Pop Culture Archives

Longtime readers know that - as discussed here - I'm a very big fan of the Saw Doctors, the great Irish pop/rock band, who in a just world would be international musical superstars. Anyway, here is a study in contrasts for you: among their more recent releases, which hit the top of the Irish pop charts last fall, is a cover of "About You Now," originally recorded in the U.S. by the Sugababes, but translated into something rather different by the Saw Doctors (a cover tune is a departure for a band that typically writes their own stuff, but this one was originally done to raise money for a cystic fibrosis charity...and yes, writing that made me think of Dean Barnett again). Check out three versions of the song. First, we have the Sugababes' decidedly R&B flavored original, which I will confess is not at all to my taste, here. Second, a version by teenybopper singer Miranda Cosgrove, here, which is basically the same thing but slightly less funky and more...well, for lack of a better word, white. Then we get the Saw Doctors' guitar-driven version, which of course is more rock n' roll and also, naturally, less girly and more wistful:

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I'd always expected Michael Jackson to go by slipping into the Cracks of Doom while clutching his Precious....Seriously, I never had any sympathy for him, given that he was a pedophile or something very like it (leave for another day the people who thought it was a good idea to send their children over to his house), but Jackson was a figure deserving mainly of pity. His family, especially his father, wrecked him, and he spent most of his life mutilating himself and indulging his increasingly bizarre fixations, and seeking the company of children, old women, animals, basically anyone but adults who could have dealt with him as a peer. I have to wonder if his death was more or less intentional, especially given some of the financial problems the Wall Street Journal had been reporting he'd been having lately.

Musically, Jackson wasn't my cup of tea - I loathed him when he was big in 1983, and other than some of the pure Motown-ish Jackson 5 stuff, once the craze was gone the only one of his songs I liked (which is on my iPod) was "Beat It," his collaboration with Eddie Van Halen, which really does rock after all these years. But I came to appreciate the fact that he was a great musical talent and, in his day, a great entertainer. But his personal wierdness did that in as well - an entertainer needs some sort of connection with the audience, and after Thriller, Jackson was just too bizarre for anybody to identify with or connect with him at all. Smeagol was long gone by then.

Irony alert: Brad Pitt's film version of Moneyball appears to have been cut from the roster, presumably to save money.

I don't read interviews with Bruce Springsteen all that much anymore - although Bruce's music is still mostly only vaguely political, as I discussed at some length back in 2002, in recent years he's gotten sufficiently actively partisan that I prefer to just listen to the music and tune out the politics. But this interview has some telling (if in a few places overly grandiose) musings on the thing that - other than the music itself - I've always loved and admired about the Boss, and that's the fact that the man truly gives a damn about connecting with his audience, and works at it, which is why he remains the best live showman in the business:

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I mentioned a few weeks ago that I'd recently gotten into the music of Kelly Clarkson. Well, I ended up digging up enough material on her to turn out a fairly exhaustive profile for The New Ledger of her formula for success and place in the culture (consider it a counterbalance to all the Bob Dylan content on the site). I've always had a soft spot for people who made a career path where one didn't exist before, and Clarkson isn't quite like anybody else in the music business. I also came to the conclusion that she is, with the exception of Justin Timberlake, probably the naturally funniest person in the music business.

Well, we all have our ways of moving on from tragedy in our lives. If you're Liam Neeson, that entails....assembling the A-Team!

Liam Neeson is in talks with movie bosses to star in the upcoming big screen version of The A Team.

The Schindler's List actor has reportedly been lined up to play John 'Hannibal' Smith, the role made famous by George Peppard in the hit 1980s television show.

He is currently in negotiations with 20th Century Fox and producers Tony and Ridley Scott to appear in the movie about four war veterans who escape from a prison to become vigilantes.

The Hangover star Bradley Cooper was recently rumoured to be taking on the role of Lieutenant Templeton 'Faceman' Peck, originally played by Dirk Benedict, but he has since denied the claims.

The roles of Captain 'Howling Mad' Murdock and Sergeant 'BA' Baracus have yet to be cast, but rapper-turned-actor Common is rumoured to be in the running for Mr.T's iconic role.

Production for the film is due to begin in late August for release next year, according to Daily Variety.

I pity the fool who's not excited about this. There's actually a good deal to be said for remaking something that was cheesy at the time and is now terribly dated; there's a lot more freedom. Of course, it could still be awful, as most Hollywood rehashes are. As for Neeson, well, I hope it's a fun movie to make, he could use that.

A collection of Dylan's idiosyncratic observations from his radio show, some of which can't help but crack you up. H/T. And while I am at it, my New Ledger colleagues have more on Dylan: Pejman on Dylan's self-education, Sean Curnyn on Dylan's new album, and Paul Cella on "The Patriotic Bob Dylan." I'm not a huge Dylan fan but enjoy the best of his work, and as Paul has often reminded me, he's a man who has always defied easy classification.

Interesting list from Yahoo of the best-selling artists (by albums sold) of the decade. It says something about the state of rock that the top seven are two rappers, three country artists, Britney Spears and The Beatles, although there are still a handful of rock acts on the chart.

There really is no possible objective way to measure the greatest rock n' roll song of all time, but pretty high on any list would be whether a song was so essential that just about everybody who's ever picked up a guitar had to try their hand at it. I say you can't go wrong with the original, primordial, classic rock standard that's one of the very few songs of the 1950s that sounds as fresh today as it did five decades ago (warning, the volume of these is variable):

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This video, featuring an appearance by Kelly Clarkson on what appears to be German TV, cracked me up for some reason...picture a foreign pop star who speaks barely any English appearing on David Letterman, with the attendant awkwardness and translation problems, and ending up in one of his stunts, and you start to get the effect.

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H/T

UPDATE: Moe Lane has some more philosophical thoughts from Mr. T on the nature of pitying the fool.

This could be a metaphor for any number of things in different walks of life, but really it's awesome enough to deserve its own post:

In the upcoming movie version of "Moneyball," starring Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, Bill James will appear as an animated character.

H/T

Law & Order is expanding into a UK series.

The good: reader Rob B points me to the Tauntaun sleeping bag, which of course I now want...or at least, wish I had had when I was about 11.

The not so good: Brian Faughnan looks at the new General Motors ....vehicle. Um, yeah, let's see how this drives on the highways of Minnesota in winter. And this Iowahawk video Brian links to is too good not to share:

Speaking of things Japanese, this is awesome:

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Old college friend Mike Sergott has a new site, "Appetite for Deconstruction." His look back in horror at the 2008 movie season is here. Check it out.

Via Jonathan Last, an interview with Christopher McQuarrie, screenwriter of "Valkyrie" (which I have not seen, although I think I can guess how it ends). A lot of interesting stuff; I liked this:

Q. ... Saw "Valkyrie" and really enjoyed it. What struck me was that the film is a throwback to a time before "Saving Private Ryan" -- when movies about World War II didn't have to be Big Important Statements and could just be thrillers.

A. Thank you. What we've been trying to get across -- and what the criticism of the film seems to be -- is that we had the audacity to make a World War II movie that wasn't "important" -- as in, a giant statement about war. I mean, what more do you need than a bunch of Germans trying to kill Hitler? Isn't that all kind of obvious -- do they really need to be sitting around talking about their objection to war?

Joe Posnanski, the best working baseball writer, has a fine Hall of Fame column (although I seriously disagree with him on Tommy John, and kinda disagree on Grich and Trammell), with a marvelous digression about Barry Manilow and the songs of the 1980s. His earlier effort on the Hall was good too, and has some interesting historical walk data - basically, the recent high tide of walk rates in 1994-2000 in the AL (in the NL it was just 1999-2000) has largely receded to historical levels akin to those of the 1969-93 period (walks have always been less common in the NL, even before the DH; the all-time high was the AL in the late 40s, with the NL season high set in 1894).

I watched the ball drop New Year's Eve on CNN (we decided we'd had enough of Dick Clark's Rockin' New Years Deathbed Watch), and I have to say, the co-hosting team of Anderson Cooper and Kathy Griffin had to have the worst chemistry of any on-air partners since the heyday of Monday Night Football's bad booths. I'm not a terribly big fan of Cooper, but he's a Jennings/Brokaw type, a newsman who tries to take his job seriously and has a dry, deadpan sense of humor - and they had him matched up with the unwatchable and unfunny Griffin, whose shtick is slapstick and saying inappropriate things. All she did was step on and undermine his lines, and I swear on several occasions Cooper looked like he wanted to punch her in the mouth, and I'm not sure too many of the viewers wouldn't have sympathized with him. Talk about terrible programming. (She added insult to injury with some heavy-handedly staged flirting with Cooper - a little semi-flirtatious banter is sort of expected in a male-female TV pairing like that, but c'mon, at least half the audience knows Cooper is gay). Meanwhile they sent Erica Hill, Cooper's usual co-host and who normally is on the same wavelength with him, down to the street in a vain effort to get frozen revelers to say something interesting (one area where Griffin's shtick as a provocateur might have at least caused something unexpected to happen). Terribly incompetent TV.

Patterico goes to the archives with a quote from the late and very much lamented Michael Crichton on why we believe the newspapers even though we know better:

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

One of my recurring themes on the media is that the preference for liberal politics - big government, social liberalism, political correctness, disdain of conservatives and the religious - is really only the tip of the iceberg of what is wrong with the mainstream media. The state of sportswriting, business and legal journalism, pretty much anything that gets covered in the papers and on TV is subject not only to political bias but also to a whole host of other individual and institutional biases and prejudices and axes to grind, laziness, sloppiness, failures of substantive knowledge and logical reasoning...the blogosphere has no shortage of flaws of its own, but the fact that so many bloggers have had careers doing things (the law, the military, business, medicine, etc.) means in general that you get a class of people who have substantive knowledge and exposure to more rigorous disciplines than the typical journalist. Crichton, with his medical background, brought that same advantage to his craft as a novelist, and we were richer for his work (I read a whole bunch of his books; my favorites were The Great Train Robbery and Disclosure).

Over at RedState yesterday a bunch of us had some Election Day fun with a little tongue-in-cheek geostrategy about the Council of Elrond. A good diversion from a discouraging day.

Via Gabriel Malor at Ace's place. Amazingly, Billy Dee Williams was available.

Michele Catalano looks back at the first day's playlist on MTV.

The new animated Star Wars film may actually be pretty good. It actually sounds as if the director is following the same lines of thinking I laid out in my argument about how the prequels could have been better.

Unlike past vacations, I don't have much to report in the travelogue from last week's brief trip to West Palm Beach. I did finally get to see an Obama ad on TV, which featured him taking credit for welfare reform, tax cuts and other Republican-sounding things, and catch just a little of that epic 18-17 Rockies-Marlins game, and we did get to experience the joys of daily thuderstorms. During one of those, we took the kids to see Wall*E.

I'd definitely give the film a thumbs-up, especially the first half and the short at the
beginning, which had me in stitches. The lengthy silent-film-ish parts and the homage to 2001 made the film awfully artsy for a kids' cartoon, but on the whole it was very well done and entertaining, and the animation during the earth-bound sequences was breathtaking. I was surprised that the kids liked it - my two-year-old said her favorite part was the people falling off their chairs, which she found funny. I would not rate it among the best of the Pixar films, like the Toy Story films and The Incredibles, but it's a good one that will bear re-watching.

There's been some minor debate over the movie's anti-consumer environmental politics, but the movie wasn't dominated by heavy-handed propaganda like the NGO-shilling penguins of Happy Feet or even the enviro-silliness of Evan Almighty, and in any event the trash-will-overwhelm-us doomsday scenario was self-evidently absurd even within the context of the movie (they show the humans' new spaceship home as gleamingly spotless because they have the technology to jettison their garbage into space). I did think they hit one or two slightly sour notes when Fred Willard tried to sneak in Bush-bashing references to his dialogue (a completely out-of-context "stay the course!" interjection), which I didn't find annoying so much as sad in the way it will date the film - imagine watching that 40 years from now, as if you were watching Peter Pan and they threw in a random potshot at Dwight Eisenhower.

A marketing note: when we talked about going to a movie, my 2-year-old daughter piped up with "I want to see panda movie." She watches only Sesame Street and Teletubbies videos and Jetsons and Muppet Show DVDs - nothing with ads (my wife and I have no particular axe to grind with commercial TV, but aside from baseball the kids don't really watch it, mainly because the things we think are worth showing them are the things we grew up with on video or DVD). So, how did she know about Kung Fu Panda? Maybe she saw it on a breakfast cereal box or something, I do not know (my son thinks maybe she caught an ad for it on a Mets broadcast).

One might even say that this list from Cracked.com is the most fundamentally conservative thing you will ever read about the movies.

This is also hilarious, and could also be applied to the world at large. I like the Venn diagram about Sweeney Todd. They don't mention the worst offender of all, which was the ad campaign for the animated Lord of the Rings movie in the 1970s, which led filmgoers to believe it was the entire trilogy, not just the Fellowship of the Ring.

I took the kids Saturday to see the fourth Indiana Jones movie, and I must say, it exceeded my expectations, which I had worked to keep modest. You have to remember that the original Indiana Jones movies were not such film legends because they were compelling human drama or fantastically realistic; rather, they succeeded because they offered three things:

1. A classic action hero (I know I was a minority in enjoying Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, but the film was nonetheless a vivid reminder of how much a film like that loses when it has a bland hero instead of a charismatic swashbuckler);

2. Non-stop action that keeps you on the edge of your seat too consistently to allow for reflection on the amount of disbelief you have to suspend; and

3. A tongue-in-cheek attitude towards the fact that this is a movie; they were supposed to be a fun throwback to the action films of the 30s and 40s, and all three of the originals had their share of explicit winks to film convention or homages to specific films of old.

I was reminded of this by recently re-watching them. All three are still a lot of fun, but there's still plenty that's outright preposterous, from the action sequences to the romantic dialogue to the 'monologuing' villains to the inevitable deus ex machina supernatural ending. Temple of Doom, which may have been my favorite of the three when I saw it in the theater as a young teenager, has undoubtedly aged the worst and/or holds up the worst when watched as an adult (it's also the most politically incorrect of the three), although the opening action sequence remains a classic.

On to the new installment (a few very mild spoilers, but the main spoilers will be below the fold). First of all, Harrison Ford's still got it. He looks great for his age, but he definitely looks his age (65); he basically defines "grizzled" at this point. And he's still got some of the old charm, much moreseo than in interviews with the real Ford, who has been a crusty old man for years now. That said, Indy comes off as more serious and sober now, which is inevitable with the passage of years (we're reminded early on that Indy's father has died - Sean Connery chose not to return for the film - as has Indy's professorial colleague Marcus Brody, played by the late Denholm Elliott; John Rhys-Davies' absence is not explained, and mercifully Short Round does not turn up). We are definitely given to believe that in the years between 1939 and 1957, treasure hunting and womanizing have had to take a back seat to the grim business of defending the free world from Nazis and Communists, a reality that's consistent not only with the world's history at that time but with why Lucas and Spielberg originally set the first three films before the outbreak of world war, when it was still possible for an American rogue to travel the world and fight the bad guys without a lot of friendly military help or polarized local resistance. Indy by now, like Han Solo in the later Star Wars flicks, has largely been absorbed into the chain of command. In fact, an early plotline about Indy being the victim of a sort of McCarthyism (in today's Hollywood, you can't have Commie bad guys without a little McCarthyism, even as late as 1957) serves mostly to ensure that Indy can function once again as a free agent.

The second really crucial decision was bringing back Karen Allen as Marion Ravenwood to be Indy's love interest rather than pair up Ford with some young starlet. Not only does this spare us the spectacle of a woman in her twenties or thirties falling for a guy twice her age, but by bringing back the best of Indy's old flames, we get to skip almost entirely over the whole process of flirtation and courtship, which almost invariably goes down badly in a George Lucas film, and stick to the action. When you see Indy and Marion together, you don't need to be sold on their immediate attraction; it's baked into the characters and our history with them. And the 56-year-old Allen is still appealing, even cute if you can apply that word to a woman her age who - like Ford - definitely looks her age.

The movie has plenty of fun action sequences, my favorite being a lengthy, rollicking chase sequence in the Peruvian jungle that borrows very liberally from the speeder bike sequence in Return of the Jedi and features the meanest ants since Them. Early on, we also get to see Indy one-up Jack Bauer by surviving the shockwave from a nuclear blast, which is amusingly ludicrous.

Lucas and Spielberg, as children of the 50s (in Lucas' case, also a veteran of the first wave of 50s nostalgia with American Graffiti), lovingly slather on every detail, both realistic and cliched, to evoke the time period, from Elvis to malt-shop bobby-soxers to "I Like Ike" to the Red Scare. There are more than a few obvious tips of the hat (some literal, some figurative) to the prior movies as well as to other films. The most obvious is when Shia Lebeouf, with his hair compulsively slicked back to look like a ringer for James Dean, makes his first appearance dressed exactly like Marlon Brando in The Wild One:

More spoilers below

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Your nostalgia for the day:

Apparently, at least somebody thinks the new Indiana Jones is really good, as the Daily News gives it four stars. Frankly, I was going to take the kids to see it even if everyone said it was horrible, so it's good to see that the reviews are at worst mixed. George Lucas may have lost his touch, but Spielberg hasn't, which bodes well.

Dan Federici, founding member of the E Street Band, has died at 58 of skin cancer. A great loss; the E Street Band has several key components, but Federici has always been one of them.

CBS, besides defending a $70 million lawsuit over the dismissal of its last Evening News anchor, is now pondering dumping Katie Couric, who has failed to earn her own $75 million paycheck.

For Couric, this turned out to be a bad case of hubris: she assumed that, having been a commercial success in morning TV, she could switch to the different format and audience of evening news and not only succeed but turn around a floundering, scandal-tarred news division. It didn't happen; not only did she lose one of her principal assets along the way (Couric's chipper demeanor always went over well with the morning-TV crowd), but once CBS made the decision to stay a nominally straight news outlet rather than becoming an openly left-leaning news source, Couric was always the worst possible person to try to correct CBS News' decades-long reputation as the most liberal news source on TV.

Clearly, CBS should have listened to me when I suggested back in December 2004 that they hire CNN's Erica Hill instead. Hill's career has only headed up since then; Headline News ended up rebranding her prime-time shift as "Prime News with Erica Hill," and more recently she moved to the mother network to pair with Anderson Cooper on one of CNN's two most prominent news shows (the other being The Lou Dobbs Really Hates Foreigners Hour). Hill probably wouldn't have singlehandedly turned around CBS overnight either, but hiring a younger, lower-key and undoubtedly less expensive anchor would have kept costs and expectations lower, and signalled a commitment to rebuilding the brand from scratch rather than trying to poach from NBC. Instead, CBS is now reduced to denying reports that it's going to outsource newsgathering to ... CNN.

*This analysis of major league managers' tendencies illustrated as cartoon faces is...well, you have to click on the graphic to get the full effect. It's bizarre. H/T Rays Index.

*Today is the 97th anniversary of the introduction of baseball's MVP Award by automaker Hugh Chalmers. The first-ever MVPs? In the AL, 24-year-old Ty Cobb for his first and best .400 season, batting .420/.467/.621 with 47 doubles, 24 triples and 83 steals, scoring 147 runs and driving in 127. In the NL, 28-year-old veteran Cubs rightfielder Frank "Wildfire" Schulte, narrowly over Christy Mathewson, for batting .300/.384/.534 with 21 triples and 21 homers (only the third 20-HR season ever if you exclude the fluky 1884 Cubs), 105 Runs, and 107 RBI.

*Our old friend Dr. Manhattan is back blogging! While I was tied up doing my baseball previews, he had a fine column taking John McCain to task for his knee-jerk ignorance on the connection between vaccines and autism. As a general rule, the more science is involved in an issue, the worse McCain is. He seems sometimes to have a superstitious faith in junk science.

*Former equipment manager Yosh Kawano is leaving the Cubs clubhouse after 65 years. That's a very long time to work for one baseball team and not get a World Series ring. I think Kawano's name is familiar to me from one of Joe Garagiola's books...as in, he was there when Garagiola played for the Cubs.

*Via Pinto, Travis Nelson at Boy of Summer has a lengthy attack on Melky Cabrera. I'm more optimistic about Cabrera's potential for across-the-board growth as a hitter, but I'd generally agree that his prospects are much dimmer if you don't regard him as a competent defensive center fielder.

*There's no such thing as an innocent non-Muslim? This may go a ways to explaining what this means. I can't buy into Hawkins' notion, which has been pushed for some time by my RedState colleague Paul Cella, that the U.S. should bar immigration by Muslims, but when you consider Hawkins' logic, I have to admit that that's more an emotional reaction than a reasoned position on my part.

*While I don't agree with all the analysis, David Frum and Bill Kristol have some useful points about the perlious passivity of the Bush Administration in responding to criticism, most particularly the conviction that there's no point in fighting over the past. The Administration's enemies have nourished a number of myths about the past 7 years that have proven terribly corrosive of its credibility, goodwill and, ultimately, ability to get anything done. (On a related note, consider how little press went to the Army Corps of Engineers' ultimate admission that its design defects caused the flooding of New Orleans).

*Yes, Glenn Greenwald is still a fool who has trouble with elementary logical reasoning.

*The Nineties economy in a nutshell. This, too.

*Guns don't kill people, guns kill movie scripts.

*24 is coming back! Maybe that means Jack Bauer will stay out of trouble.

This story about Chuck Norris' cult following among U.S. troops in Iraq is pretty amusing, but he is apparently popular with the locals as well:

Norris' appeal is not restricted to U.S. troops either. At an Iraqi police graduation ceremony in Fallujah, graduates called out for their "Chuck Norris" to pose with them for photos.

"Truthfully, I didn't know who he was. I asked the Americans, and they said he was a great fighter, and that's why they named me after him. They showed me a video, and it's true, he's a great fighter" said police trainer Mohammed Rasheed.

With his handle-bar moustache, Rasheed has a vague resemblance to Norris.

Another police trainer said Chuck Norris was a role model for the police in Fallujah, which until 2007 was an al-Qaida stronghold and the scene of fierce battles with security forces.

"I've seen his videos, he's a hero. He saves the city, he protects women and children and he fights crime wherever it is. We should all be like Chuck Norris," Khaled Hussein said.

One of yesterday's biggest stock losers was Build A Bear Workshop, which saw its stock price plunge 20% on a disappointing earnings report. Motley Fool looks at the roadblocks the company has faced, mainly escalating costs and a general sense that the novelty of bear-building has worn off. The suggestion that someone like Disney snap up the company makes some sense, and probably a lot more sense if the price continues to drop.* When we took the kids to Citizens Bank Park last summer, they had a Build-a-Phanatic store; I would think that Disneyworld could do something similar. The good news for a brand like this is that if kids get bored with it, there's always another generation of little ones for whom everything is new.

