Movietime
I have been remiss in my movie viewing for a number of months. Most of the movies that come out nowadays, I am content to wait another four to six months until they come out on DVD and watch them in the comfort of my own home. However, this past week, I finally got around to seeing Sky Captian and the World of Tomorrow and Team America: World Police.
Sky Captian first. Wow! What a georgeous movie. Stylistically, it is beautiful. I have always loved the retro-future look, a throwback to movies such as Metropolis and Things to Come. The story was well done. As good a salute to the old serials as Raiders of the Lost Ark. Jude Law is perfect in movies such as this because he doesn't look real to begin with. I say this without feeling any threat to my heterosexuality, he is a pretty man, too pretty to be natural. So he's perfecft as a character in what is basically a computer-generated movie or as the gigalo robot in Artificial Intelligence. I can't say I care either way for Gwynneth Paltrow, she can't act anyway her role didn't require much in the way of acting to begin with, so it didn't matter. It was a fun movie and something a little different from the standard fair.
Team America: Trey and Matt have done it again. While it didn't have as many laugh out loud moments as, say, the South Park movie, it was a very clever and well written satire. One of the things we lack today is good satire. There are too many people afraid of offending this group or that group or any group and they end up making the motion picture equivalent of styrofoam. I found it amusing when walking out of the theater to hear the comments of those leaving, including the groupn of college-age women who found the movie offensive mainly because of the language. People, you've got to do your research. At least read the little line of type under the Rated R printed on the movie poster. It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to figure out that a movie involving Trey Parker and Matt Stone is going to not only contain a great deal of harsh language, but it's probably going to ridicule something you feel strongly about, whether it's the "war on terror," action movies or puppet sex. Speaking of which, I can't wait for the unrated DVD. If that was the edited puppet sex scene, I gotta see the whole thing.
These two films have temporarily restored my faith in movies which was shattered by M. Night Shymalan and the extrodinarily crappy The Village.
Congratulations
My friend Tutor got married today. I'm sorry I was unable to attend the wedding, but I wish he and Christina the best in the journey they are undertaking together and I hope that they find the happiness Rebecca and I have found.
More Godzilla
The big green guy seems to be getting some much-deserved recognition after 50 years of making movies and romping on Japan. Now Godzilla will be getting a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. This, added to the MTV Lifetime Achievement Award a few years ago are a good way to begin the final send-off for the big guy before he hangs up his large, radioactive hat and retires. Only one thing remains....can we say Oscar?
This is going to be good
Glenn Close is going to join one of the best shows on television these days, The Shield, as a series regular and the new captain of the Farmington precinct. This is going to be gooooooood!
New music Sunday.
Once again, I've posted some new music on the GarageBand sites. One is a song I wrote in college. The other is one that came together between 8 p.m. and midnight Saturday night. Thus the title. I hope you enjoy.
These songs are also listed on my MacIdol page.
Musicians and liberals and pagans, oh my!
I've updated my sidebar a little adding some of my favorite websites. My plan is to update this from time to time adding and subtracting as time goes by. Of course, I also planned to update my blog on a regular basis. I'm pretty much shooting for updating over the weekends now. Since Star Trek, sci-fi and movie websites are pretty much a given, I've stuck to other areas of interest for the side bar. If anyone has any other sites they think I might find interesting, please, by all means, let me know.
A journalistic 'well, duh!'
Earlier this week, I heard one of those radio news stories that had me yelling at the radion in my truck the same way I yell at my television or the Internet (or according to Dubya "the Internets") when they really discuss something stupid. Last week on one of the public radio talk shows (I don't remember which one) they were discussing the latest trent in the national "news" media of fact checking the candidtes' statements made during the debates. This is something that has been happening on the web for a while, both by partisan and non-partisan sites. The mainstream news organizations are just now catching on to this trend.
This discussion was about whether or not it was the media's job to fact check the candidates or if the national media powerhouses should just simply report what the candidates were saying. If I remeber correctly the fact checking started at either the Times or the Post when a senior editor spoke up about the blatant lies coming from one camp about the policies proposed by the other camp. (Guess which one was telling the lies :) ) After that the newspaper started checking the claims made by both candidates and printing the facts along with the rhetoric spouted by the candidate.
What really got me shouting at the disembodied voices coming out of my dashboard was the argument made by one that fact checking should not be the function of the media, but of the consumer. It should be up to them to basically keep the candidates honest about their "facts." To do otherwise would introduce an element of bias against candidates ont he part of the news outlet, and would be patently unfair.
Okay, now I realize I've only spent 16 years of my life in journalism and only practiced it professionally in small town Mississippi, but, if I remember any of the lessons learned in any of my classes (with the possible exception of one or two taught by a certian professor. My fellow j-students know who I'm talking about), checking the facts of a news story was kind of part of the job. If farmer Bob claims to have a 50-pound turnip shaped like Elvis, you don't just take his word for it. You have him load it up in the back of his pick-up, bring it to the office and you actually see for yourself if his claim is valid. In addition, you run a photo of farmer Bob holding the turnip up while sitting on the tailgate of his truck above the fold on the front page along with the story as proof to the reader. If you do this, it gives the reader more information at their disposal as they consider farmer Bully's claim that farmer Bob's turnip is actually only about 30 pounds and looks more like Jerry Lee Lewis than Elvis and that farmer Billy's turnip is actually 60 pounds and looks like the young, skinny Elvis.
The argument that it's not the media's responsibility to fact check politicians, candidates running for the top office in the land, smacks me not only of laziness and irresponsibility, but also of that superior attitude sported by many I've met in the national press that gives journalists such a bad name. I remember meeting one journalist while in school who came to talk to us. He talked about how he and many others inside the Beltway isolated themselves from the rest of the world to help keep themselves "unbiased." They only fratanized with other members of the media. They didn't attend social functions unless they were there on the job and many of them didn't vote because they considered that a bias.
I remember thinking at that time what a ridiculous idea that was. Rather than eliminating bias, it introduced an element of extremeism into the media which has given people the impression of intellectual snobbery. The truth is even the best journalist is going to be biased. They are humans. They have opinons. It might be a subtled bias like prefering thin young Elvis-shaped turnips over old, fat Elvis-shaped turnips. You can't eliminate bias, but you can learn to recognize it in your reporting and try and compensate for it.
I always acknowledged my bias while in the business. Maybe not publicallyh, but I would be the first one to hand my story to others in the office to look over when I had to report on someone I couldn't stand or an issue I felt strongly about. I know they would be biased as well, but not exactly the same as me, and the more people who looked at it, the better chance you would get as fair a story as possible.
We also checked facts. Sure, maybe it wasn't as big a chore in small-town Mississippi covering an Alderman race as it is in Washington covering a presidential election, but the principle is the same. If a candidate gives you a "fact," check it out and take the candidate to task if they stray from the truth. The follow-up question seems to be a lost art.
More and more as I watch the media from the outside today, I am more and more glad I work in a library.
Validation!
After all these years, I can finally thumb my nose at all those people who said I was just wasting my time watching all those Godzilla movies growing up. It seems now that I was engaging in a scholarly endeavour and to prove me right, the University of Kansas is having a scholarly conference on the legacy of the big guy in honor of the 50th anniversary of the release of the origonal Godzilla. It will be complete with a large inflatable Godzilla standing atop a theater showing the recently re-released Japanese version of the movie.
Happy birthday
Happy birthday to Dungeons and Dragons which reached the optimum role of a 20 sided die and a 10 sided die. Or optimum combined roles of three four sided dice and four six sided dice. Or a 12 sided, eight sided and 10 sided dice.
New music
I've got some new tunes posted on MacIdol and hopefully coming soon on MacJams.
Trek redux
I downloaded and watched the lastest episode from Star Trek: New Voyages, In Harm's Way, last night. It was pretty good. An improvement over the first episode, which I also thought was pretty good. My only real complaint about the story was that it was a little jumbled, especially at the end. I do hope that in the future the creators get a little more origonal with the stories. The first episode, Come What May, seemed way too much like a Q episode. The second episode brought back too many elements from the first three seasons.
The special effects were pretty good, the acting was better and Kirk's hairdoo seemed to have calmed down a little bit. I hope this group keeps up their effort and continues to put out new episodes, maybe at even a little quicker pace than once a year. With some of the backing they seem to be getting now, maybe that will be possible.
Must see TV
I can't remember the last time I watched a television series on ABC. In fact, I can't remember the last time I watched anything on ABC, but so far I've come across two new series that are off to a promising start. Lost, the adventures of a group of survivors of a plane crash on a deserted island, is off to a realy good start in the first three episodes. So far, it's managed to stay creepy. It's well written and has yet to get into any of the regular deserted island cliches.
The second show just premiered last week, and to be honest, there are two reasons I decided to watch it. The first is that it starred one of my favorite TV icons, the second is because my wife is in law school. Boston Legal, which stars William Shatner, James Spader and co-stars Rene Auberjonois, was funny, weird and very entertaining. I've never like lawyer TV shows, including Perry Mason and L.A. Law, (okay, I did kind of like that sci-fi lawyer series last spring Century City, but realized it was kind of silly), but I think this one's going to be pretty good. And I readily admitt that I probably would be watching it if it weren't for Shatner.
The state of small town newspapers today
I read with interest recently about the endorsement of John Kerry by the Iconoclast, the Crawford, Texas newspaper in the adopted home town of Dubya. Political leanings aside, I knew when I read the editorial exactly what the response would be. It would be nasty, it would be personal and it would be unfortunate for the small town newspaper every where.
The publishers of the Iconoclast responded to the criticism, economic retaliations and outright threats of violence in an excellent editorial here. Again, politics aside, this is an excellent editorial to a reaction that, as a former small town journalism, I am very familiar with.
