My Goal: Too much prejudice in this world - and not just racial. Religious and especially political prejudice is more prevalent and more harmful. The blogosphere has added to that and I want to subtract from it.
Here's some of my life and the things I'm interested in. You can find more info in my Permanent File. Click on the Categories under Blog Index to the Right.
Below are the first minutes of the first episode of this series:
I watched the first 3 seasons on Netflix. They have on Instant Viewing. You can also watch many episodes on Youtube.
This is a workplace situation comedy. Dave Nelson is the News Director and most of the series is told from his viewpoint. Staff include Bill McNiel, the announcer, Lisa Miller, reporter, Matthew, the comic screw-up, and others. Others sadly includes a character played by Khandi Alexander who is not given much comedic goofiness, presumably because she’s both a woman and black. Sad, because I think that the Bill and Catherine characters could have been a great comic duo on the show. The real character for me is Jimmy James, the owner of the station. Here’s James explaining to Dave why he took away Dave’s desk:
Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave... there is a saying, I cried... because I had no desk until I met a man who had no feet... and the no feet guy explained that there was such a thing as a budget... and WNYX was way way over it. The End.
Watched this movie last night. It was a romantic comedy. Very little romance but still funny. Why can't people figure out that romance is so much more than sex? Hollywood used to know this. Sadly, the comedy is all about sexual desire and almost nothing about love.
From the trailer, just look at all the A-List talent in this pic! All this, and hardly any romance - sad, sad.
Good premise: cab driver picks up girl and they fall in love and get married. Then the fun begins.
Mr. Moto was a fictional Japanese detective. He traveled the world in the 1930's and 40's. One of the sad things about Hollywood during this time, was that they didn't cast minorities in leading roles. So Peter Lorre (a German emigre) got the part. One has to forgive everyone, though because he's just so good at it.
Mr. Moto is always polite to everyone, even when he's beating they up. The fight scenes are decades before Bruce Lee showed audiences how Oriental fighting could be brought to the screen, so the fights seem lame.
The above movie is from the series and is set in Egypt. ----------- * If Google's embed is sluggish, try this.
Probably the worst idea since the TV show "Married by America" is today's announcement of Donald Trump's newest. This is a dating show featuring the bitch voted "Top TV Reality Villian" by TV Guide.
It could last more than one season. After all, what man, after winning such a contest, would stay with such a person?
Kathy and I saw a play last night. This was a children's play. I was surprised at how exhuberant the performances were. One has come to expect school productions to show kids who look cute and shy. These kids, however, were not - shy, that is.
One big problem was the genie. (I think that this was more the adult director's fault than the child actor.) The genie ought to not be held too closely to the script in this play. The genie's delivered all the right lines but since the performance was scripted, it was overly restrained - for this part in this play. A related problem was the flying carpet. It was mounted on wheels and was too heavy for the children to push. The result was that they managed to get Aladdin out of that cave but without the exhuberance that one wished for.
I also got the impression that some of the extras had more talent than the leads, a common problem with children productions.
With all these caveats taken into account, this was a great production. I was surprised at how good it was.
I spent the last few days in Ohio at my 10th year college reunion, but before I could write anything about it, something occurred to me: on this date four years ago, Beauty and the Geek first hit the airwaves and turned me into an international superstar. Or at least put my face on TV—the “superstar” status is questionable at best.
Four years… wow.
- Shawn Bakken, who made it to the penultimate episode in Season 1 - from Shawn Bakken's Blog
And even the quote is 2 months old now. How time flies!
I’ve been watching Battlestar Gallactica on Netflix the last months. I watched all four seasons. Here’s my thoughts on it.
First, I this kind of show needs to be seen on DVD’s because it is really one huge extended movie umpteen hours long busted up into episodes. Which makes me wonder why they didn’t save the original director’s cuts and just use them for the DVD’s? The commentary continually refers to the problem that important scenes were cut in order to fit into the timeslots for television. It seems a simple matter to save the original uncut versions and just transfer those to DVD. It would also make the DVD sets more marketable to those who have seen the shows originally on tv.