One thing that isn't mentioned here but should be, though, is the rising threat of Webkinz. If you're not familiar, Webkinz sells stuffed animals, much like a slightly larger version of Beanie Babies, but the hook is that each Webkinz can be registered on a website so that kids can then play online games with an online avatar of their stuffed character, buy things for the character (e.g., furniture for its room). The site is engaging and it's kid-safe, in that while kids can interact with others over the site, such as by playing games with them and exchanging some canned forms of communication, there's no way for them to actually talk to other kids on the site - and thus no way for them to talk to people pretending to be kids, either. It's enormously addictive, and the Webkinz site has definitely drawn my kids away from Build a Bears to Webkinz.

That said, we were back at Build a Bear this weekend (much to the particular joy and amazement of my youngest, who is almost two). Why? Because Build a Bear has opened its own website, and in addition to registering all new stuffed animals on the site they are having a limited time offer to register previously purchased stuffed animals. While "Build a Bearville" doesn't seem to be on a par with "Webkinz World," it at least got my kids back to wanting to go to the store and check out the site.

So that's the real story from the trenches. It remains to be seen which of the two prevails in the long run (Webkinz has the advantage of lower margins, since they don't operate retail stores), or whether perhaps there is even an opportunity for the two companies to merge their operations (less likely). But it's proof that even so prosaic a company as Build a Bear needs to adapt to the internet to stay competitive.

* - I should note that (a) I'm not giving investment advice, nor would anyone in their right minds take investment advice from me and (b) I haven't checked on whether Build a Bear is one of my law firm's many clients and I don't personally have any non-public information about the company or any of the other companies mentioned here or in the Fool.com article.

Looks like the writers' strike may be close to an end, which means no more of this. Hopefully, the actors won't go out next.

Season 7 of 24, if it ever arrives, will be missing this thrilling plot:

Come spring, the show's writers and their Fox bosses began having informal telephone conversations about how to recover for next season. By the May 21 season finale, the audience had dropped to just over 11 million. Fox gave the writers carte blanche to "reimagine" the show. One of the team's chief considerations was how to address the controversy surrounding Jack's use of torture. Should Jack be feeling the guilt the media would have him feel?

On May 31, the show's head writers went in for a meeting at the studio to present their first big idea: sending Jack to Africa. In various incarnations, Jack would begin the season digging ditches, building houses, tending to orphans, providing security for an embassy or escorting around a visiting dignitary. "One of the themes we discussed was penance, that Africa was a place Jack had gone to seek some kind of penance. Some sanctuary too, but also penance for things he's done in his life," Mr. Gordon says.

Ms. Walden and Gary Newman, chairmen of 20th Century Fox Television, were receptive but believed it was too much of a departure. "It felt like we were throwing the baby out with the bathwater," says Ms. Walden. The Africa plot also had several glaring problems, the first of which was that at some point Jack would have to fly back to the U.S. The writers proposed that for the first time ever, "24" would break from its real-time conceit; the show would skip the period when Jack was on his 14-hour flight.

The writers agreed to work on the plot. Just three weeks before they were due to start shooting the first episodes, Messrs. Gordon and Surnow joined fellow head writers Bob Cochran and Manny Coto for a pancake breakfast at an IHOP to talk through the elements of Jack-in-Africa that still weren't working. Jack was too far away, they felt, both from the immediacy of domestic terror and from the character he had been in prior seasons.

As Dave Barry would say: 24 has writers?

Yes, another video in lieu of content.

Via Allahpundit.

The good news: there will be a movie version of The Hobbit, and Peter Jackson will be involved.

The bad news: I gather the "sequel" discussed here will be set between The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Rings, which means it will have nothing to do with Tolkein, who wrote very little occurring in that period, and nothing resembling a fully fleshed out adventure. The Silmarillion and other parts of the Tolkein canon, including the LotR appendices, provide more than enough material for pre-Hobbit storytelling; I have no idea why Jackson would want to do that other than a positive desire to make his own stuff up. I mean, I want to see the fall of Gondolin, the flight of the Noldor from Valinor, the fight of Morgoth and Fingolfin. If he wants to do a story with a lot of creative liberties, he could do a full film treatment of the Last Alliance or some of the battles in the earlier Third Age.

UPDATE: More than a few people are questioning whether the "sequel" is really going to be something other than doing the book in two parts. I hope it won't, and maybe I have heard incorrectly. When I get a chance, I'll look for more sources on this.

*Studes says Jose Reyes' problem down the stretch last season was not hitting too few ground balls.

*TIME Magazine looked into Vladimir Putin's heart, too, and named him their Man of the Year for discarding the remaining constitutional breaks on dictatorship in Russia. Unlike President Bush, TIME can't excuse this as diplomacy.

*You'll shoot your eye out! Mike Huckabee may have a serious problem with granting too many clemencies to violent criminals, but Mitt Romney's refusal to grant any pardons or clemencies at all took him to the ridiculous length of refusing to expunge the conviction of a decorated Iraq War veteran who was convicted at age 13 of shooting a friend in the arm with a BB gun.

*Britney Spears' 16-year-old sister, who was supposed to be the responsible one, has announced that she is pregnant. At least she's keeping the baby.

*Businesses that should exist but don't.

My wife and I have been watching some episodes of FrankTV lately on TBS. The show, if you're not familiar, is basically as low-budget a concept as you can get this side of a reality show: Frank Caliendo does sketches in which he plays nearly all the characters, and the sketches are broken up by Frank on a couch with a semi-randomly selected member of the studio audience.

The writing on the show isn't particularly good, but it's worth tuning in for an episode or two if you haven't seen Caliendo's impressions, which are uncanny. Longer term, of course, the show is yet another point in the evolution of original TV programming towards budget-consciousness. Even some scripted shows these days seem to be under pressure to make do with smaller casts and fewer sets. It's an economically rational response to the decline of mass-market ratings.

Julia Roberts designs Armani bracelet for World AIDS Day. Mother Theresa should have been so virtuous.

In light of the writers' strike, Jonathan Last asks why the writers don't get paid more simply by operation of the market:

Writers make a lot less money in comparison to directors and actors than they used to. And the less money you make on a project, the less control you can exert over the creative process.

And I think it's safe to argue that, in general, the more control writers have on a project, the better it generally turns out. (By better, I mean both commercially and artistically.)

The importance of writers in TV is, I think, self-evident. They trump everyone else (except the showrunner, but on good shows, the showrunner is normally a writer, too) in terms of their contributions to the success or failure of the finished product. . .

Actors are quarterbacks, directors are running backs, and writers are offensive linemen. That's about how they contribute to the product, and how they're paid. And just like it was a welcome change when left tackles finally started being compensated more closely to their value a few years back, I think we should be happy to see writers moved a tiny bit closer to their real value.

His whole post is worth reading...the analogy isn't perfect in terms of market structure: writers have more of a free market than NFL linemen had pre-free-agency, but as Last notes in the comments, the market they have is not the most effective one, given the stranglehold a handful of consumers (i.e., network heads) have on the decision to hire them.

As Last notes, writers bring a large marginal value to the table: it's far more common to see TV shows fail for bad writing than for bad acting, so improving the writing can dramatically improve the expected return on investment on a show (unless the show's concept is so bad as to be beyond salvage by any writer). That's partly a function of an inefficient market (i.e., inability to identify the best writers, as compared to a relatively efficient market for locating good actors), possibly partly a scarcity-of-quality issue, and partly that - unlike novelists or movie writers - TV writers are signed in advance of turning out multiple stories, so the network heads may not want to pay in advance without assurances that a given writer will produce consistently good work.

The problem with writers not getting their due in terms of their marginal value to the projects they work on is, I would guess, the combination of the first and third points: networks don't have - or don't feel they have - a really good system for telling the difference between good and bad writers, and lack confidence that today's good writer will continue to churn out quality tomorrow. At least, that's my speculation. Because if the networks really did believe they could measure the difference between good writers and bad ones there would be a very big marginal investment return to be made by expanding your writing budget to snag the best ones.

I was, at one time or another, a regular viewer of something like half the shows on this list.

Sean Connery's golfing buddies: Craig T. Nelson and Joe Pesci.

Warning: contains spoilers if you have not watched all 6 prior seasons (I learned things here I did not know, not having yet caught up on seasons 4 & 5):

Via Allahpundit.

Matt Welch links to a cool video of the Beatles performing "Hey Bulldog," one of their lesser-known but still excellent tunes:

Boba Fett: Delicious Cookie Receptacle.

Just a moment to blog here - I just got back from seeing Bruce Springsteen live at Rockefeller Center (which is just a block from my office). It was awesome (and a good deal more fun than last night's Mets game, which I was at Shea for, and which quickly turned from desperation to a funereal atmosphere). Granted, I couldn't see Bruce from where I was standing, and I couldn't hear nearly any of what he said when he bantered with or hectored the crowd or chatted with Matt Lauer, but (a) I was still closer to the stage than I have been for the three times I saw him in concert, and (b) hey, it's free. It was sort of surreal, since I was across the street and while Bruce was playing there were an endless stream of cabs, trucks, cop cars, buses, etc. streaming by. I also got to see Tim Russert, who wandered in front of one of the big panoramic second-floor windows on his cell phone and waved to the crowd.

Bruce was scheduled to go on at about 8:30, but he came out to do a warmup at 8am sharp - and oddly, he played "The Promised Land," which he then played a second time as his opener on the air. Bruce and the band both sounded great. After that he played two of the new songs that for various reasons I had not heard previously. First was "Radio Nowhere," which rocks, and if anything reminded me of "Trouble River," but bouncier. Second up, and preceded by some political screed about tearing up the Constitution and whatnot (I couldn't make out enough of it to really be irritated, and besides, we know Bruce's politics by now) was "Living in the Future," which has a real vintage E Street Band feel to it. Then he did a fairly somber version of "My Hometown," and came back out (I assume for the last time - I left a few minutes later) for an encore of "Night," a little bit of an odd choice at 9am but the longtime Bruce fans in the crowd ate it up.

UPDATE: From YouTube, audio of Bruce doing "Radio Nowhere" in Asbury Park Tuesday night:

And here is "Living in the Future"

It would appear that Bruce may have done one more song after I left....grrr.

Will Collier explains how the record companies' declining profit margins from selling music in the age of iTunes are pushing them to focus on acts who generate profit from things other than their music, with inevitable declining returns on the quality of the music.

It's the feel-good story of the year:

Via Jane Galt.

UPDATE: This is good too.

So, late Thursday night I finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh and final installment in the series. My review of the book is below the fold.

WARNING! SPOILERS! WARNING! SPOILERS! WARNING! SPOILERS! WARNING! SPOILERS! WARNING! SPOILERS! WARNING! SPOILERS! WARNING! SPOILERS!

In other words, don't read further unless you have finished the book or don't mind finding out how it goes and ends.

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I'm still appalled that the NY Times broke embargo and published a review of the seventh Harry Potter book yesterday, though given the Times' attitude towards far more serious and dangerous secrets, I can't say I'm surprised. At any rate, I will never forgive anyone who spoils the ending for me, doubly so because I'm swamped with work at the moment and will take longer than usual to get through the final 784 pages of the saga. This isn't like the Sopranos, where we could all watch a single episode the same night. My one consolation is that the media is so fixated on "does Harry die?" that that may be all they report. Either way, I will have to avoid a lot of media for the next week or two.

As for my predictions for Book #7, I can't add much to my lengthy analysis after Book #6. Jonathan Last has more here, including a link to a lengthy analysis of the "evil Snape" theory (i.e., that Snape is actually a Saruman-like figure). I continue to believe that we will find that Snape was never fully loyal either to Dumbledore or Voldemort.

It being my son's brithday last Thursday, we took the kids (sans baby) out to see Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. On the whole, it was yet again an enjoyable film, as the first four were. But a good many of the scenes felt rushed - they didn't just trim out scenes to squeeze an 870-page book into a single movie, they also simplified the scenes that were left, taking out many of the delicious ironies, clever plot twists and one-liners that make Rowling's books more than just fun kiddie stories. I swear, if they made a movie version of Gilligan's Island today the first thing the studio would do is tell the director that the plot needed to be simplified and there were too many characters. The film ran something like 2 hours and 20 minutes, and while a 3-hour movie is always a hard sell, especially for kids, you could easily have added 20 minutes to the film and lost nothing in terms of pacing. Remember, the bulk of the kids in the audience have plowed through multiple 700+ page books, they will have the patience.

Of course, the book is always better. And I'm not unsympathetic to the problem of condensing a book of that length. More after the fold - I'm writing for the audience of people who know the books here, so spoilers will follow if you don't.

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H/T

An exhaustive explanation from the setting of the final scene of why Tony is deader than Paul McCartney. Via HotAir. Of course, all of this is equally consistent with Chase teasing us to build suspense. I still think the whole "show ends when Tony's point of view ends" assumption is inconsistent with the show's prior seasons, in which we saw plenty of things Tony never saw.

By the way - another spoiler here, albeit from an older film:

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An interesting interview with the Sopranos creator, including an unsurprising admission:

[R]emember that 21-month hiatus between Seasons Five and Six? That was Chase thinking up the ending. HBO chairman Chris Albrecht came to him after Season Five and suggested thinking up a conclusion to the series; Chase agreed, on the condition that he get "a long break" to decide on an ending.

Originally, that ending was supposed to occur last year, but midway through production, the number of episodes was increased, and Chase stretched out certain plot elements while saving the major climaxes for this final batch of 9.

"If this had been one season, the Vito storyline would not have been so important," he says.

Translation: if it feels like filler, it is filler. The Kevin Finnerty thing went on at least an episode too long as well.

Let's talk about the ending of The Sopranos. Spoliers, of course, aplenty. DO NOT READ IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO KNOW HOW IT ENDED

(NOTE: POST HAS BEEN UPDATED SEVERAL TIMES)

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Now, now, we are really in the home stretch. SPOLIERS from last night's Sopranos included, so don't go below the fold if you are still waiting to watch it.

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Jonathan Last has been pumping up the Harry Potter 7 speculation with posts discussing the possibility of an early-in-the-book death for Mrs. Weasley and speculation that Professor McGonagall is a double agent. I don't buy the latter at all - I don't think even a fictional character could be convicted in a court of law of treason on such flimsy evidence, most of which consists of (1) sour facial expressions and (2) questionable decisionmaking.

I'm a little bleary-eyed from watching the Sopranos last night after the Mets got shut down by Tyler Clippard on the way to his junior prom....thoughts in the extended entry below, SPOILERS INCLUDED.

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I was switching back and forth last night between the GOP debate and the Met game before catching up on last night's "24," so let me give you my observations on what I did catch, plus a few other bits:

*It may almost be time to add Shawn Green to the list of Omar's successes - I'm really amazed that he is hitting .324 and slugging .525, when he looked for all the world like he was headed irreversibly downhill last season. It's a Mike Lowell-style resurgence. Green doesn't look like a power hitter; he's built like a finesse pitcher. The Mets have batboys beefier than Green.

*24 has just gone catastrophically off the rails since the end of the plot with the Arabs. They should probably have ended the season right there. In particular, we have seen no explanation of how Chaing new where and when to call Jack to start this whole thing, and no good reason why the White House should have agreed in the first place to negotiate with a state actor holding a U.S. citizen hostage in Los Angeles. It's gone downhill from there. The Russians seem awfully touchy about nuclear technology that their own consul was basically handing out like Halloween candy, yet blase about threatening war with the U.S. when they know that the U.S. has access to that technology. The simplest explanation is this one.

It looks like Jack is finally leaving Los Angeles after this season. This means we can ask a question that would come up for no other show: will they kill off Los Angeles?

*The account of the White House hospital visit to John Ashcroft, by the way, sounds so much like something from 24... a scene very, very radically different from the caricature of Ashcroft as a jackbooted thug. I would love to have been a fly on the wall for Bush's talk with Comey to know how his concerns were ultimately dealt with or whether Bush just twisted his arm on the importance of the intelligence being collected.

*That set for the debate looked like a bad game show...I missed the rules, were the candidates actually buzzing in for rebuttal time?

*Rudy had the best response of the night when he slammed Ron Paul for essentially saying the U.S. had invited 9/11. I think Paul misread his invite to the Green Party debate. As I have said before, one Ron Paul in Congress is a good thing, but more of them would be a disaster. Any time he opens his mouth on foreign affairs you see why.

*Runner-up line goes to Mike Huckabee: "Congress has been spending money like John Edwards at a beauty shop".

*Of course, both of them have stiff competition from Fred Thompson's brilliant and hilarious response to Michael Moore.

*Having seen only transcripts of the first debate, I had not seen Paul or Tom Tancredo live before, and they were much unlike my image of them from reading their statements for years - Paul seemed like a frail old man, and Tancredo seemed meek and nervous; I was expecting a guy who looked and sounded like Bob Dornan.

*Goldberg and Vodkapundit had basically the same reaction to Romney - of course, Romney's father was a car salesman (well, a CEO of a car company, actually). In positioning himself as a conservative, Romney is basically a smart businessman pursuing an underserved market, not a man seeking higher office out of a firm belief in anything in particular, and it shows.

*There is really, really no purpose to Thommy Thompson and Jim Gilmore being in this race, none.

*Other than his position on trade, I can't think of a single thing I have seen from Duncan Hunter to dislike. Hunter has no realistic chance of getting the nomination, but he might not be a bad running mate - he's a serious guy who looks and sounds like a serious guy.

*From what I saw, compared to some of the last debate's questions, I have to say that the Fox team was just miles better than the MSNBC team in asking questions that GOP primary voters would actually want to see answered (one exception was the justly-booed question to McCain about the Confederate flag) and avoiding speechifying by the moderators. From here on out they should just have Brit Hume & co. do all the GOP debates and Tim Russert do the Democrats.

More environmental propaganda from Hollywood children's movies. Oh, goody. Quoth Cameron Diaz: "Well, hopefully there'll be a planet in four years." Ya think?

A California appeals court throws out a lawsuit against the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), holding that under California's SLAPP statute (designed to reduce lawsuits targeting public speech), IMDb was entitled to immunity from suit for basing its listing of film credits on the credits used by the studios. The plaintiff claimed an entitlement to be listed as a producer on three films but had had his credits deleted by the studio after he left its employ.

Thoughts on tonight's episode - SPOILERS INCLUDED so don't say you were not warned...but I will warn you that you should watch this one ASAP if you recorded it. There were Things that Happened in this episode.

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This sounds like news, at least incrementally:

Lucas... says he is readying "Clone Wars," an animated series for TV that's derived from "Star Wars." Many "Star Wars" characters appear in "Clone Wars," but voiced by other actors.

And here's a little news: Lucas tells me he will make two more live-action films based in the "Star Wars" era.

"But they won't have members of the Skywalker family as characters," he said. "They will be other people of that milieu."

The two extra films will also be made for TV and probably be an hour long each. But, like "Clone Wars," Lucas doesn't know where on TV they will land.

I wonder if the Clone Wars show will rehash the stuff in the animated micro-series or be different.

So I have been pondering in recent days how The Sopranos will or should end, with 6 or 7 seasons (depending how you count) behind us and 4 episodes to go. There's much speculation that David Chase, the creator of the series, really doesn't want to give us a neatly wrapped, satisfying ending, and of course there is the fact that many long-running serieses leave us with endings that go wrong in one of two opposite directions: either it leaves us hanging or it ties things up with a forced, didn't-see-that-coming ending. (A discussion for another day is the best and worst ways that long-running shows have ended).

More below the fold, for those of you who aren't caught up. If for any reason you have genuine spoilers rather than educated speculation about the last four episodes, TAKE THEM ELSEWHERE.

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The Imus controversy has had a number of ripples, including the car accident that nearly killed the Governor of New Jersey. But now we see the opening of a door that just might lead to some good:

Prominent U.S. hip-hop executive Russell Simmons Monday recommended eliminating the words "b___h," "ho" and "n____r" from the recording industry, considering them "extreme curse words."

+++

Simmons, co-founder of the Def Jam label and a driving force behind hip-hop's huge commercial success, called for voluntary restrictions on the words and setting up an industry watchdog to recommend guidelines for lyrical and visual standards.

Good for Russell Simmons, one of the few people with enough clout and enough credibility to make something like this happen.

* - YMMV as to whether this story was an imbroglio, a kerfuffle or a brouhaha.

So the Rutgers women's basketball team held a team press conference yesterday to respond to Don Imus:

Rutgers' outraged coach, C. Vivian Stringer, wiped away tears as she recounted her own battles with racism and said she won't let Imus "steal our joy."

Then each player stood up, walked over to the microphone and introduced herself.

Towering over her teammates, Vaughn gave a cheery "Good morning, everyone." But her broad smile faded as she opened up about the hurt she feels - as an African-American and a woman. "I'm not a ho, I'm a woman. I'm someone's child," she said.

The decision to hold this press conference is a horrible failure of leadership on the part of Stringer and anyone else in the athletic and academic establishment at Rutgers who let this happen.

To recap, for those of you just tuning in, radio 'shock jock' Don Imus is in hot water, and justifiably so, for referring to the Rutgers women's hoops players as "nappy headed hos," and a fair debate is to be had as to whether this proves that Imus is

(a) a racist and/or sexist;
(b) a boor and a moron with no sense of propriety;
(c) a cranky old coot whose brain is permanently addled by drugs having a 'senior moment' on the air;
(d) an aging shock-radio guy trying desperately to stay relevant by talking like a 22-year-old rapper; or
(e) my personal favorite, all of the above.

I'm not here to defend Imus, as his remark was indefensible, and besides, Imus endorsed and relentlessly touted Kerry in 2004, so let the Left defend him. On the other hand, as I have long argued, not everything that is indefensible is necessarily a capital crime. Imus has, appropriately, been given a two-week suspension for the same reason you hit the dog with a rolled-up newspaper when he poops on the living room rug. Whether he should be fired depends on what you think more generally about shock-jock radio, since this kind of thing is basically an occupational hazard of employing people like Imus. Of course, there's also the fact that Imus isn't funny (granted, I've never been a regular listener, and I first heard him around 1980 so I may be selling his early work short, but in my book a guy who is unfunny for going on three decades is not funny).

But here's the thing: whether or not they think they are just in the business of winning ballgames, college coaches are role models to their players. College students are at a particularly impressionable stage in their lives: finally old enough to first start to see adults as peers rather than distant authority figures, they naturally begin to model themselves on whomever they meet that most impresses them. Most college athletes - and I assume this is true of the Rutgers women as well - will not become professional athletes, and thus are preparing themselves for life and jobs in the real world. It is incumbent on their coaches to teach them lessons that will help them there.

Imus' remarks were crude and ugly, but the lesson Stringer should have been sending these young ladies is that they say a lot about Imus but nothing about them. Different people handle these things differently, but a coach worth his or her salt could have played this at least two perfectly reasonable ways. One is to laugh it off with the traditional "sticks and stones" attitude, and show the players that this really shouldn't mean anything to them; there will always be people who say inappropriate and mean-spirited things in life, and you shouldn't take that seriously. A more combative personality of the Bobby Knight variety would respond by taking some personal public potshots at Imus, drawing the story away from the players and into coach vs. shock jock; this would teach the players the valuable lesson that when somebody sucker punches your people, you hit them back in kind and teach them a lesson.

What you do not do is call a press conference like this:

"I want to ask him, 'Now that you've met me, am I ho?'" said Rutgers center Kia Vaughn of the Bronx. "Unless they've given 'ho' a whole new definition, that's not what I am."

Declaring that Imus has "stolen a moment of pure grace for us," the wounded women spoke out for the first time about Imus' racist radio remarks.

"This has scarred me for life," said guard Matee Ajavon of Newark. "I've dealt with racism before. For it to be in the public eye like this, it will be something I will tell my granddaughter."

Somebody gave these young women the message - or at least failed to disabuse them of the notion - that they should take Imus' words seriously, take them to heart. This press conference was a show of the coach and the players wallowing in Imus' words, embracing them, and thus elevating them as if any serious person would think less of them - rather than of Imus - for what Imus said. This story should never have been about the players, because Imus' words were generic (indeed, that's precisely why they were offensive). It's the Culture of Victimology at its most destructive, teaching these young women that they should consider themselves to have been genuinely maligned by an aging boor and to seek out the status and posture of one to whom a deep wrong has been done and who is owed.

Put more succinctly, when someone calls you a 'nappy headed ho,' you should not feel the need to call a press conference to deny it. Maybe these young women don't know that - but if they don't, it was the business of someone in a position of authority to teach them. Shame on Vivian Stringer and Rutgers University for failing to teach them that.

Josh notes the passing of B.C. creator Johnny Hart, who suffered a fatal stroke (at age 76) while working on his comic strip: "the dude died at his drawing board. That's hardcore."

As Josh notes, B.C. was a deeply idiosyncratic strip, with thick and sometimes impenetrable doses of Hart's Christianity and a lot of running gags, most of which were not funny. I bought a book of B.C. strips some years back; when Hart was on he could, in fact, be both funny and thoughtful, even though a lot of what he did wasn't really my cup of tea. I agree 100% with Josh that the strip shouldn't be continued by Hart's family.

More details here.

You know you want it. They're asking $150K. Of course, some disclaimers are apparently thought necessary:

Although it cannot achieve the 300 mph speeds that KITT reached, soar 50 feet in the air or throw smoke bombs, key features of the star car are intact. Perhaps most important, the red scanner light on the nose glows and makes a humming noise.

The car has two working video screens on the dashboard, and the cockpit features buttons that light up in green, yellow and red: ski mode, rocket boost, micro jam, silent mode, oil slick and eject.

Most of the buttons don't do anything, Verhoek said. Nor can the car hold a conversation or drive itself.

Well, I'm glad they cleared that up. Of course, you will want the car David Hasselhoff drove before he ended the Cold War.

A potentially relevant provision of the US Constitution:

(Note: Spoiler involved for those of you who are not caught up. Double note: I won't see tonight's episode until later this week and have not seen seasons 2-5 or the second half of season 1, so please don't spoil anything for me, either)

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Jonathan Last noted last week that Law & Order may actually be in danger of getting cancelled. That seems daft to me - while people like Jerry Orbach and Sam Waterson have been major factors in the show's success, the Law & Order format doesn't depend on keeping particular writers or cast any more than, say, the Tonight Show, Saturday Night Live, or the Evening News do - if the show isn't working, the answer is to replace the people, not cancel the show.

That said, obviously if the show were to go off the air, Fred Thompson - who is increasingly being urged to run for president by Republicans dissatisfied with the 2008 field - might have one less reason to stay out of presidential politics.

Boston lead singer Brad Delp's death has been ruled a suicide by carbon monoxide posioning. Delp was 55; his body was found by his fiancee. Boston did little enough of note after its legendary first album, but that's more than enough memories for one lifetime. Rest in Peace.

Kiefer Sutherland is headed to West Point to explain to rabid "24" fans among the cadets that torture isn't OK in real life.

While I remain deeply skeptical - putting aside for a second the moral and legal arguments - of claims that torture is never the most effective way to get information, there's no question from what I've seen (bear in mind I've only started watching the show this season) that 24 way overstates the practical case for torture - Jack Bauer basically never gets any useful information until he starts abusing people, and always gets more (and it's always accurate) when he turns the screws on them. I have no problem with that as a theatrical convention, but the real world is a lot messier.

FTTW is holding a poll on the funniest film comedy ever.

UPDATE: Of course, I voted for Holy Grail.

Well, I didn't watch the Oscars on Sunday; I ended up getting sucked into an Iwo Jima documentary on PBS instead. I don't get to the movies much anymore and it's rare these days that I see anything that gets nominated (well, except for those agitprop penguins).

Matt Welch did, and he had quite enough of Hollywood's self-congratulation:

I live in East Hollywood. I do not like that Bush fellow. I'm worried about Global Warming. I really liked An Inconvenient Truth (except for the horror bits where Robot Al whispering his haunted memories about some river, his son, Katherine Harris, whatever). I'm really happy that lesbians rock the mic and get married and make babies with evil David Crosby's sperm; I'm on that team (well, not David Crosby's, but you get the point). But watching these people congratulate each other for their enlightened views, their activism, their spreading of "awareness," kinda makes me want to do one-handed pushups with Brent Bozell, or at least lick my hand & slap that Guggenheim kid on the back of his Gore-loving neck.

Isn't the simplest explanation for Britney Spears shaving her head that she had some hygiene-related need to do so (the word "lice" comes to mind)? I mean, we're talking about a woman who rarely appears to have washed her face or hair.

MTV is facing a wave of layoffs amid plunging ratings, placing even the future of the once-iconic "Total Request Live" in doubt.

If this keeps up, the network may have to fill time by showing music videos.

Apple Computer has settled its longstanding trademark dispute with Apple Music, the publisher of the Beatles catalogue. The good news is that this means some hope of finally bringing the Beatles to iTunes.

Re-watching some of Revenge of the Sith the other day finally crystallized my thoughts on the Star Wars prequel trilogy, now with a distance of some 18 months from the completion of the last of the prequels.

When each of the prequels came out, I enjoyed them (my review of Episode III is here). Of course, any male born between about 1965 and 1975 was hard-wired to embrace the prequels, given how much the original trilogy dominated popular culture in our childhoods and preteen years. It took a lot to alienate us Star Wars fanatics; although George Lucas nonetheless succeeded in alienating a good number, most everyone who loved the first three could find something to like in these - the Phantom Menace, for example, had all sorts of problems as a film, but the lightsaber duel between Darth Maul, Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan was the best lightsaber fight of the whole Star Wars series; likewise you would need a heart of stone not to get excited about finally seeing Yoda square off in combat at the end of Attack of the Clones.

Looking back, Lucas produced two uneven films (Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones), each of which had a bunch of fun scenes but also with plenty of cringe-inducing scenes and neither of which hung together that well as a complete film, and one good movie (Revenge of the Sith) which could and should have been a great movie but for a few potholes along the way.

If Lucas' goals were simply to complete his story arc his own way, make a bucketload of money from films, books, games and other merchandise, and play around with modern special effects, then he succeeded. But there was no reason to set his sights that low. The prequels could have been genuinely outstanding films.

The particular errors that Lucas made are well-worn ground by now - Jar Jar was a bad joke told for far too long, the midichlorians unnecessarily de-mystified the Force, the fish-faced Neimoidians with the Charlie Chan accents were silly and off-putting at best, racist caricatures at worst, and the handful of efforts at contemporary political commentary were distracting and incoherent. I'm more interested in not just the excising of particular mistakes but rethinking how the films could have been better, even within the parameters of the basic prequel storylines and characters as they have been laid out in the films, novels and the animated Clone Wars microseries.

Lucas started the films with two related and significant disadvantages - first, a lack of suspense, since everyone knew that the prequels had to end with Anakin turning into Vader, Obi-Wan headed to Tattooine, Yoda to Dagobah, Palpatine becoming the Emperor, etc. And second, limited ability to get creative with the storyline for the same reason - his endpoints were already set in stone.

But the films also started with tremendous advantages that most filmmakers would kill for: (1) an emotionally powerful, built-in double dramatic arc of downfall and betrayal, both Anakin's and that of the Republic; (2) a stable of pre-existing characters with known and in some cases reasonably vivid personalities, who require little further introduction, combined with a pre-existing fictional universe free from current realities of human existence; (3) employment of the best special-effects teams and the best film composer of our times; (4) a huge, built-in audience; (5) complete creative independence and an essentially unlimited budget, given Lucas' wealth and the justifiably high box office expectations; and (6) the combination of pop culture cache (especially for male performers of roughly my generation) with the prior two factors, making it child's play to attract the best talent in Hollywood to work on the films.

Bearing those in mind, here's four things Lucas should have done differently:

1. Don't Go It Alone. I'm hardly the first to make this point, but it was the original error that spawned so many of the others. Lucas is a man of considerable gifts, and some of these are still evident in the prequels - his imagination, his talent with special effects, his gift for the pacing of action sequences. But he has always had weaknesses as a filmmaker - he has no talent for directing actors, his dramatic and especially romantic dialogue can be horrendous - and one thing he did well in the original trilogy (well-timed wisecracks and one-liners) seems to have ossified in the intervening years as he went from quirky and ambitious film buff to merchandising tycoon.

All of that would have mattered a lot less if Lucas had made the decision to bring in the best help he could get from talented directors and writers to work over the films and make them wonderful and realistic and human. It's not as if Lucas would have had to worry about losing creative control, since he owns the place, and it's not as if fans and reviewers would have forgotten that this was a George Lucas production (how many besides Star Wars fanatics can name the directors of Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi?). The use of a revolving door of directors has worked quite well for the Harry Potter films, for example. If Lucas had only been willing to get the input of some other people, he could have worked with better dialogue, better performances, and people to point out huge mistakes before they hit the screen.

2. Combine the First Two Films. Since the original Star Wars ("A New Hope") billed itself as "Episode IV," the prequels had to be three films. But they didn't have to be these three. In fact, I think most Star Wars fans expected the first of the three films to introduce Anakin, the second to cover the Clone Wars, and the third to bring Anakin over fully to the Dark Side.

Had Lucas stuck with that order, a huge number of the narrative problems and omissions in the prequel trilogy would have fallen away. First, Lucas himself has admitted that he had to pad out Phantom Menace to get to a full-length film. Making an Episode I that covered Phantom Menace's storyline in 45 minutes before jumping ahead 10 years to pick up the Attack of the Clones storyline would have immediately removed or drastically shortened a lot of the filler and the redundant plotlines - the Gungans (Jar Jar even would not have been so bad with five minutes of screen time), the storyline where Anakin accidentally destroys the Death Star-lite, the fun but overlong pod race, the repetitive fight scenes at Padme's palace. As a corollary, instead of being off in a star fighter Anakin should have been present for the final battle with Darth Maul. That would have presented several opportunities - have him witness the death of his first mentor, intensifying his emotional scars. Have him play some role, through a not-entirely-intentional use of the Dark Side of the Force (perhaps even a Force-choke on Darth Maul that isn't noticed by Obi-Wan) that saves Obi-Wan and lets him kill Darth Maul, thus (1) establishing Anakin's unusual precocity without the need for a midichlorian blood sample and (2) serving as a sort of original sin in his relationship with Obi-Wan. Personally, I would also have laid out near the beginning the death of Sifo Dyas, whose critical role in ordering the clone army is never explained onscreen.

Granted, Attack of the Clones covers a lot of plot, some of which would get submerged if you combined the two, but with a full Clone Wars film to work with, the reworked first episode could have cut a lot of the romantic scenes with Padme, to be developed during the war. Some of the more video-game-y scenes could have been dropped (i.e., the conveyer belt scene). Certainly there was a half hour's worth of fat to be cut, and the films could have run close to three hours without exhausting audience patience if done right.

The resulting space cleared for a full-length film treatment of the Clone Wars would have given the trilogy much-needed epic scope (we see far too little of how the main characters' dramas affect the wider galaxy) and dramatic depth, as well as giving us a lot more insight into the character development and growth to manhood of Anakin, a little backstory to make cartoonish villains like Dooku and Grievous less incomprehensible, and perhaps space to let Sam Jackson take Mace Windu out to play more. Certainly the novels and the microseries offered numerous examples of the kinds of storylines available during the war - seiges, hostage situations, the deaths of Jedi in battle, intrigue among the villains, opportunities for Anakin to learn how to command, the whole whodunit story of the Jedi pursuing Sidious (leading to Palpatine needing to get off Coruscant to dry up the trail and thus motivating him to stage his own abduction). A full Clone Wars film could also have given us a live-action Asajj Ventress, a character who is vividly drawn in the novels, and who is naturally theatrical, with her shaved tattooed head, taut, leather-clad figure, double lightsabers and depthless rage; in fact, she could well have been a sort of Boba Fett crossed with Princess Leia in terms of combination geek factor and weird sex appeal. She would also have given us a chance for either Anakin and Obi-Wan combined, or perhaps Yoda or Mace, to get another lightsaber kill.

3. Rethink and Recast Anakin: Hayden Christensen took a lot of grief for his performances, but in Attack of the Clones I thought some of the criticisms unfair - he was asked to play a whining, petulant, self-important teenage boy, and he gave a very realistic portrayal of one. In Revenge of the Sith he was asked to do more as an actor, with decidedly mixed results - he stuck one key scene perfectly (the final showdown with Obi-Wan), gave a weak performance in the other (his conversion to the Dark Side), and proved incompetent at any scenes with Padme.

The core problem, though, wasn't so much Christensen himself as Lucas' failure to grasp Anakin's full potential as a character and cast him accordingly. While Obi-Wan is important to the plot, Anakin's personal drama is, after all, the center of the prequel trilogy. And the Anakin we could have expected from watching Vader in action and hearing about his youth had enormous potential as a classic film role: a young man who is cocky, ambitous, and supremely talented, but also rash, reckless, impatient, and subject to passions and rages he can't control and that ultimately consume him. Any screenwriter worth his salt would kill to write that character, any actor to play him. He could have been the ultimate bad boy anti-hero, James Dean with a lightsaber, the guy every teenage guy admires and every teen girl wants (indeed, ask Peter Jackson how it helps the box office to have teen girls swoon over your male lead). The role could have launched the next Brando, if written and cast properly - more swagger, more smirking, more volcanic temper, less whimpering and speechifying. Leo DiCaprio would have been perfect for the role if he was a foot taller.

4. Find A Han Solo: One of the critical elements of the original trilogy was the balance between the whiny, self-centered Luke and the wisecracking, free-wheeling Han. Throughout the films, Han (and his relationships with the other characters) kept the movies light-hearted, deflated some of the pretensions of even Obi-Wan and Leia, and generally injected the same retro 1940s charm that Harrison Ford would later bring to Lucas' Indiana Jones films. Han was at all times the movies' sense of humor about the absurdity of its own cosmology.

Obviously, neither Han nor Harrison Ford could appear in the original trilogy, but some character could and should have been given a Han-like personality to lighten the mood. There's no reason it couldn't have been a Jedi (the first two Jedi we meet are the mischievous Yoda and the dryly witty Obi-Wan, so there was no rule that says Jedi have to be somber and dull to be self-controlled), maybe even Mace Windu, but regardless, somewhere in the films we needed a foil for the overly serious tone. As discussed above, a better Anakin would have provided a little of this mood-lightener in the re-imagined second film in particular, and in fact a whole film focused on the Clone Wars would have created more room for a gun-wielding character who helps command the Clone Troopers.

You must read Dave Barry's year in review (via Instapundit). I could not believe it when he had jokes in there about the Winter Olympics - that was less than a year ago? It seems like another century. It's been a long year. A few classic lines:

This was the year in which the members of the United States Congress, who do not bother to read the actual bills they pass, spent weeks poring over instant messages sent by a pervert. This was the year in which the vice president of the United States shot a lawyer, which turned out to be totally legal in Texas.

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[January] dawns with petty partisan bickering in Washington, D.C., a place where many people view petty partisan bickering as honest, productive work, like making furniture.

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In Paris, thousands of demonstrators take to the streets and shut down the city to demonstrate the fact that, hey, it's Paris.

Read the whole thing.

The final Harry Potter book is titled.

Like any good fable, the Harry Potter books can be read to support a variety of worldviews and political viewpoints, although if there's a common theme in the politics of JK Rowling's writings it's more libertarian than anything, as she plays up the value of individual self-reliance and self-defense and trashes goverment in all its forms - dovish government, hawkish government, law enforcement, government interference in schools, government interference in the media, etc.

That said, only a lunatic would look at the fifth Potter book, in particular, as supportive of left-leaning politics as applied to the post-9/11 world (perhaps the sixth, to some extent, with its running storyline about an innocent detainee, but not the fifth). Jonathan Last has more, on an article I had meant to blog about myself but he's got it covered.

Yesterday I took my 9-year-old son to see the film version of Eragon. I read to him every night, and in between the six Harry Potter books, the Hobbit and (currently) the Fellowship of the Ring, we did Eragon and its sequel in a proposed trilogy, Eldest.

The Eragon books are well-done, and certainly an impressive achievement for a teenage author. My son enjoys them, and while they are perhaps not books I would bother to read on my own, Christopher Paolini keeps the story going well enough to keep my interest.

That said, they aren't the most original things in the world. Some people have suggested that they are a Tolkein knockoff, but they are more accurately described as a Star Wars knockoff transplanted into a Tolkein-like universe:

*Ancient order of guardians of peace and justice reigns for a thousand years, gets done in by the treachery of one of their own.

*Ignorant farmboy who lives with his uncle discovers that he is the last heir to the order, is guided by old bearded hermit type who used to be one of them after the bad guys toast his farm and his uncle.

etc., etc., etc. The parallels grow stronger as the story goes on and into the second book (for any of you who may read the books or see the movie without having read both books, I'll keep the spoilers below the fold). What is stolen from Tolkein is more the world this takes place in - Paolini's elves and dwarves are almost entirely indistinguishable from Tolkein's, for example.

The movie wasn't terrible, taken in its own right, but I had a couple of specific problems with it. The most baffling problem was that the filmmakers systematically eliminated all of the plot elements that tied the story to its sequel, including eliminating key characters (Katrina, Jeod, Elva, Solembum, the dwarves, the Twins, the Cripple Who is Whole) and even appearing to kill one other character who survives to the third book. I assume they made this movie without either reading Eldest or consulting with Paolini, because the sequel will make far less sense without an explanation of how the threads of the story connect. Either that or they just assume that no sequel will be made.

A second problem is that the film changed all sorts of things big and small that did not need to be changed, and in many places by doing so removed the elements of Paolini's book that were original, or at least were cribbed from sources other than Tolkein, Peter Jackson and George Lucas. The Shade, for example, is a very vividly distinctive character in the book, with pale skin and red eyes to signify the extent to which he is possessed by evil spirits. In the film his skin doesn't approach that hue until the end, and his eyes are normal. But other characters, the Urgals, have red eyes. And about the Urgals: unlike Tolkein's orcs, they aren't supposed to be simply misshapen but rather are almost minotaur-like, standing taller than humans (the tallest breed run some eight feet tall), broad-shouldered and with horns. In the movie, no horns, and they are basically just ugly men with bad makeup, and look like rejects from a Peter Jackson casting call.

Read on...

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I was reading a few weeks back an article in the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal, discussing high-end neckties. There were a variety on offer at different prices: $79 tie, $100+ tie, even a $220 tie. And then...a $1200 tie.

See, this is where I get lost. I mean, while I personally don't have the kind of disposable income to go throwing $220 after a tie, I can imagine the situation where it would seem reasonable to do that. Say you are a corporate CEO making millions, and always need to look impressive. Or you're Jay Leno: you appear in a suit and tie on national television something like 200 times a year. A $220 tie, I can see.

But $1200? I don't care how rich you are, I just can't see where it would ever seem worth it. How much visibly better can it be than the $220 tie? Plus, even if I was a billionaire I'd still be worried about spilling something on a tie that expensive.

So let me get this straight: we know that Princess Diana's driver was drunk, speeding and trying to flee paparazzi, and she wasn't wearing a seatbelt...and yet some people still find her death mysterious?

Gwyneth Paltrow says she relies on Madonna for "advice about how to say no". The punchline pretty much writes itself, doesn't it?

If you have small children I would highly recommend that you not take them to this movie (if you don't, you surely won't go anyway). First off, the film is often dark, depressing or scary, probably too much so for kids under 8 or 9. Second, the second half of the film is basically an extended diatribe in favor of a UN ban on fishing in the Antarctic. As with so many cartoons today featuring talking animals, carnivores and humans are uniformly evil (well, except for the penguins themselves - the fish they eat are not anthropomorphized). And the anti-human, anti-fishing messages are not subtle but heavy-handed and preachy.

The film had other weaknesses, of varying degrees of obviousness. The bouts of sexual suggestiveness among the penguins were reasonably subtle enough to sail over smaller kids' heads, and to some extent necessary to a film the first half of which centers on penguin mating rituals. There were Hollywood stereotypes abounding: unfavorable characters were given Southern or Scottish accents, misguided religious superstitions and a bluenosed insistence on tradition and conformity (even though the film's beginning dramatically emphasized the reality that tradition and conformity are essential to the survival of emperor penguins), while favorable ones got Latino accents, rythym, a sense of humor and a lust for females; and the scene in a penguin house in a zoo may turn kids against the joy of watching penguins in the zoo, something my kids love. (These would all be minor grievances - I'm not suggesting I'm outraged about giving penguins ethnic accents - if the movie was funnier or less preachy). The movie also never explains why the lead character ends up with blue eyes and a permanent adolescent fuzz, although presumably this is just to let audiences keep him straight from the other penguins.

This is not to say that the movie is all bad. The animated landscapes and action scenes are breathtaking, for example. The voicework is pretty good, notably by Robin Williams in dual roles. But inhuman (or at least, anti-human) environmental propaganda wrapped in the veneer of a kids' movie is not the best way to spend a Saturday afternoon with the family.

Please tell me I did not just see an ad for a Broadway musical with the music of Bob Dylan.

Slash of Guns n' Roses advertising Volkswagens.

The last thing you expect if you hire Keith Richards is for him to show up drunk, right?

Kids, in particular, will have to be crushed to learn of the death early this morning of "Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin, stung fatally by a stingray while filming a documentary. Like Dale Earnhardt, Irwin made his name by taking risks in full view of the public, so you can't really separate his death from the way he lived.

UPDATE: CNN headline: "'Crocodile Hunter' Steve Irwin dies, Al Qaeda official captured"

And here I had thought the two stories unrelated ...

Cruise has cornered the market.

Actually, Bruno Kirby was a cut above the usual "that guy". I was actually surprised that his role as the young Clemenza in Godfather II didn't rate a more prominent entry in his obit, given the series' iconic stature, but he had so many memorable roles. RIP.

Coming to a TV near you:

Mr. T, whose real name is Lawrence Tero, stars in "I Pity the Fool" debuting in October on TV Land. He dispenses advice to viewers who are struggling with life's problems.

Keith Richards will appear as Johnny Depp's pirate father in the second Pirates Of The Caribbean sequel, playing "a whisky-soaked buccaneer." I'm guessing that won't be a stretch.

In the future, at the fifteenth minute, everyone will have a blog. In that spirit, welcome Jeopardy! champ Ken Jennings to the blogosphere. Via Orin Kerr.

Can't the court use its equitable powers to enjoin the issuance of such an album for the good of the general public?

It's nearly impossible to keep up with the steady stream of criminal activity by people associated with "The Sopranos," but this just cracked me up - Louis Gross, who just joined the cast as Tony's bodyguard (the one Tony picked a fight with to prove he was still top dog), has been arrested twice in recent months:

[Gross] was busted Sunday for allegedly bashing in the front door of a home in St. Albans in Queens, N.Y., and walking off with $2,700 in property.

As he left Queens Criminal Court last night, Gross, 23, called the home's owner, Trinny Hill, 38, "my landlord - my ex-landlord," though cops countered that Hill is really his ex-girlfriend.

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He was busted on Feb. 3 for allegedly stealing a shirt from Michael K, a trendy SoHo men's shop, and then beating the store manager and a security guard when they confronted him, law enforcement sources said.

What I just loved was Gross' response:

"I don't know nothing. I'm innocent. I'm always innocent," he said last night. "They were personal items - they belonged to me," he added. "I had the right to take them."

I think I would not advise him to say that one in front of a jury.

George Lucas is re-releasing the original Star Wars trilogy, in the form originally shown in theaters, in a limited-edition DVD. Via Jay Reding.

OK, let's hear it: what song can you just not resist singing along to, however unwise it may be to do so? There's a couple of them I can't resist at least singing along to quietly, but I think #1 on that list is the Eagles' "Already Gone". Which I cannot sing, yet I am compelled to do so. And, I should add, singing along when it comes on your iPod makes you look twice as ridiculous. I also whistle along to pretty much all the sax parts of Springsteen songs, but whistling's not quite as bad.

(On a separate subject, the only song I've tried my hand at at karaoke is Elvis' "Burning Love" - surprisingly, alcohol was involed.)

I missed blogging on this when it came out, but it was reported about a month ago that filming on the new Star Wars TV show will begin in 2008. So far, so good. But then there's this:

The series will be set between episodes three and four of the film saga.

It would cover the 20 years in the life of Luke Skywalker growing up that remains a mystery to most film-goers.

[producer Rick] McCallum said there would be "a whole bunch of new characters" and the series would be "much more dramatic and darker".

Please tell me that this franchise, which has made so many critical missteps in the past decade and which has something of a chance to start afresh with a TV series, isn't going to make a TV show about young Luke Skywalker. I mean, the entire point of Luke's character in Episode IV is that he's been off the scene for 20 years, at a distance from the battle against the Empire, frustrated and bored living life on a moisture farm in the middle of the desert. Nothing interesting ever happens to him, and at the start of Episode IV he's never seen a lightsaber and never practiced the Jedi arts. Are they gonna rewrite that history, or is this going to be a bunch of tedious stuff about Luke's teen angst having only a tangential connection to events outside of Tattooine? (UPDATE: Anyone want bets on how many episodes they do before we get to see Luke buying power converters at Tosche Station?)

What would be doubly frustrating is that there are a whole raft of existing Star Wars characters who would be interesting to follow in that 20-year period - Darth Vader, Tarkin, Chewbacca (OK, I recognize the dramatic limitations of a series with a Wookie as the main character), Han, Lando, R2D2, C3PO . . . short of watching Yoda alone in the swamp, Luke is about the worst character you could pick. Perhaps most obviously, you could break the mold by building around a female character: Princess Leia, who is at the center of things in Alderaan, watching her father navigate the politics of staying in the Senate while he leads the Rebellion. Leia has obviously been active herself in the Rebellion, has dealt with R2, 3PO, Vader and Tarkin . . . but instead, we are to be treated to Smallville: Tattooine?

UPDATE: Tim Harden at Flying Sparrows says I've been led astray and that the series will actually focus on other characters. If Lucas knows what's good for him, one of the first 2 or 3 episodes should feature the death of Jar Jar Binks, ideally involving either the Sarlaac or how Boba Fett got a reputation for disintegrations.

SECOND UPDATE: Hey, a love interest for Admiral Ackbar!

Well, The Sopranos certainly opened the new season with a dramatic flourish last night. I'm glad we managed to watch, since today's NY Daily News had not just a writeup but a photo spread inside the front page of this episode's big development. Click below the fold for more, but beware that there are spoilers here.

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I hope you can watch video on your PC, because I couldn't describe this with all the words at my disposal.

KITT was still a better singer, though.

If you ever want a time-wasting walk down memory lane, spend a few minutes with the five-decade-spanning IMDb page of Hanna Barbera voice specialist Don Messick. What a career: Scooby Doo, Bamm Bamm, Boo Boo, Ricochet Rabbit, Muttley, Mumbley, (gag, cough) Papa Smurf . . . the list of cartoons this guy was in is just amazing.

And if you really want to waste some time, try Toonopedia.

RIP Wilson Pickett. Nobody in the worlds of rock, pop and R&B ever had a better singing voice.

Christopher Lee:

The problem today, and I think it's a very dangerous one for the people concerned, is that there are quite large numbers of very young men and women - boys and girls to me - from 18 to 30, and they are playing very large parts in huge films and they simply, through no fault of their own, don't have the background and the experience and the knowledge to pull if off.

Via Althouse. He doesn't actually say the name "Hayden Christensen," . . .

Kaus:

It's . . . hard to believe that [Jake] Gyllenhaal is in demand because, as recounted by Snead, "there is nobody else around to cast as an under-40 romantic male lead." She's asking readers to suggest names. ... Wasn't it only a few days ago that The New York Observer was telling us about a shortage of romantic female leads? No wonder Hollywood is in trouble. ("Can't we get a penguin in that role?") ...

Of course, I doubt very much that there's a shortage of attractive and talented young actors and actresses in the movie business. If Hollywood is having trouble making young stars who can handle these kinds of roles and connect with the public, maybe it needs to start casting them in movies with better scripts and more appeal to the public. Bad movies don't make stars.

I keep seeing ads for the new ABC series "Emily's Reasons Why Not," starring Heather Graham as Ally McBeal. One thing about the show that doesn't bode well is its title. A TV series' chances of long-term success decreases exponentially with each additional words in the show's title - successful shows nearly always have short titles (usually one or two words, especially if you omit the words "the" "and" and "show"), while shows with really long, clever titles usually bomb, and if they don't they find a way to shorten the title (e.g., "Buffy"). On that evidence alone, I'm skeptical that this one will fly.

You know, I can respect Dick Clark not wanting to have last year's stroke be his career's end, and I can respect how hard he worked to get in shape for last night, but really, the man sounded awful last night (he looked healthy, but weak and frail), and I can't imagine any good will be done by bringing him back again. Last night's performance looked like a cruel SNL skit imagining what Clark would be like when he's too sick to go on and nobody will tell him not to. Hat's off for the try, Dick, but it's time to go now while you still have some dignity.

From 2003, my favorite Christmas songs.

By this point in rock history, they're running out of novel ways for rock stars to die. But as far as I know, firing squad hasn't been done yet.

As reported by Friday's Wall Street Journal ($), the new Arab-language version of The Simpsons sounds more like a parody of Arab cultural hypersensitivity:

"Omar Shamshoon," as he is called on the show, looks like the same Homer Simpson, but he has given up beer and bacon, which are both against Islam, and he no longer hangs out at "seedy bars with bums and lowlifes." In Arabia, Homer's beer is soda, and his hot dogs are barbequed Egyptian beef sausages. And the donut-shaped snacks he gobbles are the traditional Arab cookies called kahk.

A teetotaling Homer Simpson pretty much misses the point. The article doesn't mention the fate of Ned Flanders and the show's occasional scenes in a Christian church, which are presumably even more problematic than Moe's.

Following up on this earlier post and this discussion thread at Michele's, I thought I should go ahead and put on record now my fearless predictions for the concluding Book Seven of the Harry Potter cycle. It should go without saying that YOU SHOULD NOT READ ANY FURTHER IF YOU HAVE NOT READ ALL OF BOOK SIX, UNLESS YOU LIKE PLOT SPOILERS.

I should add that, with one or two exceptions I will detail below, my thoughts are not so much original observations as my best guesses and intuition after reading the informed speculation from a number of other sources. So, if I've said something here without explicitly crediting the person who thought it up, my apologies.

Anyway, if you don't mind playing along with this guessing game, read on for my predictions. As Dumbledore would say, "from this point forth, we shall be leaving the firm foundations of fact and journeying together through the murky marshes of memory into thickets of wildest guesswork." Specific predictions are in bold.

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This sequence of stills from a Revenge of the Sith bootleg with English subtitles badly re-translated from Chinese back into English is hysterical. I think Obi-Wan's advice to Anakin about the Jedi Council is cribbed from Jerry Maguire.

When I think that Hollywood can go no lower in terms of bad taste or unoriginality, the movie business finds a way to surprise me. But it's a rare treat when both are accomplished in one fell swoop, as they were this weekend when I started seeing billboard ads for a sequel to "Duece Bigelow: Male Gigolo."

Locusts, famine and pestilence to follow.

(On a similar note: I accept that the new "Bad News Bears" movie is raunchy and not at all suitable for chidren . . . but is it really necessary to advertise the not-suitable-for-chidren parts on baseball broadcasts?)

UPDATE: Wizbang has graphic evidence of unoriginality.

I just finished the new Harry Potter book last night. It's well-done and entertaining once again, although the book in general hewed rather more closely to the formula of the prior books than I would have expected, given how far along we are into Voldemort's terror war (and at the risk of overdrawing the parallels, Voldemort's organization is a classic terrorist group, working in secret and spreading fear through random and/or unexpected violence). A more detailed review below the fold, but be warned that there are MAJOR SPOILERS, so don't click through if you haven't read the book yet but still intend to (in fact, one reason I pressed on to finish the book rather quickly was the fear that I'd hit major spoilers on the web, having already encountered one of them quite accidentally some months ago - click here for details). Now for the SPOILERS - READ ON AT YOUR OWN RISK:

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Princess Leah is born:

Norwegian Princess Leah's name was inspired by a character in a "Star Wars" movie, the mother of the infant princess was quoted as saying Thursday.

"I must admit that I have always been a big 'Star Wars' fan, and Princess Leia has always been the most beautiful in the whole world," Princess Martha Louise said in an interview with the Norwegian daily Aftenposten.

Princess Leah, born on April 8 this year and fifth in line to the Norwegian throne, was due to be baptized Thursday.

As long as they don't give her the hairdo . . .

OK, I'm not a fan of Triumph The Insult Comic Dog, but here he's unleashed on a deeply deserving assemblage of Michael Jackson supporters and reporters. Viciously funny stuff. Via The Intern.

Maybe this musical tribute is really funny. Or maybe I'm just a gigantic Star Wars dork. (via Michele)

Michele mourns the loss of oldies radio station WCBS-FM. Now, some of her sentiment is about good memories, and everyone's got their own memories. But let me tell you: I will not miss this radio station.

When I was in college, I had a dismal summer job working at a book packing warehouse, usually working 12 hours a day (6am-6pm) in a breathtakingly dusty environment, filling orders on a sort of assembly line. The warehouse had a split-day radio policy: from opening until noon, we heard WCBS, and from noon to closing, WNEW, when it was still classic rock. Which meant six hours of the same old "oldies," starting at 6 in the morning, every single day. These oldies were mainly late 50s/early 60s pop too soft to really qualify as rock (a more complete description can be found here); if I never hear Paul Anka again, I will be very happy.

This bizarre, gruesome bicycle safety video is definitely a blast from deep in the past. I'm not even sure where or how I saw it, but it's certainly memorable.

With Mickey Kaus, Jay Tea at Wizbang and Dale Franks at QandO still kicking at the politics of Star Wars, let me note the one contemporary parallel to Palpatine that should be jaw-droppingly obvious (one other blogger has noticed the same thing). Just think:

*Rises to power in a weak, corrupt and dysfunctional republic in a time of civil war.

*Gradually consolidates extraordinary executive powers, mainly with popular approval if not entirely legitimate assent, to deal with security threats.

*Assumes direct control over the regional governors to consolidate his power outside of the purview of the legislature.

*Possesses civilization-destroying weapons.

*Is, to public appearances, warmly embraced by the leading power for good.

*Isn't above using assassination attempts as a political tool.

*Ruthlessly dispatches corrupt oligarchs who had supported his rise.

*Was trained by an old order now thought extinct, and stuns observers with nostalgia for its accomplishments.

You don't have to be the biggest critic of Vladimir Putin to see a parallel. I assume Russian audiences will pick them up. Will Putin? This is a man, after all, who complained that Dobby the House-Elf from Harry Potter looked too much like him.

Gary Farber has a long, interesting post on Revenge of the Sith, including a link to the original script and discussion of deleted scenes, some of which might have been useful to developing the plot. (via Instapundit). Farber and his commenters stress the usefulness, in understanding the broader story leading into Sith, of checking out the animated Clone Wars series and the Lucas-authorized novel Labyrinth of Evil, which leads directly into the opening of Sith. I missed the series but I'll probably check out both, eventually.

Also, Orson Scott Card has a big-picture review worth reading (via Will Collier).

In addition to busting several box office records in the US with a $160 million opening weekend, Sith had "the most successful film-opening in UK cinema history" and "grossed $144.7 million overseas for a total of $303 million worldwide," including more than $26 million in the UK and $22 million in France.

Well, I went to see Revenge of the Sith yesterday; my wife and I took the kids, ages 7 and 5. I should say that the movie was rather intense for their age, and my daughter had to hide her face in a few places. I think it's OK for a 7-8 year old, but if we'd been able to get away with it I wouldn't have brought a 5-year-old to see this.

I went in really wanting to like this movie, and if it wasn't perfect, it was a heck of a thrill ride and a fittingly satisfying end to the Star Wars saga, one that I think will stand up as the equal to Return of the Jedi in terms of action, drama and the resolution of loose ends. And yes: the Wookie army is cool, and serves as a crucial plot device. The bottom line: this was so much fun, and there was so much going on (some of which I missed, due to the mumbling of some dialogue and the kids peppering me with whispered questions) that I'm dying to see it again. (You should read the reviews (including spoilers) by Michele and Will Collier, who had much the same reaction).

I'm not quite ready to say "all is forgiven" - in particular not turning the Force into a biological phenomenon - but most of the misfires that marred Episodes I and II were but distant memories after Sith. Of course, I didn't hate Episodes I and II - Phantom Menace was enjoyable at the time, but the whole Jar Jar thing, among several other key failings, makes it painful to rewatch much of the movie. Attack of the Clones was better, but the love scenes were deadly and the entire thing was more a series of entertaining set pieces than a cohesive story.

Sith is better in that regard - everything is finally working together in a single multilayered plot held together by the masterful evil of Palpatine/Sidious, and the pacing of the movie (as well as its one startlingly graphic sequence) reminded me more than anything of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The movie's climax packs an emotional wallop despite the inevitable lack of suspense, as both Anakin and the remaining good guys watch everything they have fought for slip from within their grasp.

The special effects are great, and only in a few places - the big lizard, and some parts of the opening space battle - do they look a bit cheesy.

The dialogue isn't . . . well, it just isn't the point of the movie, but for a guy who gets a rap for bad dialogue, Lucas sure has written a lot of memorable lines. He gets in a few well-placed one-liners here.

Many of the knocks on the acting are misguided: while the acting is uneven in places, and even Ian McDiarmid - who gives the film's showstopping performance as the Emperor - takes a few lines a bit too far, most of what you want from the acting in a movie like this is not to detract from the plot.

I still think Hayden Christensen gets a bit of a bad rap - he was entirely realistic in his portrayal of Anakin in the last movie as a whining, melodramatic, self-important teenager, and he expands on that performance here as a young man who is long on courage and ego and short on patience and good judgment. In fact, if you go back and think about the Darth Vader scenes in Episodes IV-VI and imagine Christensen's voice and expressions, they actually fit quite well. Darth Vader was never, after all, an evil genius - he was always a villain whose downfall was his impatience and rash, impetuous decisions. When the Death Star is under siege, does he devise a clever, multifaceted defense of the station? No, he hops in his own specially designed Tie Fighter to go take care of what his damned incompetent subordinates can't do themselves. He runs through generals and admirals like Steinbrenner used to run through managers, sends a fleet of star destroyers into an asteroid field, and lets the good guys get away repeatedly.

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Via Pejman, a scathing IMDb review of the infamous Star Wars Christmas Special, which I am thankful not to have seen, or at least remembered. I assume that a condition of Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher returning for the sequels was no more TV specials.

NY Times movie critic AO Scott on Revenge of the Sith.

Update: Ace thinks the NYT's enthusiasm for anti-Bush themes is a bad sign (via Basil). I still haven't heard anything from the advance reviews that you could identify as an actual Bush criticism without a microscope; yes, the movie has villains, and for some people any villain is a reminder of Bush. Whatever. But I loved this, from the comments to Ace's post:

[T]here was always this one brief shot (competely irrelevant to the story, I know) that said a lot about the Empire.

When the [Death Star] is fired up for the first time, and the guys in the split-level helmets are working the controls on the video editing board (that's supposed to be the ray beam control center), they fire a ray beam that is supposed to be the most powerful weapon ever devised.

Did you ever notice that this channel of unprecedented energy zips right past two guys who are manning a station that is rather oddly located inside the in the ray's exit hole? Can you imagine what kind of s**t job that is?

"Corporal, your assignment is to man this station."

"What's that big tunnel for?"

"That's where the planet-destroying ray beam comes out."

"Where's my desk?"

"Right there."

"You mean the one that's, like, eight feet from this ray beam you mentioned?"

"That's the one."

"Where's the plexiglass wall between me and it?"

"There isn't one. Here's some earplugs."

In the interests of balancing my sight-unseen irrational exuberance about Revenge of the Sith, I present to you a nasty, sneering essay in the New York Observer. (via Instapundit). Frankly, in complying with the First Rule of Sequel Reviews - tell the reader what you thought of the earlier movies - the author, Dale Peck, gives the game away with his assertion that "[t]here has not, in fact, been a good Star Wars movie since the first one." And frankly, the entire article is almost a parody of sneering contempt for the whole Star Wars enterprise and its fans, to the point where I sincerely doubt that Peck enjoyed the first one, either. Plus, of course, the picture of the elitist New York movie critic unable to enjoy a good show wouldn't be complete without totally non sequitur anti-Bush rants.

Look: the Star Wars films are not everyone's taste, but you really have to work at this kind of animosity towards the entire project. Among other things, you need to separate yourself wholly from the ability to enjoy films with even a shred of the joy and innocence of childhood (just from reading this "review" - which scarcely discusses Revenge of the Sith, so it's really more of an essay on Star Wars in general - I would bet good money that this guy has no kids of his own).

I didn't understand this line at all:

[T]he real loss in the immediate sequels was the cantankerous sexual triangle of Han Solo, Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia that had given Star Wars a recognizable and genuinely compelling psychological frisson . . . Mr. Lucas jettisoned the sex stuff, along with any other traces of personality that had crept into his original story . . .

Did this guy see The Empire Strikes Back? I mean, you don't have to like the romantic angle in that movie - I certainly don't - but there's really quite a lot more of it than there was in the original Star Wars.

I should add that, in general, I've never liked the romantic stuff in these films. At first, looking back, I thought that might be because I saw them first in boyhood, when my natural reaction to such scenes was "yuck." But now that I'm an adult and enjoy romantic comedies and drama and the like as much as the next guy (romance, that is; not sex scenes . . . I've never really grasped the appeal in watching two people making out if I'm not one of them), I still don't like these scenes. I think it's a combination of two things. One is that Lucas just doesn't know how to write these scenes, or for that matter to write female characters in any mode other than scrappy, sassy and wisecracking. The other is, really, that I almost never enjoy this kind of stuff in action/sci-fi/fantasy films, because that's not what I'm in the mood for when I go to one of these movies; the scenes very often seem forced and artificial and I wind up feeling like I wasted valuable time that could have been spent advancing the action.

Will Collier has a history lesson for those dismayed by John Pohoretz's slam on Revenge of the Sith.

A mostly-good review of Revenge of the Sith, but awfully harsh on the film's lone significant female character. Of course, Natalie Portman's not as unpleasant to look at as Jar Jar, but given Lucas' track record of attempts at writing romance, I'm not optimistic.

Michele, who's obviously getting as sucked in to the Revenge of the Sith hype as I am, has a wee problem with Princess Leia's reaction in the original:

Tell me something: how would you react if you watched your home planet blown to smithereeens right in front of you? Would you collapse in grief? Break down in uncontrollable sobs? Faint? Go deaf, dumb and blind from the horror of watching everyone you have ever known or loved be wiped out in milliseconds? Or would you gasp, let out a stifled cry and then, a short time later, engage in flirtatious banter with a rogue space captain?

UPDATE: Another glowing review for Sith (with a few spoilers), this one from Variety. (via Todd Zywicki). I drop whatever I'm doing when an ad for this movie comes on TV. This is gonna be good.

Jonah Goldberg has an amusing column on Cookie Monster. Who else but Goldberg would invoke Marcus Aurelius and Hannibal Lecter in defense of a muppet? I particularly liked this point:

The whole point of the Cookie Monster character was to have a character who was silly because he ate so much. If Cookie Monster were a Greek god, he'd be the god of gluttony. Wouldn't it have been more honest and simply better to implore kids not to be too much like the Cookie Monster rather than make the Cookie Monster like everyone else? We all understand we shouldn’t be like Oscar the Grouch.

Who says that making Cookie Monster into moderate eater will improve kids' behavior anyway? Indeed, for years, Cookie Monster has devoured not only cookies, but things which merely look like cookies, including plates, Frisbees, and the moon. If Cookie Monster is so influential, why haven't I heard more about kids going to the hospital after trying to eat plates?

Frankly, it doesn't take a very bright 4-year-old to grasp that Cookie Monster's behavior is not acceptable. But it's funny.

I've got the first single off the new Bruce album, and unfortunately it sounds like we're back to the mopey, acoustic Bruce, although I'll wait and hear the whole album. Thought for the day, from Springsteen: "Talking about music is like talking about sex . . . Can you describe it? Are you supposed to?"

If you noticed his recent appearance on "Law & Order: Trial by Jury,"
Richard Belzer has now played the same character, Detective John Munch, on six different series, granting that half of those are of the Law & Order franchise - he's also been a regular character on L&0-SVU and Homicide, as well as appearing on the original L&O, The Beat, and The X-Files, the last being perhaps the most improbable because it was on another network.

Another sign that we'll never again see children's entertainment that actually places entertaining children first: