Paul Potts, the opera-singing mobile phone salesman from 2007, shows nearly 44 million views.)

If you haven't seen it yet, watch this version, which shows how Boyle's audition was set up for the television audience. (Is this show broadcast live, or edited later? How many cameras do they have in that auditorium? Watch how the reaction shots are inserted.) After making a joke about the one thing that's been missing from Glasgow is "talent," the hosts introduce the rather frumpy looking Boyle with comical music and a shot of her taking a big bite out of a sandwich. "Next up is a contestant who says she has what it takes to put Glasgow on the map," they say. The offscreen audience laughs. She's from West Lothian, 47 years old, unemployed but looking, never married ("Never been kissed," she says, "Shame -- but that's not an advert!").

Here's $10,000 in $100 bills.

Page Tutor used Google's free Sketchup software to visualize the massive amounts of "money" that threaten to sink the world economy... unless we get more of it circulating again.

Here's a million:

A trillion? See below...

... of impersonating a scientific theory. The 2005 federal court case was recounted in a 2007 NOVA documentary called "Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial" that re-aired on PBS this week (and can be viewed online here; full transcript here.) I recommend it as a detoxifying antidote to Ben Stein's risible 2008 "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed." Among my problems with that bait-and-switch doc was that it offered no evidence to suggest that ID should be considered a scientific theory any more than, say, creationism or astrology. Of course, there are good reasons for that -- the main one being that it was invented as a hasty response to the 1987 Supreme Court decision that found the teaching of creationism as science in public schools was a violation of the Establishment Clause of the US. Constitution.

"Darwin's Black Box" author Dr. Michael Behe, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, which promotes ID, testified under oath that his definition of alternative "scientific theory" would include astrology as well as Intelligent Design (but not creationism). It seems the irreducibly supernatural ID was born under a bad sign.

A few other highlights:

All men are created equal. All opinions aren't. Sure, anybody can hold one, and is free to express it. But of what value is an "opinion" that's based on faulty, insubstantial, incomplete, irrelevant or nonexistent information? Answer: None. In Harper's Mark Slouka writes ("A Quibble") about what may be the most important subject of our lifetimes... in my opinion:

A generation ago the proof of our foolishness, held up to our faces, might still have elicited some redeeming twinge of shame -- no longer. [...]

...[We] we feel, as if truth were a matter of personal taste, or something to be divined in the human heart, like love. I was raised to be ashamed of my ignorance, and to try to do something about it if at all possible. I carry that burden to this day, and have successfully passed it on to my children. I don't believe I have the right to an opinion about something I know nothing about -- constitutional law, for example, or sailing -- a notion that puts me sadly out of step with a growing majority of my countrymen, many of whom may be unable to tell you anything at all about Islam, say, or socialism, or climate change, except that they hate it, are against it, don't believe in it. Worse still (or more amusing, depending on the day) are those who can tell you, and then offer up a stew of New Age blather, right-wing rant, and bloggers' speculation that's so divorced from actual, demonstrable fact, that's so not true, as the kids would say, that the mind goes numb with wonder. "Way I see it is," a man in the Tulsa Motel 6 swimming pool told me last summer, "if English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it's good enough for us." [...]

Although perfectly willing to recognize expertise in basketball, for example, or refrigerator repair, when it comes to the realm of ideas, all folks (and their opinions) are suddenly created equal. [...]

Tom Brokaw, NBC News: "It's unfortunate for Vice President Cheney to have had this accident obviously, because there will be those who don't like him, who will be writing tomorrow that he had a Dr. Strangelove appearance as he appeared today in his wheelchair."

Brokaw brought it up. Judge for yourself. Did it occur to Brokaw that that this could have been a wily piece of black-hearted/suited satirical stagecraft on Cheney's part? Wonder what was in those boxes that he was reportedly moving -- himself -- when he injured his back. Shreddable secret documents, perhaps? Or could the former CEO of Halliburton not afford to hire movers?

(AP Photo)

UPDATE: Reports that the ex-VP was doing a little recreational waterboarding down by the Potomac when he slipped on the ice have not been confirmed.

Michael Sheen and Frank Langella are swell as David Frost and Richard Nixon in the adapted-from-the-stage-adaptation movie, but I feel -- and I believe the above clips demonstrate -- that these five minutes provide more compelling drama and suspense (and adrenaline) than the entire feature film. Frost presents himself as a much stronger, more flamboyant "prosecutor" than he is in the movie. And watch the incredible range and focus of Nixon's performance: the deliberate rhetorical emphases and repetitions; the flashes of steely anger and startling shifts into unctuousness/condescension when he seems like he could burst into inappropriate laugher or tears or flames; the (strategic?) digressions and circumlocutions; the hand-gestures, head-shakes, eye-blinks; the splintered syntax and mispronunciations-under-pressure when he gets flustered... At least you can tell (unlike certain modern politicians one could name) that he's actually thinking as he talks, sifting through evidence and debate tactics and talking points in his head, not just going blank and letting his lips flap. THIS is an endlessly fascinating character in peak performance mode...

* * * *

"Frost/Nixon" and "Milk" are glossy products of the Hollywood awards season, prestige pictures in the grand red-carpet tradition of fashioning uplifting, larger-than-life entertainments out of semi-fictionalized semi-recent historical events. The thing is, both have been treated far more thrillingly on documentaries that are available on DVD. Think "Frost/Nioxon" provided compelling drama, suspense and astoundingly rich performances? It can't approach the actual interviews , which have just been released as "Frost/Nixon: The Original Watergate Interviews." Think "Milk" was a moving look at a charismatic public figure and a key period in American civil rights? You have not begun to be moved until you see Rob Epstein's Oscar-winning "The Times of Harvey Milk" (clips after the jump), which is also a more complex, less hagiographic portrait of the man and his heady times.

Mark Newman of the Department of Physics and Center for the Study of Complex Systems at the University of Michigan has created some electoral cartograms of the United States that reflect the reality and complexity of our voting patterns much more effectively than those misrepresentative red state/blue state maps to which we have become accustomed. This one, for example, is based on 2008 results by county and population. Note that there's a lot of purple. You won't see this balance on Fox News, where the "real America" is supposedly bright screaming red. (In fact, the pure-blue population centers are much larger than the pure-red ones.)

Newman writes of the above: "As this map makes clear, large portions of the country are quite evenly divided, appearing in various shades of purple, although a number of strongly Democratic (blue) areas are visible too, mostly in the larger cities. There are also some strongly Republican areas, but most of them have relatively small populations and hence appear quite small on this map."

(tip: Andrew Sullivan)

Click below for my own newly redrawn map of Colbert Nation.

I saw Oliver Stone's "W." a week or two ago, and I almost forgot. Believe me, it felt even more worn out before the election. I kept thinking I'd seen it before in some other form. Not just as in every day for the last eight years, or as in some other slab of Stone. This one reminded me of Woody Allen's "Zelig" or Robert Zemeckis's "Forrest Gump" -- about a nobody who stumbles into history. Then I realized it was more like a reworking of Hal Ashby and Jerzy Kosinski's "Being There" -- the story of a vacancy.

That impression was magnified Tuesday night as I watched Barack step up to fill it. In that one solemn but hopeful election night speech in Grant Park he did more to steady, strengthen and solidify the union for tough times than I've seen any president do in my lifetime. It wasn't just a matter of commanding screen space or being ready for his close-up (although the camera loves him). But after so many years of looking at a skittish hamster-in-the-headlights, squinting or staring blankly into the lens, how dramatic it was to see somebody there at last -- a solid somebody with a firm sense of who he is, and what it means to lead and to strive and to inspire. No smugness, no self-congratulation, no condescension, no desperation. A grown-up. I felt an enormous sense of confidence and relief. And I didn't feel alone in feeling that.

Which brings me back to the hollowness of W. and "W."...