Second, the creators went in big for surprise twists. The trouble is that not all the plot points resolved the hanging threads created by the surprise twists. The resolutions that were given were of an ad-hoc nature. The creator’s commentaries admitted that they gave plot twists that created long range plotting problems and postponed thinking about the resolutions to those problems until later. For example, Kara’s resurrection was never fully explained.
Third, one wonders what the Cylons were about, whether they had a plan or not. They went through a lot of trouble to destroy the remnants of the human race in Adama’s rag-tag fleet through 4 years and who knows how many light-years distance, while doing precious little to create their own civilization in the meantime. The show bases the Cylon behavior on the need for human sperm for reproduction. They have ships that can travel the galaxy but they can’t get sperm banks?
But I dwell on the negative. The positives of this series far outweighs those. The story holds up. Some of those plot problem resolutions were pretty ingenious. I really got interested in the characters.
My favorite episodes were those on the occupation and escape from New Caprica.
I recommend this series. If you wish, you can rent the videos like I did (Netflix) or buy them from somewhere like Amazon: Battlestar Gallactica 1, 2.0, 2.5
This is from the series finale of Battlestar Gallactica. This Youtube emphasizes the special effects of this series and centers on the fate of the ship, the Battlestar Gallactica. This is simply wonderful!
In a couple of days I shall do a wrap-up of my thoughts on this series.
This movie has something completely different. Humor from a conservative point of view. We're used to humor from the left wing point of view. One does not have to be a conservative to appreciate something that is different.
I saw this movie when it was in the theatres. Because of the EXTREME leftwing slant of the mainstream media, this movie passed unnoticed. Newspapers and other critics such as the successors to Ebert and Roper that review movies, refused to even mention this one.The one thing that I require from a comedy is that it be funny. I don't need to agree with the movie's political point of view, which is a good thing because otherwise Colbert, Letterman, Stewart, Mahr, and so many others would be inaccessable to me and millions like me.
This was one of the great Western TV shows of the 1950's. Like Maverick below, Paladin wandered the west. Unlike the Maverick show, this one was straight adventure. Paladin was a hired gunman - but with a conscience. He was a loner.
Each show started with the closeup of him taking the gun from the holster and pointing it straight at the camera. Then came a bit of dialogue from the show. It certainly was a great attention-grabber! This clip is a series of pictures that is a tribute to the show.
This was the only show I ever saw which made the act of giving a business card into a dramatic threat. Now you can see the show for free - or as long as CBS keeps it on its site. It the link ceases to work, then CBS has taken it down. I always loved the theme song. But, like most TV shows, you never get to hear the complete song when it airs. This clip gives the complete song!
I've been watching Maverick from Netflix. This was the show that launched James Garner's career, though I think Jack Kelly was pretty good, too.
The Maverick boys, Bret and Bart, got by in the Old West by gambling. They made money and lost money. They ran crooked cons and generally raised mayhem. One of the things about the new media is that old shows that were inaccessable are now available. I especially like that I can see the show in the order of the episodes.
I like the conning, the skulldugery and the comedy. The heros of this show get by through outwitting their enemies rather than outfighting them. This puts more demands on the plotting the storyline, hence more more demands on good scripts.
One big point. Too much is made of the acting. Yes, it is important but the writing is even more important. Regretabbly, Warner Bros. skimped on the writing in the later episodes and this is a big reason why James Garner and Roger Moore left. Watch the first three seasons. After that, well . . .
You can watch by buying DVD's Maverick (Television Favorites), or by subscribing to Blockbuster or Netflix. Netflix has instant streaming to the computer.
The above video gives you a flavor for the show. Wikipedia has a nice article.
There were movies before Edison. The first try was to position a series of cameras along a racetrack with tripwires across the track. Then they ran the horse down the track. The hooves struck the wires, activating the camera. The resulting photos were displayed rapidly creating the first “movie experience”. But a dead-end invention.
Edison came up with the film strip as the medium and invented a camera to photograph scenes directly to the strip. He also invented a machine for viewing the developed film, thus completing the commercial process.
