Wailing Into The Void

You should absolutely show your kids the six Star Wars movies in order of theatrical release, and not in order of episode number.

If we accept the premise that the primary goal of television producers is to keep people watching, it should come as no surprise that they place a premium on putting people on air who look good and sound good, as opposed to putting people on who have something valuable to say or even know what they’re talking about.

He’s not resting, he’s dead.  He will be missed.

I watch his show occasionally and I find it entertaining, but while I’m usually sympathetic to his opinions I also can’t help thinking that he is essentially a liberal version of Bill O’Reilly.  He’s bullying, pompous, self-righteous and assumes the air of a self-appointed defender of values that are beseiged by all kinds of nefarious forces, just like O’Reilly.  I can’t stand O’Reilly and I’m pretty sure that if my politics tilted more to the right I would hold Olbermann in equal contempt.

Peter J. Boyer’s profile of Olbermann in this week’s New Yorker gives us some interesting glimpses into the man’s mindset, including this nugget:

But Olbermann contends that the labored pretense of neutrality in the news business is a fruitless exercise. “There are people who, with absolute conviction, believe that Brian Williams is a Communist,” he said. “There are people who, with absolute conviction, believe that Katie Couric is in the pay of the Pentagon. There are people who are absolutely certain that Charlie Gibson sleeps with Hillary Clinton, based on the last debate. This is an old schoolyard thing I learned from being repeatedly beat up in the fourth grade. It finally dawned on me one day—they are going to keep beating me up whether I respond to them or not.” Olbermann continued, “Brian sometimes looks like his collar button is going to burst from the restraint that he has. I know the pain that he goes through; he measures each word like an apothecary—and they beat him up, too. The point is, why not? Why not add something to the discourse?”

There’s a good case to be made for why maintaining the pretense of neutrality in news is a fruitless exercise, but what Olbermann offers here isn’t part of it.  First of all, the point of trying to be neutral in reporting is not to avoid criticism.  There are many reasons why a news outlet might want to aim for neutrality, but the reason that stands out to me is a desire to develop and maintain credibility with its audience.  True, a news outlet will never gain absolute credibility with every member of its audience, but that doesn’t mean pursuing that as an ideal is fruitless. 

Second, all criticism isn’t equally valid, or invalid as the case may be.  The notion that Brian Williams is a Communist doesn’t hold a lot of weight.  Some people may believe it with all their heart, but my guess is they don’t have much evidence to back it up.  The notion that Keith Olbermann wants Barack Obama to defeat John McCain in November, however, is close to self-evident.  Because Olbermann has abandoned any pretense of neutrality in this regard the credibility of any or all of his coverage of the race is severely undermined.  That’s not necessarily a problem for Olbermann I suppose, who seems to be content to preach to the choir, but that doesn’t mean the efforts of countless newspeople to keep their opinions out of their reporting isn’t worthwhile.

I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark as an eight year-old when it came out in 1981. I recall flatly declaring back then that it was the best movie I had ever seen in my whole life. I suspect, however, if I had seen the movie for the first time when I was 35 it wouldn’t have made all that big an impression on me. I kept this thought in mind while watching Indiana Jones and the Kindgom of the Crystal Skull earlier this evening.

My adult brain told me that this movie is garbage. There isn’t anything really engaging about the characters or the story. There’s too much CGI. Harrison Ford is too old. Karen Allen smiles too often when she and the rest of the good guys are supposed to be in mortal danger. Cate Blanchett is more campy than menacing as the main bad guy.

My inner eight year-old enjoyed it immensely. When I was eight, two of my favorite televison shows were The Dukes of Hazzard and re-runs of the Batman series starring Adam West. Dukes was all about car chases, Batman was the height of camp and neither show was well known for featuring three-dimesional characters or compelling and coherent plots. They were dumb but they were fun, and so it is with The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

The film they were showing on my flight back from San Francisco on Sunday was Wild Hogs.  Under normal circumstances I would never even attempt to watch a film like this, but I was desperate for any sort of distraction from the horror show that is the modern day airline experience. 

I’m not a film critic and I don’t pretend or aspire to be one, but when I see a movie like this I’ve just got to weigh in.  According to IMDB the person who wrote the screenplay, a Mr. Brad Copeland, is also credited with writing six episodes of Arrested Development.  I find this difficult to comprehend.  Wild Hogs is about as lazy as writing gets.  No cliche goes unmined and the jokes couldn’t be more obvious nor the story more predictable.  If you can read this post you probably have what it takes to write a better version of this movie.  Please move to L.A. and start cranking out scripts that will make enduring the risk of getting deep-vein thrombosis fun again. 

At least that’s my theory.  Some agree.  Some don’t.  Some are just angry. And some are taking their frustrations out on David Chase’s daughter.

For the skeptics among you who still doubt that this season of the Sporanos has eerily foretold several real-life events I present to you yet another case of the show doing exactly that.  In this past Sunday’s episode, hitmen botch an attempted rubout of a mafioso in Brooklyn.  Two days later, whaddya think happened?   David Chase is on a roll, folks.  While all of you guys tune in this week to see what happens to Tony I’ll be tuning in to carefully search for hidden clues to the future.

Over at Slate Jeffrey Goldberg has noted that this season of the Sopranos has been eerily presaging real life events. While Goldberg jokingly suggests that David Chase could write an episode predicting the onset of peace in the Middle East, it looks like Chase has other ideas. Before A.J. tries to whack himself in tonight’s episode he tells Meadow “we’re gonna bomb Iran”, so that’s more or less an inevitability now.