"W." is the third in what could turn out to be Oliver Stone's five-part trilogy of movies containing pronounceable capital letters in the titles (after "JFK" and "U-Turn"), if you don't count "Natural Born Killers" and "World Trade Center," sometimes known as "NBK" and "WTC," respectively, in which case it may already be the fifth film in a proposed diptych about the tetralogy of power.

I haven't seen the movie yet, but the timing seems inopportune. Few public figures have faded into irrelevance more quickly in recent months than George W. Bush, whose popularity and name-recognition numbers are now running slightly behind Sanjaya, and I'm not sure I remember who that was.

Before I get to the movie part of this post, I want to toast Paul Krugman. He is one of the few public figures I've ever considered a personal hero. (Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are, too, and I'm not joking.)

In the bleakest hours of the new millennium -- through 9/11, Iraq, soul-shattering scandals, national elections, and impending financial disasters -- Krugman stood as a beacon of hope and, if you'll pardon the expression, moral clarity in what Nick Lowe (and Elvis Costello) memorably called "the darkness of insanity."

Hired in 1999 as the New York Times economic columnist, Krugman wound up doing what so many journalists, even at his own paper, were failing to do. He reported. Not just what people said, but how what they said compared to independently verifiable reality. Week after week, column after column, Krugman was virtually alone (alongside Knight-Ridder, NPR and "The Daily Show") in pointing out, and explaining the significance of, relevant facts that so many didn't care to notice, even when they were right there in plain sight -- and in the public record, if anyone bothered to pay attention.

He wasn't just a good reporter but a fine critic.

When I first tried to understand what the whole financial meltdown was about, it sounded to me like some kind of perpetual motion machine -- a black box that reversed the first law of thermodynamics ("econo-dynamics"?) to produce energy from nothing, or money from debt. Turns out the principles behind the "financial instruments" that caused the collapse were indeed crafted in part by physicists and mathematicians who designed complex formulas that defied real-world understanding, but that appeared to guarantee profits out of nothing.

Here's my quick take on the smoke-and-mirrors magic-of-the-marketplace that deregulation made possible at the turn of the last century (y'all remember Enron) and how it's manifesting itself in today's financial crises -- using clips from CBS's "60 Minutes" report, "Wall Street's Shadow Market", (10/6/08) and Alex Gibney's documentary, "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" (2005).

Michael Cera, on his decision to act in "Juno" (or "Juneau"):

"Well, I had a feeling when I took the part that something like that would happen, that Sarah Palin would run and her teen would be pregnant, and so I'm glad that it finally was fulfilled."

☺☺☺☺

The Fargo Interview, with Marge Gunderson:

Gosh darn it, whether ya just love her or ya can't stand her, there's something about that Sarah Palin that's got everybody talkin' -- whether it's tryin' to talk her kinda plain ol' "Say it ain't so, Joe Sixpack" Hockey Mom talk, or just tryin' to figure out what the heck the gal is sayin'! Can ya tell what she thinks she means when she flaps that lipstick, or do ya just like the sparkle motion she makes when the words come out? Get back to me on that! Anyways, here we go again, with a buncha ways of looking at that Sarah Palin Talk that everybody's talkin' about:

Linguist Steven Pinker, "Everything You Heard Is Wrong," New York Times, October 4, 2008:

Since the vice presidential debate on Thursday night, two opposing myths have quickly taken hold about Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska. The first, advanced by her supporters, is that she made it through a gantlet of fire; the second, embraced by her detractors, is that her speaking style betrays her naïveté. Both are wrong. [...]

But it would be unfair to question the authenticity of her accent or to use it as a measure of her intellect or sophistication. The dialect is certainly for real. Listeners who hear the Minnewegian sounds of the characters from "Fargo" when they listen to Ms. Palin are on to something: the Matanuska-Susitna Valley in Alaska, where she grew up, was settled by farmers from Minnesota during the Depression.

The communal Parallax View film criticism blog, coordinated by Sean Axmaker, has resurrected Richard T. Jameson's provocative, penetrating "Apocalypse Now" review, originally published in the Seattle Weekly (then known only as The Weekly) October 17, 1979. I think it's the most lucid thing anyone's ever written about the movie, and should be required reading after every screening as a way of ensuring substantive discussion.

Jameson's piece illuminates essential truths about "Apocalypse" (and, I think, about Coppola's body of work), with a precision few critics have been willing or able to explore. You may want to argue with it (and by all means go ahead!), but if you read it closely I think it will show you things you may already have felt, even if you never quite noticed them before. That's true for me, anyway. I've just re-read it for the first time in almost 30 years, and I feel it's been there, under my skin, the whole time:

"Apocalypse Now" is a dumb movie that could have been made only by an intelligent and talented man. It pushes its egregiousness with such conviction and technical sophistication that, upon first viewing, I immediately resolved to withhold firm judgment until I'd seen the film again: perhaps I'd missed some crucial irony, some ingenious framework that, properly understood, would convert apparent asininity to audacity. I didn't find it. It isn't there. What is there is the evidence of a reasonably talented filmmaker having spectacularly overextended himself -- Francis Ford Coppola who, having had a toney pop epic widely accepted as great cinema, felt he was ready to make "Citizen Kurtz."

From a commencement address by the late David Foster Wallace at Kenyon University, May 21, 2005:

There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: "Look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was fifty below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'" And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. "Well then you must believe now," he says, "After all, here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp."

The excerpt below is from a piece I wrote at MSN Movies about what films of the past can teach us about the politics of the present. It's called Lights, Camera, Election! Political lessons we learned from the movies:

Events are more carefully staged and scripted than ever, and the mainstream media cover the photo ops, "press conferences" and "debates" as if they were actually news. Even Baghdad can be just another studio back lot: McCain claimed to "walk freely" in a market there and complained Americans weren't getting the full picture of U.S. successes in Iraq -- neglecting to mention his escort of 100 soldiers, three Blackhawk helicopters and two Apache gunships, conveniently off-camera.

With an eye toward Kevin Costner's "Swing Vote" (and Oliver Stone's "W."), I've rounded up a focus group of eight educational movies about politics (though many more could be added to the list): "The Candidate," "Election," "Primary Colors," "Nashville," "Bulworth," "Wag the Dog," "Homecoming" and (of course!) "Duck Soup."

Hey, remember the year they released "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull"? Where were you when the movie of "Sex and the City" came out? Remember when Entertainment Weekly did a 63-page spread about the former HBO show the week before the feature film came out? Oh, and what about the big "Chronicles of Narnia" sequel? It was such a hot property they made everybody go through security -- with metal detectors and everything. What if someone had made a shaky-cam bootleg of it 36 hours before it opened to the masses? Whoa!

Then, just a couple weeks ago, people lined up for days to catch the first midnight showings of "The Dark Knight." Oh, maybe that was last week. Once upon a time these things seemed like kind of a big deal, and now they all seem so three months ago.

Yesterday, Nathan Lee sent out an e-mail to colleagues in which he announced:

In great Village Voice tradition, I was abruptly laid off today for "economic reasons." My employment at the paper ends immediately: someone else, alas, will be tasked with specifying the precise shade of periwinkle frosting atop the cupcakes in "My Blueberry Nights."

And so I am, as they say, "looking for work," though presumably not as a staff film critic as such jobs no longer appear to exist.

In the last 24 hours, Lee's lamentable departure and the whole moribund notion of "the professional movie critic" have been passionately discussed (at The House Next Door, The Reeler, and elsewhere). But before we get to the latter: Nathan Lee, a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, is a perfervid cinephile (I hope he'll appreciate that phrase), a writer whose insights and observations are penetrating, often pointed and even more often hilarious. A few highlights:

On certain homophobic but ostensibly (and patronizingly) pro-gay reactions to "Brokeback Mountain": "If I hear one more straight critic complain that 'Brokeback Mountain' isn't particularly gay, I'm gonna spit on my hand, lube up my c---, and f--- him in the b---."