He introduced his new machine to the world at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. People lined up to peer into the machine’s eyepiece one at a time and see the world’s first moving pictures. His invention was a hit. Other inventors could have stopped there but Edison knew that this new process opened both opportunities and challenges
In both Europe and America, other people were jumping into the arena. British inventors Robert W. Paul and Birt Acres developed a machine that projected the film images across the room onto the wall. Now, movies could be showed to groups of people instead of just one person at a time. In France, the Lumiere brothers began showing creative films that were widely received. If Edison wanted his invention to pay, he would have to get creative, too.
See Wikipedia for more on these earliest movie days.
While the quality of these early movies seem pretty lame today, the audiences of the 1890’s were experiencing the first sights ever seen by anyone in history: pictures that moved. The creativity was limited but the technology was, too. Each movie had to be contained in a film strip only 50 feet long! That means that each movie could last only a few seconds.
The quality of the filmstrip, well. Need we say more? The reason we have these very early movies is that the government copyright laws lagged behind this new industry, too. The only way Edison could think of to copyright his films was to reproduce them frame by frame onto a strip of paper. It was these lengthy spools of paper (adding machine tape, anybody?) with each frame printed as an individual picture, that were provided to the Library of Congress to meet the copyright laws of the 1890’s.
When film historians went looking for the earliest films, the filmstrips had long since deteriorated to dust. But the paper prints still existed in the Library of Congress. Technicians reversed Edison’s process, photographing each picture and putting it on modern film. That is what we have today.
For samples of Edison’s movies, I searched YouTube and got this:
First Kiss
This was Edison’s big hit of 1896. The lady was the famous actress May Irwin. In 1896, Irwin had a problem. As you can see from the movie, by 1896 this former sex siren of the stage was very much a FORMER sex siren. She was only 34 years old, yet she looked much older. She was starring in a play “The Widow Jones” and concerned that the leading man, John C. Rice, not so young looking himself, in fact looked old and that helped make her look old. Still, to help publicize the play, she shot the climactic scene, the big kiss, for Edison. But even as this scene was shot, she had plans for Rice.
After shooting, she fired him and hired a much younger man instead. Edison released the movie and it became a huge hit. Rice, a new star but out of work, went to work in vaudeville with an act “teaching people how to kiss for the theatre.” The act was a sensation.
Meanwhile, back on Broadway, “The Widow Jones” returned in the fall of 1896 for the new season. With the fired John C. Rice giving kissing demonstrations all across the country, and Edison’s movie a smash hit, everybody who went to the play focused on that climactic big kiss at the end. Could the new guy perform up to John C. Rice’s standards? Too, bad; uh, uh; nada; zip; it was a flop.
Irwin was in a quandary. She didn’t want Rice back; Rice didn’t want to come back; the public demanded they get back. Guess who won? This was a harbinger of the movies’ future power on public opinion.
Serpentine Dance
These were popular vaudeville acts in this era. This movie exhibits Edison’s experiments with applying color tints to the film.
Annabelle Moore is the dancer in this film from 1894. She was one of Edison’s favorite stars. She starred in Edison’s films throughout the 1890’s. Part of the reason that Edison kept bringing her back was because his master film strips kept wearing out and he needed new shoots to release.
Sandow the Strongman
It is 1894. Edison, under pressure from the competition, was looking for new stars. (The Star System was actually invented by D.W. Griffin about 20 years in the future. I use the term “stars” because even in the 1890’s, Edison had the concept, if not the execution, as this story shows.)
Eugene Sandow was the Arnold Swarzenegger of the 1890’s. He billed himself in vaudeville as “The Strongest Man in the World”. Others disputed his claim. How to solidify his reputation and thus his marketability?
Edison brought Sandow to his studios in a blaze of publicity. On March 6, with cameras flashing and the press looking on, “the world’s greatest strongman shook hands with the world’s greatest inventor.” Thus Edison and Sandow packaged the event. The reporters rushed the photos into print and the Edison/Sandow team went to work.
The movie is the opening of Sandow’s act. (Remember, this is the 1890’s, movies are only a few seconds long.) Sandow immediately followed up his movie debut with a book on physical fitness. Five weeks after this film shot, Edison introduced his new film invention, the kinetoscope.
Thus, the two celebrities used a 15 second film to promote their careers.
