Archive for the 'Media' Category
(Chronologically Listed)
The Star Wars Holiday Special! (1978)
Courtesy of Ace of Spades comes the most reviled, most wretched “holiday special” ever produced. First, here’s the Vanity Fair article to give you the entire ugly background:
In the summer of 1978, Bruce Vilanch had a bad feeling about the Star Wars television special he’d been hired to write. A veteran of the comedy wars who has since written material for 16 Oscar telecasts and starred as the extra-large Edna Turnblad in the Broadway musical adaptation of John Waters’s Hairspray, Vilanch had just finished working on Bette Midler’s 1977 TV special, Ol’ Red Hair Is Back, for producers Gary Smith and Dwight Hemion when they threw him what sounded like a plum assignment: a spot on the writing team that would help George Lucas adapt more of the Star Wars saga for television.
A year had passed since the theatrical release of Lucas’s gee-whiz space epic, and in that time Star Wars had become the highest-grossing movie in history as well as a cultural phenomenon with its very own lexicon and mythology. With a sequel still two years away from theaters, Lucas had been sold on the idea that a Star Wars holiday television special—to be broadcast on CBS the weekend before Thanksgiving, when Nielsen audiences were plentiful—would sustain interest in the franchise, move more toys off the shelves, and maybe even pick up some new fans who hadn’t seen the movie.
Though Lucas would not be involved in the actual shooting of the special—Smith and Hemion would oversee that—he knew the tales he wanted to tell and planned to work with the show’s team of seasoned TV writers to develop his ideas into a viable script. For those who had been summoned, the prospect of collaborating with the father of the Force initially sounded like a sure bet. “We were really excited, because, ‘My God, this is an annuity—Star Wars!’” says Lenny Ripps, another writer who worked on the special. “How could it lose?”
How indeed.
For those of you with the stamina, here a link to the complete Star Wars Holiday Special itself. I suspect most (if not all) of the actors involved wished that no record of this existed. Heh. ..bruce w..
Election 2008 - You Are Right To Mistrust The Polls
One of the most annoying and anti-climatic parts of this rather sad and miserable election cycle has been the faux-drama of the polls. In absence of any real reporting on the details of either candidate’s plans, background or personality, the media focuses more and more on the virtual horse race conducted via the polls.
Websites like Real Clear Politics make it very easy to scratch that itch, by creating a master aggregation point for all manner of polls. They even provide fantastic break downs state by state of both the current numbers and the trends.
One would think by looking at a site like this that America is composed of a bunch of flighty know-nothings that have very poor grasp of the facts and tend to only believe what the campaign/media machines feed them. If you take a look at the graph below (from their web site) it would seem that some huge shift in voter opinion have been going on.
Seriously, do you think that a country as large and center-right as the US of A is going to swing from Obama-mania to thinking the crusty old John McCain is the right choice in a matter of days, just to turn around and re-embrace “The One” only to think that maybe Sara Palin is the person who can save us from the invading moose-born Al Queda?
What most in politics and the media know is that opinions change very little when it comes to electoral preferences. For the overwhelming majority of Americans, the choice of who they were going to vote for was decided long ago. What can explain such wild swings in the polls?
The primary reason is that the pollsters are not seeing radical shifts in opinion, what they are doing is trying to work out what the correct ratio of people in their sample size to use. This is the problem with statistics, your results are determined by what you input. Say last week my poll had 400 Democrats, 500 Republicans and 200 Independents. You would likely have McCain on top. Then I run the poll this week and I have 500 Democrats, 400 Republicans and 200 Independents. Viola! You now have Obama on top, without a single person changing their mind!
If you look at the statistical make up of the polls, from Rassumsen to Zogby top Gallup, they are all over the place, they are nowhere close to having a stable idea of who is really in front. Obama’s surge in the last 2 weeks? A dramatic change in how many Democrats were in the sample. The inch by inch comeback of McCain since the debate? An increase in the number of Republicans in the samples.
I am not suggesting they are doing this to “throw the election” or some nefarious intent, the pollsters simply don’t have a handle on what the turnout will be on election day. There are a lot of questions, will Obama really energize a lot of new voters? Will the Acorn fraud machine be able to manufacture a vast new wave of Democratic votes? Will the highly frustrated Republican and Conservative base hold their noses and vote for McCain even though they only want to vote for Palin? These are very tough questions that the pollster teams have to try and factor in some how.
Until then, remember that the polls are (especially this year) very bad guesses not on popular opinion, but who is going to be motivated enough to show up.
McCain images of the day
As I noted earlier, I actually like the underlit photograph of John McCain that moonbat photographer Jill Greenberg secretly shot while taking his photograph for the cover of The Atlantic.
S. Weasel has now done her own photoshop of the underlit image:
It sort of says, “Vote for me or die.” Heh.