On "Transformers": "Director Michael Bay never met a rhetorical apocalypse he didn't love. Dude could film a round of Jenga with greater shock and awe than the collapse of the World Trade Center. There are mini-robots hiding inside his mega-robots. His lens flares have lens flares. He evidently controls the magic hour at a flick of a switch, and flips it willy-nilly for 'poetic effect.' In what may constitute the zaniest authorial signature in contemporary cinema, he has a habit of arresting an action set piece in order to indulge outlandishly backlit, monumentally pointless romantic interludes."

On "Zodiac: "... 'Zodiac' is the most information-packed procedural since 'JFK,' though far more restrained when it comes to theorizing.... The result is an orgy of empiricism, a monumental geek fest of fact-checking, speculation, deduction, code breaking, note taking, forensics, graphology, fingerprint analysis, warrant wrangling, witness testimony, phone calls, news reports. 'I felt like I was stuck in a filing cabinet for three hours,' complained one viewer. Exactly!"

On ""I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry": "Tremendously savvy in its stupid way, 'I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry' is as eloquent as 'Brokeback Mountain,' and even more radical. 'The gay cowboy movie' liberated desires latent in the classic western, and made them palpable (and palatable) by channeling them into the strictures of another genre, romantic tragedy. Progressive values were advanced by a retreat to a traditional mode of storytelling, the love that dare not speak its name rendered intelligible through the universal language of the upscale weepy. [...]

I know, I'm sorry, that's two Entertainment Weekly covers in a row, but how was I supposed to avoid mentioning this? Where's the YouTube mash-up? I'd make it myself, but I don't really want to. I never thought of Anton Chigurh or Daniel Plainview as "Bad Boys," but...

From "Three Kinds of Violence: Zodiac, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood" (January 25, 2008):

Like the chess-playing avatar of Death in Ingmar Bergman's "The Seventh Seal," to whom he has been compared, Chigurh exhibits the occasional glimmers of personality -- pride, arrogance, annoyance, determination -- as do Zodiac and Plainview, but he never succumbs to the latter's fits of dudgeon. He kills not from anger, or even for money, but because it is his nature. Plainview is a petty bully, his unmanageable fury a sign of weakness that Chigurh would consider frivolous and self-indulgent. (That said, let no one suggest a "Chigurh vs. Plainview" sequel, please.)

The "Alien" and "Predator" franchises are owned by Fox. Both "NCFOM" and "TWBB" are Miramax/Paramount Vantage releases (and they were both shot in Marfa, TX!). Will Javier Bardem's and Daniel Day-Lewis's people return the studio execs' phone calls?

"[Director Tim Burton] saw the picture as an homage to old Universal horror flicks ('Frankenstein,' 'The Black Cat'), creepy silent-film melodramas (any number of Lon Chaney spine-tinglers), and Hammer horror films (pulpy fare from the '50s and '60s). Both Burton and Depp say there are major nods to Peter Lorre's 'Mad Love' performance in Sweeney. Oh, and that shock of white in Depp's hair? A sign of Todd's trauma — and possibly a nod to Humphrey Bogart's skunk stripe in his lone horror picture, 'The Return of Dr. X.,' a Burton favorite. (Plus Depp says he's got a nephew with a white streak.)"
-- Entertainment Weekly (November 9, 2007)

"Mr. Depp’s Sweeney isn’t a regular guy either. With a Susan Sontag patch of white streaking his pompadour, ghostly skin and distraught eyes, this Sweeney is both wretched and mad."
-- The New York Times (November 4, 2007)

Bulletin: Johnny Depp plays the title role in a Tim Burton film version of Stephen Sondheim's "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street" -- and he's not a regular guy! In fact, he's "both wretched and mad," which (from the way the Times reports it) must be an entirely new take on the character. The Demon Barber, that is. Bet Sondheim wishes he'd thought of that.

But what of that mysterious shock of white hair that leaves the Times and EW writers stretching for an antecedent? Bogart in "Dr. X"? Sure, OK. Susan Sontag? Somebody needs to get out of New York more often. Hey, why not JoBeth Williams in the latter part of "Poltergeist"?

You know there's a pretty obvious one that a fan of James Whale's "Frankenstein" and its sequel could not help but recognize, if only because it's the most famous streak of white hair in all of movie history...

(All will be revealed after the jump...)

Regarding issues raised by Brian De Palma and "Redacted" (see below): Here are two frame grab from Woody Allen's 1980 feature "Stardust Memories," a United Artists release. The movie is a Felliniesque comedy (it starts right off as a parody of "8 1/2"), not a documentary. The blown-up image on the wall was taken a dozen years before "Stardust Memories" (February 1, 1968) during the Tet Offensive by Associated Press photographer Eddie Adams in Saigon.

The man with the gun is South Vietnamese National Police Chief General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan. The man in the plaid shirt, who is or is about to be shot in the head (his death is shown in NBC News footage taken at the same time), is thought to be Nguyễn Văn Lém (or possibly Le Cong Na), and was either a Viet Cong officer or a political operative. His face was disfigured because he had been beaten. The title of the photo, which became instantly famous around the world, is "General Nguyen Ngoc Loan Executing a Viet Cong Prisoner in Saigon" and it won a Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography in 1969. It was widely reprinted and was used as a symbolic image by the anti-war movement.

Adams later wrote in Time magazine:

The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths... What the photograph didn't say was, 'What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American soldiers?'

Although a number of "galleries and artists" are acknowledged in the end credits of "Stardust Memories" for the use of photos and artworks in the film, the source for this picture is not cited. The film does contain a standard disclaimer, reading: "The story, all names, characters and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. No identification with actual persons is intended or should be inferred."

Consider: If a filmmaker like, say, Brian De Palma, had used actual images of dead and injured Vietnamese war casualties in one of his fictionalized, semi-pseudo-documentary features like "Greetings" (1969) or "Hi, Mom!" (1970), would he or the films' producers or distributors have run a significant risk of being sued by the victims or their families? Are the legal or ethical issues any different now, with the carnage in Iraq? Why or why not? A few things to mull over regarding the latest "Redacted" scandal/controversy/promotional gimmick:

I suspect that De Palma was quite consciously out for publicity at the New York Film Festival press conference for "Redacted" Monday, when he accused Mark Cuban of HDNet and/or Magnolia Pictures of "redacting" the images of actual war casualties in his film's final montage. And it worked. Here's a movie about documentary reporting and amateur video and blogging of the occupation of Iraq and... look! IFC has posted a viral YouTube video of the NYFF confrontation between De Palma and Magnolia Pictures president Eammon Bowles that has been featured (even embedded) on sites such as Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, Movie City Indie, GreenCine Daily, spout blog, jürgen fauth’s muckworld and I don't know how many other outlets including... well, the site you're looking at right now.

How much more meta do you want to get?

Bowles denies he was in on any "staging." But De Palma? Isn't that what he does? He provokes, he fakes, he toys with what's genuine and what's phony to the point where the distinctions become tricky or even meaningless. If his role in the press conference, at least, wasn't part of a "Be Black, Baby" performance piece (see "Hi, Mom!") then it sure ought to have been. And even if it wasn't, it still is. Spontaneous, pre-meditated, both, neither -- it's still a spectacle designed for the cameras and the audience.

But that's not really the most important issue, is it? De Palma says he got the images for the montage sequence either off the Internet or otherwise, and that they are photos of real people, with real injuries, that photographers took in Iraq. Except for a couple pictures created specifically for "Redacted" -- an wounded pregnant woman featured earlier in the movie and the victim of the fictionalized, (re-)enacted rape and murder -- the photos are meant to be perceived as shockingly unfiltered, and/or to further the movie's strategy of pushing the viewer to question what is real (I suppose I really should put quotation marks around that word in this context) and what has been composed for the movie you're watching. In the version of "Redacted" shown at the Toronto and New York Film Festivals, and perhaps in Venice and elsewhere, the faces of the actual victims have been blacked out -- as if someone had taken a marker and scribbled over their eyes to conceal their identities. (The logo of a YouTube-lookalike site shown in the movie has been similarly "redacted.")