The Boxing Match
These two were a comedy team but Edison made movies of real fights in the 1890’s. Boxing was illegal in every state of the Union. Edison filmed the first sports films at these illegal fights.
Being the great celebrity, Edison could get away with it. And he took advantage of the gap between development of technology and the development of law. It was illegal to attend fights; there was nothing in the law making it illegal to show movies of fights. Of course, the movies could be entered into evidence against the fighters, the referee, and such spectators whose faces appeared in the film. Judges were outraged when juries refused to convict. Edison’s boxing movies played a key role in the subsequent legalizing of this sport.
------ I came upon these movies in my Netflix subscription (yet another innovative use of new technology). Netflix members can find the exact disk here.
Edison’s contribution did not stop with novelty filming; he conscientiously tried to use the invention for something larger.
This is a trailer to the famous movie that created Hollywood - the first full-length movie in American history. I watched it on DVD last night. What struck me was how great it was as art but how very bad it was as history. There is just no getting around it: this is a truly racist movie. In these times when the practice of branding innocent statements as "racist" have hardened us to the term, this movie reminds us that there really was a racist past in our nation. The key thing to remember is how well this movie was received in the 1915.
This is the trailer from the movie. I watched it on DVD today. This is an improvement on the series and the movie that Don Adams (the original Maxwell Smart) made.
The Get Smart TV series was a spoof on James Bond and the other spy thrillers of the 1960's. It was funny then; it is still funny now; this movie is even better.
And Ann Hathaway version of Agent 99 is an enormous improvement over the original. They just didn't give the original 99 much to do. The movie fleshed out the characters all around.
This is still my favorite TV show. Season 5 already! Here I'm still in love with Mindi from Season 1. And Susan Polgar posted just yesterday about Joe Block being a chessplayer from Season 2.
I don't like it that the beauties and the geeks have been so typed on this show. And more, I don't like it that the producers have gone to so many former Playboy Playmates to get their beauties. Part of the charm of Season 1 was that the beauties were the beautiful girls we all wanted to date in school but didn't feel we could ever approach. The Playboy crowd just takes this to celebrity status.
Anyway, I've put a new widget on my right hand column. It is temporary for the duration of the season. I'm putting it permanently here.
18 months from now, broadcasters will stop sending analog signals in the US. This means that millions of people like me who refuse to invest in hi-def or cable or satellite dish receivers will turn on their TV's and get just snow on all their channels. Me, I just think that I watch TV too much, so I just use some "rabbit ears". If my TV were to stop working, that would probably be for the best.
Government is worried that Congress will face the "perfect storm" from the public when this happens. They're talking of spending millions in consumer education, and new regulations requiring retailers and others to join in "educating" the public about this. They are also worried that Hollywood may take a big hit when millions like me might simply stop watching TV - or else drastically change our viewing habits.
Unstated in the article is an important question about the job of government. I expect it to protect me - police, firefighters, etc. I expect it to look our for the overall economy. Education, yes. --- But is it part of government's responsibility to ENTERTAIN me, too?
If the entertainment industry fails to educate the public and suffers thereby, is that government's fault? And if I, myself, fail to follow the news, is that government's fault? In short, is it government's job to save the fool from the consequences of his actions?
My favorite tv show remains the reality show "Beauty and the Geek". Re-runs can still be seen on MTV. This show has a certain charm because it throws a bunch of socially inept geeks in with a bunch of academically impaired beauties. I always wondered what it would be like to be with the cool kids. This show rang a bell with me.
Shawn Bakken had a blog until last month. Unfortunately he was the only one from Season 1 who let himself be accessable. I'm afraid he got a little frustrated with me at certain points because I started to turn his blog into a little like the USCF Forums. To say no more, we had vastly different opinions on Season 2 and Scarlet Garcia (his partner from Season 1).
I've written him since his blog disappeared and there's a chance that he may put in an appearance here.
Susan is pictured on the left; Scarlett on the right. -------------------------------------------------- Susan Polgar's picture from Susan Polgar's Blog. Used with Permission. Scarlett Johansen's picture is from publicity still.
, or by subscribing to Blockbuster or Netflix. Netflix has instant streaming to the computer.
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