And here’s an earlier photoshop from S. Weasel:
Heh. ..bruce w..
“US Weekly” editor gets shredded by Megyn Kelly
US Magazine of course had its infamous cover story this week on Sarah Palin, titled “Babies, Lies, and Scandal”. Bradley Jacobs, the senior editor for US Weekly, has his head handed to him by Megyn Kelly at Fox News by virtue of the fact that she actually read the story:
Hat tip to The Jawa Report. ..bruce w..
Rating Obama’s speech
All in all, I thought it a very powerful, well-delivered speech. He is, without a doubt, the best orator that the Democrats have put forward since JFK; he is, I think, more polished than Reagan, though Reagan knew how to be folksy without sounding either stupid or condescending.
I thought his attacks against McCain were effective (I’ll let others critique whether they’re accurate), but I do think he slipped big time with this statement:
If you don’t have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from.
Obama has been in the Senate for 4 years and doesn’t have much of a record prior to that. I expect this line to show up in McCain ads, pointing out who has a record and who doesn’t.
The domesitic policy part of Obama’s speech had me hearing cash registers in my head (”cha-ching!”) for each new proposal he mad. Beyond that, I have serious questions whether he can enact — in a recognizable form — any of these policies, especially with a Democratic Congress. Bill Clinton made very similar promises in 1992 and then had a disastrous first two years — with a Democratic Congress — so much so that the Republicans gained control of the House in 1994.
The foreign policy portion was better, though given that we now have more support from France and Germany than we did a few years ago, I’m not sure what the basis of his “restore respect” comments are. I will frankly admit that — with a son (Jon) serving in Iraq and a nephew (Darren) most likely head to Afghanistan in a few months — this passage made me tear up:
The times are too serious, the stakes are too high for this same partisan playbook. So let us agree that patriotism has no party. I love this country, and so do you, and so does John McCain. The men and women who serve in our battlefields may be Democrats and Republicans and Independents, but they have fought together and bled together and some died together under the same proud flag. They have not served a Red America or a Blue America - they have served the United States of America.
Against all odds (and my own misgivings), the stadium venue worked — even the Grecian columns. It was a profoundly effective setting.
Setting aside my own policy and political preferences, I would rate the acceptance speech as a 5 out of 5, simply because I’m not sure what more Obama could have done to fire up the Democratic base, reach out to independents, and leave an amazing sets of sound bites and images for the whole country to ponder. Plus, having most of the mainstream media in the tank for him, Obama won’t face a lot of critical analysis over what he said and what he proposes. I suspect Obama may go over 50% in the polls this weekend, and McCain has his work cut out for him. ..bruce..
Know what impresses me about “The Dark Knight”?
No, not the movie itself — I haven’t seen it yet, though I do have tickets for Friday night.
It’s the movie’s title: “The Dark Knight”. It’s not “Batman: The Dark Knight” or worse yet “Batman II: The Dark Knight” (though I guess technically you’d have to call it “Batman VI: The Dark Knight”). It’s not even “Batman and the Joker”. Yet I daresay that the movie-going public is pretty clear that this is a film about Batman.
Lucas had an excuse for the Star Wars series — he was really trying to do episodes (though read Michael Kaminski’s utterly fascinating The Secret History of Star Wars — a free downloadable electronic book), and he had the cojones to label “The Empire Strikes Back” — the second Star Wars film made — as “Episode VI”. Beyond that, the “Star Wars Episode XX” part wasn’t part of the titles for posters and promotions for “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Return of the Jedi”. Everyone who had a pulse and an above-room-temperature IQ knew that these were all Star Wars films and needed to reminding.
Spielberg, on the other hand, had no excuse for sticking “Indiana Jones and” in front of the successive “Indiana Jones” movies or, worse yet, retroactively in front of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (yep, that’s what the DVD cover says, though the title within the film itself remains untouched). Somewhere in here there is a whiff of Hollywood’s fear that we’re all secretly idiots and that no one would realize that “The Temple of Doom”, “The Last Crusade” and “The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” (which should have been “The City of Gods“, and I don’t just mean the title) were Indiana Jones films.
The nadir is probably “Spider-Man”, “Spider-Man 2″, and “Spider-Man 3″. Given how many different “Spider-Man” titles that Marvel has had over the years, surely Sony could have used some of those instead (as Marvel did for the Hulk reboot, using “The Incredible Hulk”).
A useless rant, I know. But if “The Dark Knight” turns out to be the top-grossing film of the year, maybe other studios will sit up and take notice. ..bruce w..
How many times have you read this?
An ineffectual international organisation yesterday issued a stark warning about a situation it has absolutely no power to change, the latest in a series of self-serving interventions by toothless intergovernmental bodies.
“We are seriously concerned about this most serious outbreak of seriousness,” said the head of the institution, either a former minister from a developing country or a mid-level European or American bureaucrat. “This is a wake-up call to the world. They must take on board the vital message that my organisation exists.”
The director of the body, based in one of New York, Washington or an agreeable Western European city, was speaking at its annual conference, at which ministers from around the world gather to wring their hands impotently about the most fashionable issue of the day. The organisation has sought to justify its almost completely fruitless existence by joining its many fellow talking-shops in highlighting whatever crisis has recently gained most coverage in the global media.
“Governments around the world must come together to combat whatever this year’s worrying situation has turned out to be,” the director said. “It is not yet time to panic, but if it goes on much further without my institution gaining some credit for sounding off on the issue, we will be justified in labelling it a crisis.”
Heh. Hat tip to Daniel Drezner. ..bruce w..
“The Andromeda Strain”: a brief review (w/spoilers)
OK, I wrote an initial review after watching Part 1 of A&E’s miniseries, “The Andromeda Strain”. It was goofy and heavy-handed in its political agenda, but was still a bit fun, and I was waiting to see how Part 2 went.
So now I’ve watched Part 2, which (IMHO) descended from goofiness into full-blown stupidity. It’s hard to explain why without giving away spoilers, so I’ll detail my reasons after the jump. But the result of the constant stream of varied idiocies, big and small, robbed Part 2 of any tension or verisimilitude.
The irony was that the people who made this miniseries appeared to try hard to make the scientific dialog sound accurate and feasible, yet they repeatedly tripped up over relatively minor items. In the end, the whole miniseries came across as a 3rd-rate X-Files knock-off — some nice effects and production values, but hackneyed dialog and tired plot cliches.
Overall, I give it a ‘D’. Seriously. More after the jump.
Outrageous behavior by the TSA
Jeffrey Denning is a former TSA air marshal who has been serving in Iraq with the US Army Reserve. He just returned home only to face immediately a TSA investigation into an e-mail he received and forward asking “current and former air marshals to talk to CNN”:
My wife and I had an interesting conversation last night. It turns out Mr. Neiderer called my home and spoke with my wife while I was in Iraq. My wife of ten years said he knew I was in Iraq when he called our home. Of course, she was the only one home when he called.
She said he acted like he knew me, and since I had been a Federal Air Marshal (FAM) under the arm of the TSA, and since the caller ID read “U.S. government” with an area code “703” out of Virginia, she thought he may have been an old friend of mine. With that in mind, she told him I was in Iraq. “Yeah, that’s what I thought,” he said, and then he laughed.
There’s nothing funny about that, Mr. Neiderer.
To everyone else, Mr. Neiderer is not an old friend, or even an acquaintance. In fact, I’ve never heard of him in my life until a couple of days ago.
When I got home from Iraq last Monday, he didn’t even allow me a week to relax before calling me and probing me with questions in a supposed all-important government investigation. One would think the nature of this investigation would be terribly serious given the fact that Mr. Neiderer and his ilk at the TSA office in Virginia took some painstaking strides to conduct a thorough search on my recent activities since leaving the air marshal service.
From my personal email he, 1) found out I was a former air marshal; 2) found out I was in Iraq with the Army Reserves and knew that I wasn’t home yet; 3) dug up my personal phone number and called my wife while he knew I was in Iraq. What else did this guy find out about me or my family? Oh, probably everything. Shoot, I wonder if the private email conversations I had with my wife while I was in Iraq were being monitored too! It makes me livid.
All of this just because TSA wanted to know who sent me an email I forwarded in March of this year from my personal email account asking for current and former air marshals to talk to CNN.
Pretty appalling and inappropriate, if you ask me. I tend to cut the TSA more slack than most people, but this is unconscionable. ..bruce w..
“The Andromeda Strain” (pt. 1): a brief review (w/spoilers)
OK, Sandra and I just finished watching the first two hours of A&E’s mini-series, “The Andromeda Strain”, based on the Michael Crichton novel.
Sandra, about 45 minutes into tonight’s showing, turned to me and said, “This is like a SciFi Channel movie, but made with better actors.” What makes that really funny is that she said independently, almost word for word, what Charlie Jane Anders wrote over at io9 in his review. Actually, this miniseries also has much better effects and (for the most part) better writing than the various SciFi films.
But the plot is simultaneously goofy and heavy-handed, with a blatant political agenda/slant and some truly bad science. What made the original novel (and movie) so effective was the lack of villains and the low key scientific verisimilitude that didn’t attempt to explain everything.
But, you know, it’s still more watchable than most of the SciFi Channel movies, and I’ll definitely watch the final two hours tomorrow (Tuesday) night. Note that if you missed tonight’s Part I, it will show on Tuesday night just before Part II. [UPDATE: Here's my review of Part II.]
Spoilers after the jump.