De Palma says he wants to use the montage with the unredacted faces. Bowles says (in comments posted at Movie City Indie):

the sole reason that the photos are redacted, is that it is legally indefensible to use someone's unauthorized photo in a commercial work. any claim to the contrary is either hopelessly naive or willfully false. And any indemnification does not preclude getting sued, and considering the asset bases of cuban and wagner versus depalma, there's no issue about who's purses will be attacked (not to mention the presumption of agreeing to the image of one of your loved one's mutilated body living on in the world wide media).

Brian De Palma is neither naive nor stupid. He knows what Bowles says is true -- and that even if a suit went to court and the producers were able to successfully argue that their use of the photos was journalistic in intent, even within the context of a non-documentary commercial feature film, the cost of fighting such a lawsuit would be significant. In fact, "Redacted" announces itself as a "visual document" of "imagined events" (I'm not sure I remember the exact language used in the opening titles, but I believe that's close), and as such does not attempt to present any factual documentation for those events. De Palma also knows that, while "Redacted" plays with documentary, web, home video and other techniques and formats, it can't help but be an exploitation movie too, no matter how serious its concerns. It's right there in the title: Come see what has been forbidden for you to see.

Again, that's what De Palma does....

HEADLINE; "Lohan defends herself after arrest

AP, LOS ANGELES (July 24, 2007) -- Lindsay Lohan says she's innocent.

The 21-year-old actress was arrested and released on bail for investigation of misdemeanor driving under the influence and with a suspended license, and felony cocaine possession, early Tuesday in Santa Monica, less than two weeks after completing her second trip to rehab.

"I am innocent ... did not do drugs they're not mine. I was almost hit by my assistant Tarin's mom I appreciate everyone giving me my privacy," Lohan wrote in an e-mail to "Access Hollywood" host Billy Bush, the show reported on its Web site Tuesday night.

Police found cocaine in one of Lohan's pockets during a pre-booking search, Sgt. Shane Talbot said. Police initially said Lohan was also being booked for investigation of transporting a narcotic but later said she was not.

Police received a 911 call from the mother of Lohan's former personal assistant saying that Lohan was chasing her in an SUV, said Lt. Alex Padilla. The assistant had quit hours before, he said.

Authorities found Lohan and the woman in a "heated debate" in the parking lot of Santa Monica's Civic Auditorium at about 1:30 a.m.

Lohan's arrest comes as she still faces DUI allegations connected to a Memorial Day weekend hit-and-run crash in Beverly Hills. The actress completed more than six weeks in rehab less than two weeks ago, and had checked into a recovery clinic in January.

She had worn an alcohol-monitoring ankle bracelet since her July 13 release from rehab and was tested daily to support her sobriety, her attorney, Blair Berk, said. She said Lohan had relapsed and was receiving medical care at an undisclosed location. Lohan's publicist, Leslie Sloane Zelnik, had no comment.

This story moved me to write a song, to the tune of "Unforgettable":

Uninsurable, that's what you are
Always crashing in your fancy car
Tabloid photos, so embarrassing
Flash your breasts when you're out Paris-ing
Media whore is a role you adore, but you're

Unemployable for picture work
Unprofessional, and quite a jerk
Keep the cast and crew awaiting you
And you wonder why they're hating you
Fear next year, you're carbon-dating your career

Unreliable, and more each day
Less than "adequite" in every way
Stanwyck wore an anklet to seduce
Not to monitor her booze abuse
You're a boor, a poor excuse for loose, too

Uninsurable, in Calvin Klein
Unendurable, no sign of spine
Famous for your notoriety
Not ability, insobriety
Pie-eyed claims of future piety, pooh!

Uninsurable, such a cliché
Scourge of SAG, Double-, and Triple-A
Liquored-up but not Anonymous
"Lindsay" has become synonymous
With pathetic DUI arrests, eeww...

See also: Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Denials Go Better Without Coke

Television network and cable "news" in a nutshell. From The Onion today, the Wall Street Journal tomorrow:

ATLANTA—Last week, after a reported 65 million Americans learned of the bipartisan immigration bill with the breaking news report "Mexicans Stay," it became apparent that the much- ballyhooed 24-second news cycle had come into its own. [...]

CNN is widely credited with initiating the acceleration of the modern news cycle with the fall 2006 debut of its spin-off channel CNN:24, which provides a breaking news story, an update on that story, and a news recap all within 24 seconds. In addition to creating its groundbreaking format, CNN:24 broke many important stories with reports such as "Ford No Money Everyone Fired," "Iraq Bomb Kill Truck," "Country Hates Bush," "Dow High Now," and "Squirrel Water Skis."

"TV news reporting has always been about breaking the story down into only the barest, most salient facts, but the breakneck pace of contemporary reportage doesn't allow for that anymore," said Professor Robert Kubey, director of the Center for Media Studies at Rutgers University. [...]

A typical [MSNBC] News Moment segment includes seven seconds of lead stories, four seconds of developing news, the "International Second," "Weather on the 00:00:13s with Bob Van Dorn," "The Fastest Four Seconds in Sports," a two-second top stories recap, and wraps with four seconds of mixed entertainment and lifestyle pieces. In larger markets such as New York and Los Angeles, this last portion may be preempted by local news.

Dave Kehr points out errors in the New York Times story about the future of 3-D by Sharon Waxman (the Judy Miller of showbiz reporting), which Kehr describes as "riddled with errors and misperceptions, to the point where it is actively misleading." Not the first time for Waxman, and it won't be the last. (I had to stop reading her "Rebels on the Backlot" book because it was likewise riddled with factual errors and such gross misunderstandings of how the movie business works that it led her to draw preposterous conclusions about what she witnessed or was told.)

There's a classic line in the Waxman article from Springsteen/"Titanic" producer Jon Landau: “The screen has always been an emotional barrier for audiences. Good 3-D makes the screen go away. It disappears, and you’re looking at a window into a world.”

Yeah, that damned screen. If only it weren't there to present an emotional barrier for us. (Maybe if we removed it -- and the back wall of the theater -- the projector could just show the movie into 3-D "reality" and allow us to really feel the emotions the movie is trying to convey!) It's like the way those blasted audio speakers get in the way of our emotional involvement in recorded music. Gotta get past that...

DK also refers us to a hilariously profane (i.e., Tarantinoesque) account of the "Death Proof" press conference in Cannes by Rob Nelson of the Minneapolis/St. Paul City Pages. Excerpt:

Not that I don't appreciate the privilege of seeing a longer "Death Proof"—I positively adored it at 87 minutes on the bottom-half of the ill-fated "Grindhouse" double bill. But whoever encouraged the Cannes Film Festival to advertise its new cut at "2h07" (i.e., 127 minutes)—director Quentin Tarantino, perhaps, or (more likely) the Weinstein Co.'s Stuntman Harv—is practically begging for a long ride on the fuckin' roof of the white Dodge Challenger, sans straps. I mean, the goddamn thing is no fuckin' longer than 113 tops—I fuckin' timed it—but that didn't stop Stuntman Harv from bum-rushing the Death Proof press conference yesterday to say that "you're missing the essence of Tarantino" at 87 (pffff...), and that the new cut, when it's released internationally, "will dwarf Grindhouse—trust me." Fuck, man. Does anyone, even Tarantino, trust Harvey Weinstein at this point?

Near the end of the press conference, which had QT literally sweating with enthusiasm for his movie and its many sources, a journalist asks Monsieur Grindhouse how he feels about writers having been requested by Harvey's crew to pay $1,500 apiece for a seat at the Cannes "Death Proof" junket. [...]

... As you might've guessed, gorgeous Butterfly (Vanessa Ferlito) finally does her big Texas Chili Parlor lapdance for Kurt Russell's icy-hot villain in a scene that QT invests with as much meta-movie passion as a fuckin' car chase or shootout or samurai showdown. Butterfly's tailfeather-shakin' shit is ridiculously, hilariously hot—even, it seems, for the lady from Uzbekistan who pipes up during the press conference to thank QT for his kick-ass female-empowerment movie on behalf of "all the women of Central Asia."...

I realized as I was posting this that I'd assigned it two categories: "TV" and "Journalism." Well, I haven't associated those two terms for years -- with the exception of "Frontline," last week's definitive and indispensable "Bill Moyers' Journal" ("Buying the War," which you can watch/explore here), "The Daily Show," "The Colbert Report" and the occasional "60 Minutes." An Indiana University School of Journalism analysis reminded me of what passes for "journalism" on TV these days -- particularly on the Fox Skews Channel. The study finds that Fox comedian Bill O'Reilly uses an insult on the average of once every 6.8 seconds during the "Talking Points Memo" segment of his TV show. (I, on the other hand, use a mere 1.5 insults per sentence when writing about O'Reilly.)

From a summary of the report, "Villains, Victims and the Virtuous in Bill O'Reilly's 'No Spin Zone'" -- which offers a hilarious chart tracking O'Reilly's use of various propaganda devices and rhetorical fallacies:

Bill O'Reilly may proclaim at the beginning of his program that viewers are entering the "No Spin Zone," but a new study by Indiana University media researchers found that the Fox News personality consistently paints certain people and groups as villains and others as victims to present the world, as he sees it, through political rhetoric.

The IU researchers found that O'Reilly called a person or a group a derogatory name once every 6.8 seconds, on average, or nearly nine times every minute during the editorials that open his program each night.

"It's obvious he's very big into calling people names, and he's very big into glittering generalities," said Mike Conway, assistant professor in the IU School of Journalism. "He's not very subtle. He's going to call people names, or he's going to paint something in a positive way, often without any real evidence to support that viewpoint."

Maria Elizabeth Grabe, associate professor of telecommunications, added, "If one digs further into O'Reilly's rhetoric, it becomes clear that he sets up a pretty simplistic battle between good and evil. Our analysis points to very specific groups and people presented as good and evil."

For their article in the spring issue of Journalism Studies, Conway, Grabe and Kevin Grieves, a doctoral student in journalism, studied six months worth, or 115 episodes, of O'Reilly's "Talking Points Memo" editorials using propaganda analysis techniques made popular after World War I.

A 2005 Annenberg Public Policy Center survey found that while 30 percent of Americans viewed Washington Post and Watergate reporter Bob Woodward as a journalist, 40 percent of respondents considered O'Reilly to be a journalist. [...]

Using analysis techniques first developed in the 1930s by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis, Conway, Grabe and Grieves found that O'Reilly employed six of the seven propaganda devices nearly 13 times each minute in his editorials. His editorials also are presented on his Web site and in his newspaper columns.

The seven propaganda devices include:

* Name calling -- giving something a bad label to make the audience reject it without examining the evidence;
* Glittering generalities -- the oppositie of name calling;
* Card stacking -- the selective use of facts and half-truths;
* Bandwagon -- appeals to the desire, common to most of us, to follow the crowd;
* Plain folks -- an attempt to convince an audience that they, and their ideas, are "of the people";
* Transfer -- carries over the authority, sanction and prestige of something we respect or dispute to something the speaker would want us to accept; and
* Testimonials -- involving a respected (or disrespected) person endorsing or rejecting an idea or person.

The same techniques were used during the late 1930s to study another prominent voice in a war-era, Father Charles Coughlin. His sermons evolved into a darker message of anti-Semitism and fascism, and he became a defender of Hitler and Mussolini. In this study, O'Reilly is a heavier and less-nuanced user of the propaganda devices than Coughlin.

Oddly, this precis does not mention one of O'Reilly's favorite methods, the Straw Man argument in which he presents a preposterous argument, attributes it to someone else, and then shoots it down, as in: Democrats hate America and want the US to be ruled by Islamofascists -- or would, if they actually believed in God or Yaweh or Allah! That's just wrong!

Summary and full report here.

Senator Joseph Biden praised (or faintly damned) Senator Barack Obama last week by calling him "the first sort of mainstream African-American [presidential candidate], who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy." OK, we know Jesse Jackson's record isn't exactly squeaky clean, what with the "Hymietown" and infidelity/paternity scandals and all. (I'm assuming that Biden was talking about the cleanliness of candidates' public images, not their personal hygiene.) Shirley Chisolm, Elizabeth Dole, Hillary Clinton and Carol Moseley Braun are not guys. Al Sharpton is not all that mainstream (how many people outside New York know who he is?) and -- at least when wearing a track suit -- not particularly nice-looking.

So, that leaves Obama, who is male and partly African-American. (He was born in Hawaii to a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas). He may also be all those other things Biden said, but it was the "African-American" part and the "articulate" part that got Biden in the most trouble. Obama said he didn't think Biden was making a subconscious racial slur. But as Lynette Clemetson wrote in a piece called "The Racial Politics of Speaking Well" in Sunday's New York Times: "Being articulate must surely be a baseline requirement for a former president of The Harvard Law Review.... It would be more incredible, more of a phenomenon, to borrow two more of the senator’s puzzling words, if Mr. Obama were inarticulate."

Good point. But if the former president of the Harvard Law Review cannot properly be described as "articulate," then who can? Just because somebody has achieved a certain position in life does not necessarily mean that person is articulate ("Expressing oneself easily in clear and effective language: an articulate speaker."). Clemetson notes that President Bush has also called Obama "articulate" -- which reminds me of when Bush called the late Gerald Ford "decent" and "competent." Mr. Bush went to Yale University (and is President of the United States of America) and yet he is about as articulate as Lindsay "Be Adequite" Lohan. Listen to him talk sometime. He appears to be painfully unaware of the meanings of the words he attempts to pronounce -- especially, perhaps, "decent," "competent" and "articulate." (Some Disassembly Required.) From his mouth, those words sound like insults. Given his record and the way he speaks, what indication do we have that he understands them?

I'm supposed to be "on vacation" this week, but this was just too good. People are always complaining about studies that simply "prove" the obvious, but in-depth studies and analysis are absolutely needed in a country where majorities of people believe things that are factually wrong (say, that Saddam did indeed have WMDs) or disbelieve things that have long ago been demostrated to be true (say, evolution). So, here comes a journalism study from Indiana University that finds news coverage on "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" is as substantive as network news. The only part of this I question is the word "as." It should be "more." If you don't read newspapers and listen to NPR, you might not even understand what's being satirized on "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report." If you got most of your news from network evening newscasts, you wouldn't know what the hell was going on. (See this transcript from a recent Katie Couric CBS Evening Gossipcast, posted on the blog of a prominent conservative.)

No, Stewart and Colbert may claim to be the "fake news," but they are firmly rooted in the "reality-based community" -- and provide more incisive cut-through-the-bull analysis of current events than anything on commercial television. (Only "Frontline" goes deeper -- the show that, as at least one TV critic pointed out earlier this week, would have told the powers in the White House and the Pentagon and the intelligence community the things they needed to know, but now claim they didn't, if they'd only bothered to watch it. It's on PBS, Condi!)

From the official announcement of the "Daily Show" study, to be published in the Journal of Broadcast and Electronic Media, published by the Broadcast Education Association:

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Which would you think has more substantive news coverage -- traditional broadcast network newscasts or "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart"?

Would you believe the answer is neither?

Julia R. Fox, assistant professor of telecommunications at Indiana University isn't joking when she says the popular "fake news" program, which last week featured Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf as a guest, is just as substantive as network coverage.

While much has been written in the media about "The Daily Show"'s impact, Fox's study is the first scholarly effort to systematically examine how the comedy program compares to traditional television news as sources of political information.

The study, "No Joke: A Comparison of Substance in 'The Daily Show with Jon Stewart' and Broadcast Network Television Coverage of the 2004 Presidential Election Campaign," will be published next summer...

The Los Angeles Times -- which likes to fancy itself as the "paper of record" for the entertainment industry -- has officially jumped the shark. Wednesday it inaugurated a weekly column by Jay A. Fernandez called Scriptland, which is to be dedicated to "the work and professional lives of screenwriters." What this means, evidently, is that the L.A. Times is now in the business of providing free script coverage for the studios, because the first column features a gushy mini-review of a draft of a script by Charlie Kaufman ("Being John Malkovich," "Adaptation."). I could barely make it past this without gagging:

I have the new Charlie Kaufman screenplay on my desk.

I've read it — no, lived it. I've been moved and astounded by it. And I'm tortured by the dilemma of what I should or should not say about it here. I feel a bit like Frodo palming the One Ring. [...]

But many people, beginning with Kaufman, do not want me to have the script, do not want me to read the script, and without question do not want me to write anything about the script. Words like "super-sensitive," "invasive" and "freaked" have been cautiously leveled at me as I've reached out to those involved with the project to get their thoughts on it.

In other words: "Hey, I got ahold of something I'm not supposed to have and I feel kinda bad about it, and I don't have any good reason to write about it, but I just had to tell you! Ain't it cool?!?!"

No. It's not. Fernandez isn't a journalist and he isn't a critic; he's a leech, on the level of those self-aggrandizing amateur web trolls who think their premature, uninformed opinions about an unfinished work are "news." If the L.A. Times is going to play by these rules, it will be publishing its writers' opinions about leaked manuscripts of books before they are edited or revised by the authors, and unmixed rehearsal tapes of recording sessions. In the interest of fairness, the paper should also run commentary on early versions of L.A. Times stories before they appear in print, so we can see how that sausage is made. Everything needs to be pre-digested, doesn't it? Meanwhile, expect Times employees to spend a lot of time going through showbiz garbage cans. I'm sure readers will find all this extra groundless speculation -- and spoilers -- terribly useful and informative.

I hope that movie critics, and actual journalists, will protest. Loudly. This really is a new ethical low, tarring the efforts of the paper's real reporters by sticking their work with gossip and innuendo. What is newsworthy about a work-in-progress -- unless (like Emilio Estevez's "Bobby" in Toronto) its makers have decided to screen it for the press and ticket-buying public? Fernandez hasn't seen the movie in any form. Kaufman is set to direct it himself, but hasn't even finished casting it yet. "Meanwhile," Fernandez concludes his item (after telling us an image that appears on "Page 1"), "I feel terribly sick to my stomach." Yeah, he's not the only one. What a self-serving piece of crap. I have a great idea, L.A. Times: Why don't you go put your Calendar entertainment coverage behind a web subscription wall again?

(Tip: Hot Blog.)

When the conversation turns, as it so often does these days, to blogs (or "the Internets" as Stephen Colbert is fond of calling the online realm), you'll find an astonishing number of people who, even in 2006, have absolutely no idea of what they're talking about. Like Bruce Kluger in USA Today, who writes: "If ever America needed a wake-up call about the mythology of blogging, we got it this month.... "

Kluger, who also contributes to Parenting magazine and Huffington Post (god help 'em), proceeds to destroy the "mythology" that, well, didn't exist until it was created by the mainstream media (like USA Today)... because they don't know what they're talking about. Kluger cites the defeat of Joe Lieberman in the Connecticut primary (then increasing Joementum in recent polls) and the disappointing box office receipts for "Snakes on a Plane" as evidence of "the capriciousness of the blog culture":

Lieberman's boomerang reminds us that voters represent a meager percentage of the total populace — and that bloggers are an even tinier subset of that group. Consequently, what appears to be a coast-to-coast juggernaut on a 17-inch monitor is, in the real world, simply an elaborate PC-to-PC chain letter — enthusiastic, but not necessarily the national mindset.

O, capricious bloggers! How dare you fool the MSM into thinking you were all-knowing and all-powerful! Shame upon thee! This is a great example of what I was writing about the other day -- another Straw Man piece that sets out to strike down its own assumptions, none of which apply to the exterior universe. It's the JonBenet Ramsay "murder suspect" hysteria/drivel all over again.

Following up on my posts about "Wag the Dog"/JonBenet/Iraq & 9/11 and modern propaganda films:

As we approach the fifth anniversary of the atrocities of 9/11, I still think one of the most important yet least explored aspects of the day's attacks is how they were carefully designed and staged for the cameras. Deadly spectacles that everyone kept saying was "like a movie" actually were directed that way, as a horror/disaster movie with unforgettable psychological impact -- because it wasn't just a movie, it was real. The "terror" in "terrorism" is about spreading fear and panic, and the World Trade Center towers weren't just chosen because they were symbols of American riches and hubris, but because they were visual symbols that would make for spectacular and terrifying footage. The first plane guaranteed that the second would come as an even greater shock -- and would be caught by thousands of cameras. That was the way the perpetrators spread their murderous message: they intended to terrify not just the government but the population. And, initially, they succeeded. (Nobody looked more terrified on that day than Brave President Sir Robin, who bravely ran away, away, for most of the day: "When danger reared its ugly head / He bravely turned his tail and fled...")

So, the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (who called the WTC attacks "the greatest work of art ever" -- later changing it to "Lucifer's greatest work of art") was pilloried for being insensitive (and he was), while his larger point was ignored.

British artist/provocateur Danien Hirst elaborated a bit more in 2002, but it was still "too soon" for many, who thought his words sounded flip:

"The thing about 9/11 is that it's kind of an artwork in its own right. It was wicked, but it was devised in this way for this kind of impact. It was devised visually."

No matter what you think of his tone or his timing, I don't see how one can contest that.

Lawrence Wright's new book, "The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11," explores this in greater detail than any reporting or analysis that has come along so far. A piece in Salon.com cites Osama bin Laden's role as "director":

At the heart of Wright's wide-ranging narrative is America's arch nemesis. "One can ask whether 9/11 or some similar tragedy might have happened without bin Laden to steer it," he says. "The answer is certainly not."

That's why I'm skeptical that a plot to blow up airliners somewhere in the middle of the Pacific is really the biggest plan out there. It's missing the visual aspect that is so effective at creating the fear and panic that lead to hysterical, reckless, wasteful, counter-productive and even self-destructive decision-making of the sort we've seen since 9/11. Politicians, no matter what their party affiliation (or lack of one), still haven't come to their senses.

It's enormously frustrating and stressful trying to live in three places at once, especially when they're: 1) the "reality-based community"; 2) the arena of critical thinking; and 3) America in the 21st century. So, who was surprised by this headline?

Prosecutors drop case in Ramsey slaying

Prosecutors abruptly dropped their case Monday against John Mark Karr in the slaying of JonBenet Ramsey, saying DNA tests failed to put him at the crime scene despite his insistence he sexually assaulted and strangled the 6-year-old beauty queen.

Just a week and a half after Karr's arrest in Thailand was seen as a remarkable break in the sensational, decade-old case, prosecutors suggested in court papers that he was just a man with a twisted fascination with JonBenet who confessed to a crime he didn't commit.

The only difference between this story and innumerable others (like, say the non-case for invading Iraq) is how quickly and easily it unravelled (or, rather, evaporated), after the press and the public suddenly realized they'd never had any good reason to accept it as legitimate in the first place.

Happy "Birthday" to David Poland, whose Hot Blog, Hot Button column and Movie City News are favorite sources of information and commentary about The Biz around here. This week marks the Ninth anniversary of The Hot Button and the 1000th entry in The Hot Blog.

Check out the latest column to see how much has changed (and hasn't) over these nine years. He's also posted his Rules of Thumb -- sort of a combination of the Ten Commandments for Understanding Showbiz and Charles Foster Kane's "Declaration of Principles." I think he's dead right on all counts.

Congrats, David!

TOP TEN HOT BUTTON RULES OF THUMB

1. Great Media Outlets' Standards Are Less Stringent When The Subject Is Entertainment And That Sucks.

2. $150 Million Is No Longer A Blockbuster In Theatrical… But Right Now Represents The Start Of A Road To More Than $200 Million In Returns to The Studio In Most Cases Thanks To The New DVD Market And Expanded International Theatrical Market.

3. Successful Movie Advertising Sells One Idea At A Time… And There Actually Has To Be An Idea Worth Selling

4. The Story Of The Moment Is Almost Never The Real Story

5. There Are Very Few Journalists In Entertainment Journalism

6. Talent Is Your Friend Until It's Time For Talent Not To Be Your Friend

7. Reviewing Scripts Or Test Screenings Is Selfish And Immoral… You Do Not Know What Effect Sticking Your Nose Into Process Will Have And More Often Than Not It Is Negative

8. Opening Weekend Is Never About The Quality Of The Movie

9. There Are Things I Know And Things I Don't Know And Sometimes They Change

10.Love What You Do And Do What You Love Or Get The F--- Out.

"Reviews should be objective. Keep your opinions out of your reviews!"

-- actual comments from alleged "readers," sent to Roger Ebert and just about every other critic on every planet in the solar system (except Pluto)

(NOTE: If the above quotation does not bring tears of laughter to your eyes, do not let those eyes tarry here.)

People love to quote William Goldman's famous saying about the movie industry, which is that "Nobody knows anything." Most people who quote it have absolutely no idea what it means. The phrase is tossed about as being the wisest thing ever said about showbiz, and fortunately for those who are doing the tossing, it's just vague enough to sound true under almost any circumstances. So, it is thought to be "right" more often than a stopped analog clock, which is said to tell the correct time twice a day. (The clock is not "right," of course -- it just coincides with external events that allow someone to perceive it as being correct if you check it at certain times. It's a coincidence. That's an important distinction.)

I think perhaps the most profound meaning of "Nobody knows anything" (out of all possible meanings) is not just that nobody knows what will be a hit, but that the audience does not know what it wants. They'll tell you what they want, but if they could really articulate it or quantify it, and if the studios could create some kind of quality control mechanism to manufacture it, Disney and Paramount and Warners and Fox and Sony would be as financially successful as, say, oil companies.

"All in all, it's been a rotten tomato of a summer for America's embattled film critics.... It's no secret that critics have lost influence in recent years. A recent Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll found that among 18- to 24-year-olds, only 3% said reviews were the most important factor in their movie-going decision making. Older audiences still look to critics for guidance, especially with the smaller, more ambitious studio specialty films. But during the summer months, with studios wooing audiences with $40 million worth of marketing propaganda, critics appear especially overwhelmed, if not irrelevant."

-- The Los Angeles Times, asserting that critics are less powerful now than they never were. (8/15/06)

God, I love that paragraph. Go ahead -- read it again. One of my favorite propaganda techniques -- used in politics, journalism, criticism, you name it -- is to present evidence (or, better yet, opinion polls cited as if they constituted evidence) refuting something that was never true -- or even widely thought to be true -- in the first place. It's a form of genius, really -- like the opinion polls asking Americans if they believed Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11, presented as though it could be made true if a majority felt it was. (There's another term for this technique: Fox News.)

This propaganda trick is related to the Straw Man argument, where you attack a position somebody doesn't hold instead of the one they do, but you pretend they're saying something they don't believe instead of what they actually said. All it takes is a bad listener. In the case of this article in the LA Times last week, it's made especially compelling by the knowledge that Times management has wasted colossal amounts of money on a poll of youngpeopleoftoday, forcing good reporters like Patrick Goldstein to have to invent something to make it appear the poll's findings meant... anything.

Read that hilariously insignificant statistic from the Times/Bloomberg poll one more time (and take an extra moment to savor the deliciously insinuating phrase, "It's no secret..."): Only 3 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds cited film critics as the most important factor in deciding whether to see a movie. Conclusion: It's no secret film critics are losing influence!!! The mind boggles. What percentage of persons in this six-year age span cited film critics as, say, the third-most important influence? Fifth-most? And what did this same age group say five years ago, 10 years ago, or 27 years ago? The "3 percent" figure is so narrowly defined that it's not just meaningless, but exquisitely, absurdly. ludicrously so. Somewhere, Joseph Heller is laughing out loud. And think about this for just one second: How many 18- to 24-year-olds do you know who depend primarily upon adult authority figures (like critics), above all other influences, to make their media choices, whether it's movies, music, video games, TV, web sites, whatever? Three percent seems a bit inflated to me.

(BTW, what are the ages of the "older audiences" who "still look to film critics for guidance" -- and what percentage of them rank that guidance as the most important factor in making moviegoing decisions about those "smaller, more ambitious studio specialty films"? Man, oh man -- those pollsters ask specific questions! "What is your most important source of guidance for smaller, more ambitious studio specialty films?" But did this Times/Bloomberg poll yield only one quotable statistic? If not, why weren't others cited to put this one in perspective?)

This is the kind of story that is based on "overturning" assumptions that never were. News Flash: Bush administration officials may have underestimated when they said the invasion and occupation of Iraq would cost no more than $1 billion and was unlikely to last more than a few weeks -- or as Donald Rumsfeld said, "I doubt six months." The word, "Duh" was invented for these occasions. If you honestly did not realize how preposterously false the original premises were, then you might get fooled again into thinking the second non-story qualifies as "news." (Follow up story: According to the president, when it comes to Iraq, "failure is not an option" -- even though that is the option deliberately and consistently favored by his administration above all others 9 times out of 10.)

In about a year, expect another News Flash: Poll Reveals Young People in Teens and Twenties Notoriously Unreliable Poll Subjects.

I think I was in college before I ever became aware of, or paid the slightest bit of attention to, box office grosses. Until "Entertainment Tonight" came along in the early 1980s, you had to subscribe to Daily Variety in order to find out how much money a particular picture was taking in, and I couldn't have cared less. I was thrilled when I would go into a theater to watch a movie and there would be lots of seats. This was long before I became an exhibitor myself, and suddenly saw things from the other side. I'd never thought of movies as a lowly business before, but it didn't take long to figure out the economic repercussions: The fewer people in the theater for a particular picture, the fewer movies like it we'd be probably get the chance to see, or (later) show. Somebody's got to buy the overpriced concessions, pay the film and theater rentals, the salaries, the heat and electricity bills, etc.

I'm only sporadically interested in ticket sales or advertising campaigns -- but in the case of "Snakes on a Plane," where the movie itself was always irrelevant, I confess I'm a bit perplexed that, despite all the hype and supposedly feverish anticipation, its opening weekend numbers were so blah. Critics were mostly removed from the equation (although some went to see the movie at late-night shows Thursday night, which meant reviews landed in Friday and Saturday papers). But if you level the track and don't count those extra grosses from Thursday night, "Snakes on a Plane" barely squeaked by three-week-old "Ricky Bobby" for the three-day weekend.

I was at a party with a whole buncha film critics Saturday, and everybody who had seen "Snakes on a Plane" had liked it. They all agreed it was a serviceable B-movie and a pretty fun time -- indeed, a pre-fab "Rocky Horror"-like audience-participation experience from the very first showings. So, my question to you, Scanners readers, is: What happened? Did the hype turn people off -- or was it just overexaggerated among a limited Internet-savvy crowd, while mainstream audiences just weren't all that interested? Or could there have been more people like me out there than anticipated -- people who felt it wasn't so much that we didn't want to see a movie called "Snakes on a Plane," we just felt -- long before it actually arrived -- like we already had? I'd like to get your theories on it. If you saw the movie, what did you think? What do you make of the box-office and audience response? Or would you rather just forget about the whole thing?

When apprehended for drunk driving in Malibu last Friday, Mel Gibson claimed that "The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world." And, yeah, he said, "F--- Jews," something of a blanket statement. But, he insists, it's nothing personal. According to his religious beliefs, everyone except those who follow his form of fundamentalist Catholicism (sometimes called "traditionalist Catholicism") is going to hell anyway -- and chances are, that includes you... and nearly everyone else in the world. Roman Catholics, Protestants (Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians...), agnostics, Muslims, Buddhists, atheists, Hindus, Jains, Scientologists -- they're all going to hell. Along with the Jews. Even Mel's Episcopalian wife is, he says, hellbound. As he told the Australian Herald Sun newspaper: "There is no salvation for those outside the Church. I believe it.... [My wife] prays, she believes in God, she knows Jesus, she believes in that stuff. And it’s just not fair if she doesn’t make it, she’s better than I am. But that is a pronouncement from the chair. I go with it.�?

In his second apology, Gibson said: "The tenets of what I profess to believe necessitate that I exercise charity and tolerance as a way of life. Every human being is God's child, and if I wish to honor my God I have to honor his children. But please know from my heart that I am not an anti-Semite. I am not a bigot. Hatred of any kind goes against my faith." (The $64 million question remains: Just what in the world does someone have to do or say that might properly qualify as "anti-Semitic" or bigoted?) Gibson's faith rejects the ecumenical reforms of Vatican II, among them a formal statement that Jews were not responsible for the death of Jesus -- which is why the portrayal of the crucifixion in Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" was particularly egregious to some -- including the ADL's Abraham Foxman, the same man who accepted Gibson's most recent apology.

Pope John XXIII said: ""What happened in [Christ's] passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today." Those words don't wash with the congregation of "The Church of the Holy Family in Malibu." Gibson's statements about religion, and particularly about Judaism, have been complicated by the religious beliefs he shares with his father, Hutton Gibson, who claims the attacks of 9/11 were perpetrated via remote control by Zionists, and who has associated himself with Holocaust deniers, although the son says his father merely disputes the number of Jewish victims: "My dad taught me my faith and I believe what he taught me. The man never lied to me in his life. [...] I have friends and parents of friends who have numbers on their arms. The guy who taught me Spanish was a Holocaust survivor. He worked in a concentration camp in France. Yes, of course. And my dad also knows that there were internment camps where many people died. Now, his whole thing was about the numbers. I mean atrocities happened. The thing with him [my father] was that he was talking about numbers. I mean when the war was over they said it was 12 million. Then it was six. Now it's four. I mean it's that kind of numbers game. I mean war is horrible. The Second World War killed tens of millions of people. Some of them were Jews in concentration camps. Many people lost their lives. In the Ukraine, several million people starved to death between 1932 and 1933. During the last century 20 million people died in the Soviet Union. Okay? It's horrible. "

(For further information, see "Disown Your Dad's Denial of the Holocaust, Gibson Told" -- The Australian, December 8, 2005.) Meanwhile, ABC has cancelled the Holocaust miniseries it was developing with Gibson's Icon Productions, saying no script was ever delivered.

Michael Bonner (an associate producer on "United 93") has an article in Vanity Fair reconstructing events of 9/11 from 30 hours of previously unreleased tapes from the Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS) of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) . Bonner concludes that the situation was more chaotic and uncertain than the Pentagon would later claim, and the tapes support that conclusion. He interviews several of the key participants, including NEADS mission-crew commander, Major Kevin Nasypany:

Five years after the attack, the controversy around United 93 clearly eats at Arnold, Marr, Nasypany, and several other military people I spoke with, who resent both conspiracy theories that accuse them of shooting the flight down and the 9/11 commission's conclusion that they were chasing ghosts and never stood a chance of intercepting any of the real hijackings. "I don't know about time lines and stuff like that," Nasypany, who is now a lieutenant colonel, said in one of our last conversations. "I knew where 93 was. I don't care what [the commission says]. I mean, I care, but—I made that assessment to put my fighters over Washington. Ninety-three was on its way in. I knew there was another one out there. I knew there was somebody else coming in—whatever you want to call it. And I knew what I was going to have to end up doing." When you listen to the tapes, it couldn't feel more horrendously true.

When I asked Nasypany about the conspiracy theories—the people who believe that he, or someone like him, secretly ordered the shootdown of United 93 and covered it up—the corners of his mouth began to quiver. Then, I think to the surprise of both of us, he suddenly put his head in his hands and cried. "Flight 93 was not shot down," he said when he finally looked up. "The individuals on that aircraft, the passengers, they actually took the aircraft down. Because of what those people did, I didn't have to do anything."

Related story, from Scripps-Howard via the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Poll: A third of U.S. public believes 9/11 conspiracy theory.

Hooray, for America! On Monday's "The Colbert Report," M. Night Shyamalan made #2 on the "ThreatDown," thanks to my diligent review of "Lady in the Water." I wrote:

The key to deciphering M. Night Shyamalan's fractured fairy tale, "Lady in the Water," is to remember that it is rooted in the mythology of Stephen Colbert and "The Colbert Report." It is a warning to Mankind about the dire threat posed by ferocious topiary bears in America today, and a salute to the gigantic, soaring eagle who swoops in to rescue Wet Ladies from pitiless ursine jaws and claws. Colbert oughtta sue.

Colbert had the perfect topper: "Well, I am suing... Spoiler alert: I was fatally shot in 1995 and I'm a ghost." Thank you, Mr. Colbert -- you will never be Dead to Me. As a proud citizen of Colbert Nation for years (going back to "The Daily Show"), I could not be more honored if I'd received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Wait a minute, let me think: George Tenet, Paul Bremer, Tommy Franks... To get that medal these days you have to commit fraud, perjury and/or war crimes. No, I'm more honored to be cited by Stephen Colbert!

VIDEO CLIP: Go to the official site for "The Colbert Report." Open the Comedy Central media player and click on the video link for "ThreatDown: Kix Cereal."

While Roger Ebert is on the mend, I'll be chipping in and doing occasional reviews for the Chicago Sun-Times (and RogerEbert.com, under my "editor's notes" banner). So, prepare yourself. This week it's... "You, Me and Dupree" -- bigger, longer and uncut!

On Monday night's The Daily Show, Jon Stewart reported on the big press conference called by Attorney General (and Pillar of Integrity) Alberto Gonzales to announce the arrest of seven men for "conspiring to support the Al Qaeda organization" -- by, maybe, tossing out the idea of blowing up the Sears Tower. Or something. Except that it turns out the men were a gaggle of losers living in Miami, had no weapons or explosives and no terrorist network connections, and one of them had mentioned the Sears Tower one time. However, one of the, uh, "alleged terrorists," was familiar with Chicago. (As Maureen Dowd described them on Saturday ("We Need Chloe!"): "[The] Miami gang of terrorist wannabes... look like they couldn't find the local Sears, let alone the Sears Tower. These guys were so lame they asked an informant for boots, radios, binoculars, uniforms and cash, believing he was Al Qaeda — and that jihadists need uniforms.")

Observed Stewart: "No weapons, no actual contact with Al Qaeda, but one of them had been to Chicago. By that standard, I believe this [see above] may be a terror cell." No doubt A--- C-----r & Co. would agree. Your Homeland Insecurity dollars at work...

The thing about speaking truth to power is that the powerful don't really like it all that much. That was apparent at the White House Correspondents Dinner Saturday night, when Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central's satirical "The Colbert Report" (basically a Fox News parody in which Colbert plays a fact-challenged, egomaniacal character based on Bill O'Reilly -- and Sean Hannity, Britt Hume, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter...) delivered a speech that cut maybe just an eentsy bit too close to the truth (or "truthiness") for the comfort of the President, the First Lady and the ineffectual reporters in the audience.

British filmmaker Paul Greengrass, as I've mentioned before, is surely the most accomplished action-thriller director around these days. "Bloody Sunday" and "The Bourne Supremacy" are evidence enough of that. This week, Greengrass's "United 93," about the September 11, 2001, flight now commemorated in a Pennsylvania field, opens the Tribeca Film Festival and then moves into theaters.

David Poland, over at "The Hot Blog," saw the film recently and writes: