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In Sweden, Christmas is a time for the whole family to gather around the television and watch a duck. Here in America, the Christmas fare is covered with fur. On a recent Sunday evening, pooch-loving tube watchers had to choose between simultaneously airing made-for-TV canine holiday films. In CBS' A Dog Named Christmas, based on the novel of the same name, a developmentally disabled 20-year-old man urges everyone in his small town to adopt a pound puppy. In The Family Channel's The Dog Who Saved Christmas, a pooch voiced by Mario Lopez saves his family from a yuletide home invasion.
A dog in a Santa hat—or with a wreath around its neck, or pawing an ornament, or donning a Rudlophian nose—is a longstanding symbol of Christmas dreck. Before A Dog Named Christmas came 2005's The 12 Dogs of Christmas, a tale of hounds saved from an evil dogcatcher by a spunky Depression-era girl. The Dog Who Saved Christmas has its pup predecessors as well. That talking-dog picture employs the most-widespread technique in the Frank Caprahuahua genre: adapt, borrow, or steal a bipedal story (in this case Home Alone) for a quadrupedal cast. Take a seat, Macaulay Culkin! You're in, adorable yellow lab!
While the dog-Christmas celluloid combo platter dates back to at least the 1930s and 1940s—see the cartoons The Pups' Christmas and Hector's Hectic Life—the genre truly exploded with the advent of direct-to-video animated kiddie fare. In An All Dogs Christmas Carol, a 1998 sequel to All Dogs Go to Heaven, Charles Dickens' tale of holiday salvation gets new bite thanks to hounds voiced by Ernest Borgnine and Dom DeLuise. In 2001's Nine Dog Christmas, man's best friend gets called on to save the day when Santa's reindeer get the flu. (An elf played by Scott Hamilton teaches the dogs to fly.) And this year brought Disney's Santa Buddies: The Legend of Santa Paws, in which a talking dog named Puppy Paws must save Christmas "when the magical Christmas Icicle starts to melt and the world begins to forget the true meaning of the season."
Even Hollywood's celebridogs aren't immune from the Christmas cash-in. In Benji's Very Own Christmas Story—the Bad News Bears Go to Japan of the canine Yuletide genre—the mutt superstar encounters Kris Kringle whilst on a publicity tour in Switzerland and must convince him to do his toy-delivering duty. Rather than bark, scamper, and wag his tail, Benji saves the world by sitting perfectly still and getting carried around by his various human co-stars. Perhaps this is the only way to carry out your Christmas-dog duties with dignity: Close your eyes, scratch yourself, and think of Easter.
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Plug your ears and alert the kids: Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel, the follow-up to 2007's surprise box-office smash, Alvin and the Chipmunks, opens on Friday. Besides being the silliest-titled sequel since Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo, the semi-animated, sonically assaultive jukebox comedy has a shot at achieving an elusive distinction: The Squeakquel might well be critic-proof.
Despite what you may have heard, very few Hollywood films are truly critic-proof. As Erik Lundegaard argued in Slate, and as Chadwick Matlin and Chris Wilson demonstrated for The Big Money, beyond the all-media blitz of a film's first weekend in theaters, negative reviews likely do affect long-term box-office prospects. Yet there are notable exceptions—like the original film in the Chipmunks series, which received a torrent of bad reviews but earned more than $200 million at the box office.
Using numerically based review aggregator Metacritic as a guide, we're defining as "critic-proof" those films that received "Generally Unfavorable" reviews (40 points or lower) yet still earned north of $100 million at the box office. So far, four 2009 films qualify: Couples Retreat ($107 M, 23 rating), Paul Blart: Mall Cop ($146 M, 39 rating), G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra ($150 M, 32 rating), and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (the No. 1 film of the year at $402 M, 35 rating). So what defines this year's critic-proof cinema? Lowbrow comedy, high-concept, action-figure-inspired action, vehicular mayhem, and a titular taste for colons. If Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel is half as popular (and as critically loathed) as its predecessor, it will fit right in, rounding out a Teflon Five for 2009.
Considering how many dogs Hollywood produced and aggressively marketed this year, and considering the chronic dearth of choice and true competition at the multiplex, four critic-proof films is a surprisingly low number. Perhaps that's because, at Metacritic, the difference between "Mixed or Average" (a score between 40 and 60) and "Generally Unfavorable" (again, 40 points or lower) can be negligible. Barely spared the unfavorable (and by extension "critic-proof" tag) were films such as the $120 million earning, 41-rated G-Force (wherefore the animated rodent trend?) and the $180 million, 43-rated X-Men Origins: Wolverine, not to mention poorly received, big earners like Angels and Demons, Night at the Museum, and Twilight Saga: New Moon. Less than a third of the 27 films that earned $100 million or more received "Generally Favorable" reviews (though several, such as Up, were among the top five money-earners). Apparently "Average" moviemaking, rather than critic-baiting awfulness, is the most reliable route to box-office success.
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The complete Fraggle Rock is now available on DVD in a 20-disc set that, the box promises, contains "over 47 hours of rockin' fun." And rockin' it is. The Jim Henson Co. met my entertainment needs from birth to graduation (at least from elementary school): Sesame Street for the early years, Fraggle Rock once I was ready to move on from the block, then the Muppets, and finally such dark fare as Jim Henson's The Storyteller.
Fraggle Rock makes a great halfway mark—it's got fun, silly songs like those on Sesame Street, strong story lines reminiscent of the Muppets, and even a hint of the dark side usually associated with The Storyteller: These creatures dance and sing and look goofy, but they live in a subterranean world, and some must work as miners, and all must struggle to negotiate the differences of the several distinct races of puppets that populate their underworld. An anthropomorphized trash heap is a font of wisdom, introducing child viewers to the concept that good ideas can come from unlikely places (or perhaps this is a sly dig at organized spirituality—a wise man as a dump?). The catchy theme song, which has been stuck in my head for a week, even broaches the work-life balance problem: Sometimes you have to "work your cares away," and sometimes you have to "dance your cares away."
But all is not well in Fraggle Rock. A movie version is in the works (set for release in 2011), which I await with a feeling of unease familiar to my peers who suffered through the godawful big-screen adaptations of Transformers and G.I. Joe. Watching Red and Mokey on DVD is like running into someone I haven't seen since preschool—we might not have anything to talk about, but there's a certain glee about being in the same room again. I don't want to find out that my two favorite Fraggettes have become snotty or unsufferable or dull. I trust the Jim Henson Co. more than I do Michael Bay, but I nevertheless find myself wishing that the show would just remain as-is. The JHC has made few missteps in its day, but one is bound to happen eventually, and I can't help but suspect that a big-screen version of the bizarre little Fraggle Rock may be its first mistake of the new decade.
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Anyone who claims that this is the golden age of television should page through the anorexic new TV Guide, which covers Dec. 21-Jan. 3. It's a fortnight in which the highlights include Little Chocolatiers, "a pair of pint-size confectioners whip up chocolatey treats"; Durham County, "a Canadian-made crime drama" that is apparently about to begin its second series (a televisual koan: If a show premieres on Ion and no one watches, does it deserve a mention in TV Guide?); and What I Hate About Me, in which "women gripe about themselves, then get help fixing their flaws."
What is a TV junkie to do? (Remember, the average amount of time viewers spent watching television during the 2008-09 season was four hours and 49 minutes per day.) Personally, I'll be performing the DVR equivalent of spring cleaning, catching up on the shows that have piled up on my TiVo. I started out with Leverage, a corporate revenge fantasy in which a gang of grifters channel Robin Hood and Karl Marx, and then I plan to take in Season 3 of Big Love before new episodes begin in the New Year. But what comes after this weekend? There's a limit to the number of Law & Order reruns a New Yorker can watch without getting paranoid.
So, Brow Beat readers, what should I watch? Amanda Hamilton of South Carolina is attempting to catch up on the entire Lost back story to prepare herself for the final episodes in spring 2010. That seems like a summer's worth of work. If you have any ideas for how I can get through the holidays without resorting to Hoarders, please send them to browbeatTV@gmail.com or message @junethomas on Twitter.
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James Cameron's Avatar, which premieres on Friday, is already legendary for its meticulous attention to detail. Witness, for example, the hubbub over the invented alien language, which Cameron boasts will "out-Klingon Klingon." Or the fact that he gave every plant and animal on the planet Na'vi, Latin, and common names, all catalogued in a 350-page "Pandorapedia."
Cameron seems to have been a little more lax in the biology department—at least when it comes to imagining Pandora's reigning creature, the Na'vi. Take those already infamous alien boobs: He gleefully told Playboy, "Right from the beginning I said, ‘She's got to have tits,' even though that makes no sense because her race, the Na'vi, aren't placental mammals."
One hundred percent plausibility isn't required from any fantasy creature, of course. And if audiences grok those tall blue cat-people, then biological quibbles will be moot. But Cameron's admission got the science nerd in me curious about the finer points of Na'vi anatomy—so I called up Stuart Sumida, a biologist at Cal State San Bernadino who moonlights as an anatomy consultant for FX studios. (He helped work out how the mythical creatures of The Chronicles of Narnia should look and move.) I asked him to watch the Avatar trailer and pre-release clips and to offer an initial assessment of the Na'vi.
Sumida notes that the trickiest part of making a creature using motion-capture technology is that its movements remain essentially human. ("It's still basically a guy in a suit.") But with their long limbs, heavy tail, and opposable big toes, the Na'vi should move more like gibbons than bipedal humans. And all that upright scampering across tree branches seems wrong, too, given how heavy a 10-foot-tall creature must be—even one with superlight bones.
Many of the choices that have obvious rationales from a storytelling perspective make for weird anatomy. Take those big, exotic eyes, which make the Na'vi look so cute and sympathetic. "Gigantic eyeballs are usually for creatures that forage exclusively at night," Sumida says. "These characters should be wearing sunglasses—they get so much light, their eyes will hurt."
And those expressive tails. Tails are an extension of the backbone, emerging downwards from the sacrum, where the hips attach. Na'vi tails, however, seem to emerge from above the sacrum, and they stick out at a nearly right angle. Sumida also takes exception to the Pandorapedia's claims that those tails are prehensile—that is, used for grasping things—and help the Na'vi balance their long torso and legs. If that were the case, the Na'vi would probably be walking on all fours, with their backs parallel to the ground.
Finally, about those boobs: It's good that they're purely decorative. Since the Na'vi seem to have zero fat on their bodies, those mammary glands almost certainly don't work. Relatedly, the fact that the Na'vi aren't placental mammals makes the presence of bellybuttons something of a curiosity.
However, the glittery blue skin that's earned the Na'vi unflattering comparisons to the Smurfs—and which seems to be the outgrowth of a rather awkward racial metaphor—doesn't bother Sumida. "Bioluminescence seems like a valid evolutionary strategy," he says. "I think it's one of the coolest things they've come up with."
Finally, an Easter egg for eagle-eyed viewers: If you look closely, you'll see that the Na'vi have a little muscle running down their necks. We've got them, too—it's called the sternocleidomastoid muscle—and it's a uniquely mammalian feature. Ours make a very distinctive V-shape, and when creature designers want an alien to seem attractive and familiar to its human viewers, they often slap one on. "Even C3PO has it, in the form of little pistons on his neck. Watch Star Trek: The good guys always have them, and the bad guys don't. It's a classic alien designer trick."
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In its premiere episode last night, NBC's new competition series, The Sing-Off, provided a public service that the world did not yet know it needed—namely, a sure-fire way to test whether you do, indeed, like a cappella, despite your better judgment. In the opening number, all eight vocal ensembles participating in the four-night event joined in a rendition of the Queen/David Bowie jam "Under Pressure." If you don't find yourself grinning like a fool by the end of this number, then congratulations: You, like my boyfriend (who spent last night barricaded in the dining room with his noise-canceling headphones), are immune to a cappella.
Sadly, none of the following performances quite lived up to that first one. Despite the range of groups on display—a quartet of sassy suburban moms, an R & B group from hardscrabble Omaha, a zany guys' group from Tufts—nearly all sounded too thin, too bright, and too boppy. Most also had noticeable pitch issues, which I hope will smooth out once everyone stops being so nervous.
My favorite group so far is Noteworthy, from BYU. They sounded like a hot mess on Aretha Franklin's "Think"—like many all-women's groups, they can sound screechy and piercing when they go full-blast—but I liked their moxie. They know how to convey a sense that they take themselves seriously while embracing the essentially campy nature of the genre.
We will not harp on the inadequacies of host Nick Lachey or judge Nicole Scherzinger or their shared, grating habit of insisting how cool a cappella is. ("When you hear that barbershop style you think, ‘That's dope!' ") Instead, let's celebrate the presence of the dashing Shawn Stockman, from Boyz II Men, and of Ben Folds, who, despite his uncanny resemblance to Austin Powers, provided the evening's most useful, insightful musical critiques.
The little scenes where we get to visit the groups' campuses and hometowns also provided some lovely grace notes. All the groups seem very close-knit, and none of the camaraderie seems forced. A cappella is first and foremost about fellowship, and I thought those interludes captured that quite well.
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The Shame Index is not typically one to get exercised about spoilers. But fans of How I Met Your Mother who glimpsed an episode description this week had a joke ruined for them. "The gang struggles to quit smoking," read the synopsis from Time Warner cable; "the friends try to give up smoking," read the one on TVGuide.com. Which pretty much gave away that it was the whole gang that was trying to kick the habit, not just Robin. That this joke wasn't that funny to begin with was slim consolation.
Shameful:
—The debt HIMYM owes to Friends has been previously noted in this space. Nothing wrong with emulating a winning formula, but this episode owed too much to its forebear. Chandler Bing's battle with smoking addiction was a rich vein mined on many occasions over the course of the Friends run. None of the HIMYM characters' sold their nicotine cravings as convincingly or amusingly as Matthew Perry did. The set-up of needing to smoke in order to impress your boss—Marshall's excuse for lighting up—is similarly taken directly from the Friends playbook: See Season 5, Episode 18, "The One Where Rachel Smokes." That episode aired in April 1999—before smoking jokes became as stale as the air in Giuliani-era bar.
—Lily's smoker's voice. Do the writers of HIMYM have such a low opinion of Alyson Hannigan's comedic talents that they feel she needs special effects to be funny? Over Slapsgiving, she went around reducing people to ashes with her glowing eyes. In this episode, smoking makes her start talking like Johnny Most. (The part was voiced by Harvey Fierstein). Enough with the gimics. Lily can be plenty funny without such nonsense.
—McRib jokes. Seriously—how long had this script been on ice? The Simpsons aired the definitive McRib parody in February 2003.
—Don. The Shame Index is beginning to think the HIMYM team just doesn't like Robin very much. The writers have her fall in love with Barney, then they abruptly break off the relationship and force her to look on as Barney returns to his bed-hopping ways. The costume department frequently dresses her in ensembles that border on the absurd. (The color palette of one outfit this week looked as if it was inspired by a roll of Necco wafers.) And now poor Robin has this guy as her love interest? In his interview with the Los Angeles Times last week, Carter Bays noted that Don might seem annoying at first, but would grow on Robin—and, presumably, viewers—over time. He's got a lot of growing to do. Ted Baxter—another small-time newsman—was solipsistic but forever sunny and ultimately good-hearted. Don just seems like a defeated jerk.
—That scrawny kid was supposed to be a young Marshall Eriksen? Utterly unconvincing.
—Relatedly: Are the writers of HIMYM really asking us to laugh for two straight weeks at gags based on Marshall traveling back in time? Last week we saw Future Marshall send over a plate of hot wings to Present Marshall. Fine; neither the best nor the worst bit from last week's episode. But to return to the well again this week is highly shameful. All the more so given the lameness of this week's iteration: Present Marshall going back in time to show Unconvincing Past Marshall a photo of Lily, which in turn gets Unconvincing Past Marshall's hormones racing. Is this what HIMYM has been reduced to? Time-travel-based masturbation jokes?
Awesome:
—Ted's children finally getting a speaking part—print those kids some SAG cards!
—Marshall's bad habit ... of buying Vikings lamps.
—Summer vacation in Minnesota.
—Ted: "Will you pass the onion rings?" Marshall: "What do you have, dinosaur arms? They're right here."
Yet another disappointing episode for HIMYM, which just can't get in a rhythm this season. Each week seems to bring news of a new upcoming guest star—New York Yankee Nick Swisher recently joined a list that already includes Amanda Peet and Tim Gunn. But the series doesn't need more cameos. It needs to take better care of the characters we already know and love.
Previous Shame Indices: Episode 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
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Advertising Age has come out with its end-of-decade Top 10 lists. To no one's surprise, the magazine names Crispin Porter & Bogusky the No. 1 ad agency of the aughts. I've previously expressed my distaste for CPB's bullying, misogynistic aesthetic. (There was the Volkswagen ad in which a dude suggests his girlfriend is too fat. The Burger King ad in which a dude complains about eating "chick food." And the Haggar ad in which a dude smears dog feces into a slightly less dudely dude's palm.) Still, I can't deny the agency's uncanny ability to buzz through the cultural clutter and wedge its brands into the pop zeitgeist.
In its list of the decade's best spots, Ad Age includes a pair of classically epic ads that I'm pretty fond of. Nike's "Move" is crisply edited, gorgeous to look at, and just a little uplifting. Sony's unfortunately titled "Balls" answers a visual question that needed to be asked: What does it look like when you drop 250,000 SuperBalls at the top of a steep San Francisco street? (I once overheard an envious ad exec marveling at the budgetary feat. "What an outrageous shoot," he muttered, practically licking his lips. "Can you imagine how many windows they broke?")
I have bones to pick with a few other choices, though. The iPod ad in which silhouettes bop around to music has always rubbed me the wrong way, as it suggests that humans are ephemeral shadows while their iPods are of lasting, weighty importance. I've also never been a fan of the absurdist confectionary ad genre, and I make no exception for the Cadbury milk chocolate spot in which a gorilla plays the drum part on "In the Air Tonight." First of all, shouldn't it be a cow, not a gorilla, since the point is that the candy bar uses dairy milk? And more important: They messed up the song. The real drum fill comes in a transition from verse to chorus, not from chorus to chorus. Song arrangement fail! This is why you see so few successful simian session musicians.
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We all know that Law & Order rips its stories from the headlines—but which headlines? Every week—at least every week when there's a new episode and June's DVR doesn't fail—Brow Beat matches L&O's plot points to the events that inspired them.
Dec. 11, 2009: "Fed"
These Are Their Stories
Nicholas Landy's body is found with the word "FED" scrawled on his chest. The police immediately suspect that he was targeted by an anti-government activist.
This Is the Real Story
According to the Los Angeles Times, "The body of William E. ‘Bill' Sparkman Jr., 51, was found in the backwoods of Clay County [Kentucky] on Sept. 12, with his hands, feet and mouth bound with duct tape, a rope around his neck and the word ‘Fed' written on his chest." Authorities initially considered that Sparkman, a Census Bureau worker, might have been targeted because he worked for the government. Investigators eventually concluded that he had committed suicide and attempted to disguise it so his insurance policies would pay out.
These Are Their Stories
The cops discover that although Landy worked as a door-to-door canvasser for the Rights Alliance Foundation, a nonprofit group of community organizers, he was a conservative activist who was secretly recording his work. The police find hidden-camera footage of Landy manipulating RAF workers into talking about how they might extort a restaurant chain.
This Is the Real Story
On Sept. 10, 2009, Fox News reported that "[o]fficials with the controversial community organizing group ACORN were secretly videotaped offering to assist two individuals posing as a pimp and a prostitute, encouraging them to lie to the Internal Revenue Service and providing guidance on how to claim underage girls from South America as dependents." Filmmaker James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles, who, according to the Washington Post is "the eldest daughter of a conservative Christian minister in Miami," made the videos—described by the Post as "a major strike for conservative Republicans who for years have accused ACORN of voter-registration fraud during presidential elections"—to discredit the organization.
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McSweeney's, the Bay Area-based journal and publishing house led by Dave Eggers, has made its reputation turning quirky literary undertakings into beautiful, audacious print objects: a seven-volume "treatise on violence," for example, or a magazine that came in pieces in a box. So I was excited to hear McSweeney's latest project was the San Francisco Panorama, a "21st-century newspaper prototype" centered on San Francisco, the city I grew up in and adore. This is an overdue endeavor. The Golden Gate may be the most chronically underserved daily-journalism market in the country, and it lacks a meaty, aggressive, national-class newspaper with local roots. The Panorama—a 328-page, full-color behemoth styled after the great Sunday editions of yore—is trying to be a beacon on that path.
It's also trying to prove a point. The point, as an insert in the paper makes clear, is that a great print newspaper need not be a corporate money drain: It can, instead, be pulled together by an independent staff and maybe even turn a little profit. (The prototype's print run was 20,000, with each copy retailing for $16—except for those sold in San Francisco on publication day, which cost just $5. The printing and editorial expenses were $7.98 per copy; ad revenue was $61,000.) Gripers and wet towels across the land might point out that $16 is kind of a lot to spend on a newspaper—or that six months is, practically speaking, an unacceptably long time for one issue to spend in production. These people would be right.
And yet a copy of the Panorama has just landed on my desk, and it is the most gorgeous newsprint object I have ever seen. It's utterly seductive. Each section is designed around artful, oversize photos and elegant graphics; stories run between them in stylish, well-spaced Sabon font. The project was designed, we're told, to show what newspapers can do that the Web cannot; and insofar as one of those things is arranging story elements on a fixed-size page that can lie flat on a breakfast table, the Panorama makes a beautifully persuasive argument.
The writing—most of which is essayistic in approach and some of which is first-rate—is freed from a newspaper's normal constraints of style and form. Most pieces seem to run across at least two pages and (delightfully for me) are centered on the quirks and culture of the Bay Area. Oddities abound. A "special section" of the paper consists entirely of Stephen King's thoughts about the World Series. The "Panorama magazine" contains a rococo study of power pop by Michael Chabon and a lengthy first-person account of NASCAR by Andrew Sean Greer. The "book review"—which is actually another magazine printed on slightly less nice paper—contains a short story by George Saunders and quatrains by the likes of John Ashbery and Paul Muldoon. There is "a complimentary poster" bearing a cartoon version of a 49ers play. Also, a cardstock diagram you can cut out and fold into the shape of a rocket. This was clearly a labor of love and self-indulgence, and like many of McSweeney's projects, it offers surprises at every turn.
Of course, it's an odd kind of paper that contains a six-page report by William T. Vollman, complete with 137 footnotes. The Panorama presents itself as an argument for "newspapers' survival," but that premise is a Trojan horse. Newspaper stories are written to be read once or twice, top to bottom, and then tossed out, shat on, used to start a fire. It's almost inconceivable to return to a newspaper piece—even a brilliant one—weeks after it appeared to resavor its insights or its prose. The stylish and evergreen reporting that makes up the Panorama, by contrast, is designed to be enjoyed at length and leisure, maybe even folded into an anthology one day. It is a magazine form grafted onto broadsheet. McSweeney's real ambitions seem to run less toward newspapers and more toward the golden age of glossy.
Like many golden ages, this one never quite existed in real life. Elegantly typeset long-form journalism a la Panorama did thrive in the middle of the century, as income and ad revenue climbed after the war. But by the late '60s, magazines were in a phase of crisis. Newsstand behemoths like Collier's, Life, and the Saturday Evening Post had started creaking and coming apart. The New Journalism renaissance we now associate with this period did not herald a golden stretch; it was much more the consequence of specialty mags like Esquire and Rolling Stone—targeted publications better suited to a tricky ad-sales climate—rising from the ashes of the industry.
The quirky efflorescence of that era seems to inspire the Panorama, which contains subsections like "Arts One": a thin and retro-styled insert profiling things like local radio and San Francisco murals. But there's something naggingly backward about the path of its idealism. If the innovations of the '60s and '70s showed anything, it was that journalism thrives by reimagining itself to fit new media and new constraints. A lot of writers these days think of Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) as an artifact of long-form California journalism from a greener era. Fewer realize that most of those pieces were composed for crumbling magazines that bit the dust within months of its publication.
"The old capital has always/ Just been sacked," as poet (and Panorama quatrain contributor) Robert Hass once wrote. The true newspaper of the 21st century will innovate on the canvas as it's given—whatever that may be—rather than trying to pump some life into a form that's run its course. Inventive, beautiful experiments are being done with online journalism at the moment, but you'd never know it from McSweeney's curiously bare-bones Web site. Eggers, in fact, purports to have no Internet connection at his house. Well, here's a challenge: Get wired up. Let McSweeney's turn its creativity on the large, uncharted landscape that lies ahead of newspapers, not the one they've left behind. That's where imagination and passion is most needed these days—and, more to the point: Why not.
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When a Slate writer sees one of her pieces rendered into French on Slate.fr, she feels a frisson of excitement. Our European sister publication, which launched in February 2009, runs original stories as well as translations of pieces that first appeared in Slate. Since the only stories worthy of the translator's time and trouble are those focused on topics with global appeal, seeing your piece in French is like being told that it is cosmopolitan and somehow universal, not just some provincial American dead end.
So I was excited—and a little surprised—to see my own debut in the pages of Slate.fr earlier this week. Their skilled translators (they really are superb) transformed "Shirt-Buttoning Styles of the Weird and ‘Special' " into "Du boutonnage de chemise des gens bizarres." I had cause to mention Forrest Gump and Sling Blade's Karl Childers as well as nerdy characters from television, such as Urkel, Monk, and Artie from Glee. The translator, Peggy Sastre, left in all these references, which is kind of formidable—it suggests that the French are really au courant on American pop culture.
Apparently, though, some things just cannot be translated. In the original, I said that parents are "more likely to stick to stores like JCPenney rather than venturing into Hot Topic." In the French version, that's rendered as "ils ont plus tendance à s'en remettre à C&A plutôt que d'aller s'aventurer chez American Apparel." JCPenney became C&A, and Hot Topic became American Apparel. I'm not sure what to draw from that, but as a lapsed European, let me assure you of one thing: The worst imaginings of a French translator are far nicer than the cold reality of American mall stores.
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Oh, that's right: This is a series about a guy named Ted Mosby trying to find the mother of his children. After several episodes given over to plots revolving around the other four characters, this week How I Met Your Mother returned to the story of Ted's love life. And you almost thought you missed it.
Shameful:
This episode was largely free of acute shamefulness, but suffered from a generalized dullness. To wit:
—The B-plot, in which Marshall discovers a letter enumerating the hopes and dreams of his younger self, was half-heartedly developed and funny only insofar as it afforded a peek at teenage Marshall, sporting a rat tail and overalls.
—The C-plot, in which Barney challenges himself to seduce a woman while wearing said overalls, felt similarly mailed-in—at least until its final moment, when Barney acquiesces to the advances of an elderly woman rather than admit defeat.
—The A-plot was your average Ted's-in-love, no-this-time-it's-serious storyline. If it was slightly less cloying than usual for having a clever conceit—Maggie Wilkes's fleetingly open window—it was typical of such plots in another respect: It wasn't that funny. As soon as Ted announced "I'm not going to screw this up," we knew that he would, and there were scant laughs to entertain us as we awaited the inevitable conclusion. (A few notable exceptions acknowledged below.) The A-plot also suffered from its nearly complete uninterest in establishing Maggie's character. She's the "ultimate girl next door," Marshall and Ted tell us, and is thus irresistible to men. We're left to take their word for it—the role of Maggie Wilkes was barely a speaking part.
Awesome:
—Marshall's Mad Libs: "Fart went to the fart to fart fartly." That is exactly how Vanilla Thunder would have filled out a Mad Lib.
—MAGGIE: Make Adjustments, Go Get It Energized. Nice recovery, T-Mos.
—Maggie's Isadora Duncan-caliber scarf.
—Snow.
—"Did you see the one over there of the corgis doing it people-style?"
Carter Bays, speaking to the Los Angeles Times on Monday, offered his latest explanation for the abrupt treatment of Barney and Robin, hinting that HIMYM is not done exploring the fallout of that relationship. He also promised "big shake-ups" in the second half of the season. Let's hope so—after yet another week where the laughs were few and far between, the series needs something to licky-boom-boom it back to life.
Previous Shame Indices: Episode 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
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Friday's draw for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa was half infomercial, half key party. First came the propaganda: a succession of performances centered on the message that South Africans are jovial types who wouldn't dare screw up soccer's grandest event. A video depicting elephants, lions, and ostriches kicking a soccer ball around the bush—the sub-Saharan equivalent of those Budweiser Clydesdale ads—was followed by a musical number in which service industry employees (janitors, hotel maids, train conductors, bartenders) smile broadly as they perform their various tourist-friendly tasks. (Prostitutes not included.) South African President Jacob Zuma also pushed the nothing-to-worry-about vibe, declaring that preparations for the continent's first World Cup "are on time" and have "gone according to plan." All that was missing was a meerkat singing "Hakuna Matata."
Sepp Blatter, president of soccer's international governing body FIFA, graced the proceedings in the traditional soccer potentate style, with a mix of continental paternalism and old-man skeeviness. FIFA is "trusting in South Africa," Blatter declared. "The World Cup coming to Africa, it is a love story," he told befeathered presenter Carol Manana, "and it's easy to fall in love in Africa when I see you." Manana curtsied politely.
With the Epcot World Showcase part out of the way, the business of the evening—plucking tiny soccer balls out of bowls as a means to divvy the 32 World Cup entrants into four-team groups—could begin. The United States benefited from the luck of the draw, landing in a group with England and relative lightweights Algeria and Slovenia. As the USA-England match was revealed, ex-national team defender Alexi Lalas could be heard yelling, "Yes! Yes! We've got the mother country, boys." While Lalas cleaned his musket and railed against the Stamp Act, FIFA secretary general Jérôme Valcke asked co-host Charlize Theron if she recalled America's famed upset of the English in 1950. The actress' response: "How old do you think I am?"
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In Jason Reitman's Up in the Air—released on
Friday—George Clooney's character strives for his ten millionth American
Airlines frequent flier mile. It's an accomplishment, he claims, achieved by
only six people, and it comes with serious perks—like a dedicated booking
agent. Is this for real?
Not quite. AA's elite-level rewards program is three-tiered:
Gold, Platinum, and Executive Platinum, which requires 25,000, 50,000, and
100,000 miles, respectively, flown within a calendar year. Each level offers
graduating benefits: Gold members enjoy complimentary upgrades; Platinum
members earn more bonus miles; and Executive Platinum members have perks like
guaranteed availability. (A chart of the various rewards offered is available here.)
AA also offers a dedicated booking agent for EP members—but not a "personal"
travel agent, like in Up in the Air.
But log enough airtime, and AA will reward you with a
lifetime membership that doesn't require any minimum yearly travel. One million
accumulated miles earns a lifetime Gold membership, and two million a Platinum.
AA won't disclose the number of lifetime Platinum members, but a rep assured me
that it's a "very, very exclusive" club. Reitman, the rep told me, used some poetic license with
the perks, as he did with the ‘ten million' number—there is no special mark
after two million.
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[Update, 5:16pm, Dec. 5th: This post originally stated, incorrectly, that less than 5 million miles were redeemed in 2008. Actually, less than 5 million awards were redeemed. We deleted the sentence.]
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Jonah Weiner: Jody, I don't think I ever told you about my ill-fated winter fling with Alicia Keys. The place was Copenhagen, the time was early 2008, and the occasion was a magazine profile. She was enchanting and sweet (she even offered me a pair of designer women's sunglasses she'd been sent as swag—unfortunately, not quite my style), and she gave me a candid interview. I repaid her kindness by printing her hastily phrased but ultimately reasonable quotes about the politicized (mis)uses of the phrase "gangsta rap," and, pairing these quotes with others about Keys' (also reasonable) fondness for Black Panther writings, I occasioned a P.R. shitstorm that almost cost her some fat endorsements and necessitated some official statement of clarification on her part. I don't think she ever claimed I'd taken her out of context—that old line!—but said simply that she'd misspoken, or that I'd misinterpreted, or both. It's one of my regrets that I helped open her up to ridiculous charges of "reverse racism," though I'm not sure what I really could have done differently.
Which is all to say that, whenever I hear a bittersweet Alicia Keys song, there's a little bit of poignant, unprocessed personal biography inflecting my response to it. And almost all her big songs are bittersweet. Since her 2001 debut, she's located her best music at the spot where a crush totters between schoolgirl-giddy and destructively all-consuming. Her last album included two weepy greats: the choked, deceptively dinky "No One," the Princely "Like You'll Never See Me Again." She's in a similar mode on the more muscular "Try Sleeping With a Broken Heart," the second single from her newest record. It was produced with the help of Jeff Bhasker—who co-produced on Kanye West's 808s and Heartbreak—and it pairs plush, cosmic-synth bedding with fat drums that tap a rock energy reminiscent of Rihanna's "Umbrella" and Leona Lewis's "Bleeding Love." Alicia, if you're reading Brow Beat today, I'm sorry about how it turned out, and I really like this one!
Jody Rosen: Wow, no, you never had told me that story before. What endorsements did Alicia lose, thanks to you? How much money do you owe her exactly? A couple mill?
My affection for Keys has grown as her career has progressed. Her debut album, for all of its obvious craft, was a pretty generic neosoul record, and Keys exuded that neosoul smugness: I am real musician who plays a real instrument, I have many Marvin Gaye albums in my collection, etc. She hasn't exactly loosened up over the years—she's a meticulous classicist and still one of the worst oversingers in pop. But her songs can be pretty undeniable. I adore "No One," a perfect junior-high prom ballad. "Try Sleeping With a Broken Heart" isn't quite as catchy, but I like the sweet turn the melody takes in the chorus, and the song conjures a kind of teenybopper melodrama that I'm a sucker for: "Have you ever tried sleeping with a broken heart?/ Well you could try sleeping in my bed."
The main pleasure here is sonic. I'm a big fan of the rock-inflected R & B sound that you rightly trace to "Umbrella" and "Bleeding Love." Ne-Yo and the Norwegian songwriting-production duo Stargate, the team behind Beyoncé's great "Irreplaceable," are also key figures in this movement—a shift from stark, rhythmic-centric hip-hop R & B to more Europeanized, harmonically-richer songs, full of drums and synths that clatter and boom. It's a big sound; for whatever reason, bombast is in. For me, the ne plus ultra example is Jordin Sparks' "Battlefield"—despite and because of a video in which Sparks sings while asphyxiating on cannon smoke.
Speaking of videos, what is up with the "Try Sleeping with a Broken Heart" clip? Did my eyes deceive me, or does Alicia Keys revive a dead puppy dog with a Christ-like laying-on-of-hands? Also: Keys' purple spandex onesie? Discuss.
J.W.: Oof, the video's pretty hokey! If I read all of its references correctly, she's a crack veterinarian via Jesus Christ via Neo from The Matrix, with a little Rogue from X-Men tossed in. Rogue is the mutant who can't touch people without sucking out their life force, and in a less charitable moment, I'd say this video sucks some of the life force out of the song. Or maybe it just runs, goofily, hand-in-hand with the melodrama. I do like the fact that Keys, a child of New York's Hell's Kitchen in the '80s, almost always situates her videos in the same sorts of places that rappers like Nas and Mobb Deep used to—outer-borough housing projects and similar locales figure often into her videography, and not in a bogus "Jenny from the Block"-type way. That said, Mobb Deep never had BMW motorcycles that shot lasers from their exhaust pipes. That's what that American Express plug at the top of the video helped pay for, presumably. Clearly I didn't cost her that many millions!
J.R.: You're right about Keys' downmarket tendencies—they're part of her charm. She can't quite decide what kind of a star she wants to be. Is she a bohemian neosoul chick, with incense burning on the windowsill and a bell hooks book on the nightstand? Or is she a competitor in the diva stakes, ready to jump into her Maybach mix it up with Beyoncé and Rihanna? By disposition she's the former; her success has made her the latter. So in the "Try Sleeping with a Broken Heart" video she sort of splits the difference: It starts with Keys in homegirl mode, ambling past brownstones, and ends with her drop-kicking kryptonite off of a rooftop in a superhero costume. (Or something like that.) The schizophrenia is endearing. In any case, nice song.
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A few weeks ago, the Shame Index declared Episode 7, "The Rough Patch," the worst of the season. The Index stands by this pronouncement. However, the good people over at the CBS Eyelab have taken that lemon of an episode and made it into an ice-cold glass of lemonade—by expertly mashing it up with the classic Frosty the Snowman animated Christmas special. Enjoy:
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In my Slate piece on the forgotten vaudeville great Eva Tanguay ("Vanishing Act: In search of Eva Tanguay, the first rock star"), I argue that "today's pop feels more than ever like one big reiteration of Tanguay's career," and that the divas who dominate the 2009 Billboard charts are Tanguay's spiritual heirs. But it had somehow escaped my attention, in several years of researching and obsessing over Tanguay, that the pre-pubescent Britney Spears had belted out the vaudevillian's career-making signature number "I Don't Care" in a talent show performance immortalized on VH-1's Behind the Music. (Big hat tip to Slate Culture Gabfest listener Chris Barker for bringing this to my attention.) Britney's brassy, big band-style "I Don't Care" is clearly less indebted to Tanguay herself than to Judy Garland's rendition in the 1949 MGM musical In the Good Old Summertime. Still, it's pleasant to contemplate the cosmic symmetry of our own millennial "I Don't Care Girl" blasting out Eva's proto-feminist anthem from 1904. And by the way, Britney sounds in better voice here than she has at anytime since.
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The Blind Side, the Sandra Bullock vehicle about a white society woman who shepherds a wayward young black man to professional football glory, took many in the film industry by surprise over the weekend by nearly surpassing New Moon at the box office. The film made more than $40 million this past weekend, and ticket sales were up by 18 percent compared with its opening—the first time all year that a film in wide release grossed more during its second weekend than its first. That uptick certainly wasn't the product of critical support. The film scored a middling 53 (out of 100) at Metacritic, and Slate's Josh Levin wrote that "The Blind Side plays like filmmaking by focus group, a movie that aims to please and ends up condescending to its audience." So why is The Blind Side so popular? Brow Beat has a few theories.
1) People like Sandra Bullock.
This would seem obvious, but Bullock hasn't really gotten her due. She's not the nation's favorite or most bankable star, but she's not far off, either. As recently as 2008 she was ranked among America's 10 favorite movie stars by Harris Interactive (a list still clogged by John Wayne), and her films have grossed more than $50 million on average. Fifteen years after her breakout performance in Speed and at the age of 45, she's still in her prime—playing romantic leads opposite actors 12 years her junior. She's more approachable than Julia Roberts, more down-to-earth than Angelina Jolie, and isn't above getting low to Lil Jon.
2) The movie appeals to middle America.
While blockbusters usually achieve the best take in big cities like Los Angeles and New York, the Los Angeles Times reports that The Blind Side's highest-grossing theaters last weekend were located in Dallas; Birmingham, Ala. and Nashville, Tenn. Maybe that's because there's a political aspect to the film's appeal. The Blind Side is an embodiment of compassionate conservatism. A young man is failed by the (welfare) system, then saved through private initiative, elective charity, personal outrage, and old-school benefaction.
3) Sports movie + Inspirational Social Drama = perfect date movie.
Men who follow sports (read: most men) know something of the true story behind The Blind Side, either because they read Michael Lewis' bestselling book of the same name, or because they've seen the real Michael Oher play football on TV. Women might therefore have had an easier time than usual dragging their boyfriends to see an Erin Brockovich-style fight for what's right.
4) It's not New Moon.
When Hollywood studios chart out the release schedules for their films, they're very aware of what the competition is planning for any given week. Considering the success of 2008's Twilight, and the major marketing push behind this year's sequel, rival studios were understandably wary of letting films go head-to-head with New Moon. (This maneuvering often makes box office grosses something of a fait accompli.) But what about the filmgoer who's already seen New Moon or who's had enough of teenaged vampires? Pickings were slim at the multiplex this past weekend. Faced with a choice between The Blind Side and a mugging John Travolta in Old Dogs, I'd have gone with the Sandra Bullock vehicle, too.
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On the occasion of the eighth Victoria's Secret Fashion Show, airing tonight on CBS, let us turn our attention to a document titled "Christmas Dreams & Fantasies 2009, Vol. 2," the most recent V.S. catalog to clog my family's mailbox. It advertises bedroom get-ups and underthings—including a dubious breed of panties called the "one-size-fits-all thong"—available in holiday pink, sparkle pink, dazzle pink, cozy pink, cosmo pink, pink tulip, pink punch, pink sapphire, purple pizazz, raspberry, sour cherry, berrylicious, red chili, cilantro, and even blue.
Near as I can tell, our most recent critical guides to this fantasyland appeared in academic journals in the fall of 1996. In the Journal of Popular Culture, Nancy V. Workman ventured that a Miracle Bra is the modern equivalent of a corset, enclosing women "in rigid positions of cultural enslavement." If you know the first thing about second-wave feminism, then you know the hammer drill. Meanwhile, Social Text gave its fan base the more satisfying "A Pornographic Feminity? Telling and Selling Victoria's (Dirty) Secrets" where Jane Juffer supposed that "the catalogs appeal to working, independent women who return to the home but cannot be fixed there, and who desire a home where their needs and pleasures are fulfilled." A cottage in the Cotswolds, apparently. The catalogs of the mid-‘90s strove to class themselves up by leaning on Ye Olde Respectability, offering "pyjamas" and such.
By contrast, the cover girl of "Christmas Dreams & Fantasies 2009, Vol. 2" sets the tone by appearing in a robe and bra of a shade I'd call sultry vermilion. As is common in these contexts, she parts her lips just wide enough to accommodate a delicate bonbon. More distinctive are the Veronica Lake wave in her hair and the pillow-strewn, pizazz-crimson set—an MGM idea of a royal bedchamber in folkloric Persia. Inside the catalog, one piece of ad copy booms, "Hollywood bombshell!" while another murmurs, "One gift-a thousand fantasies." This silver-screen Scheherazade is telling a story about stardom and exoticism. Is the bra the gift? Is she? Or does she imagine herself as one of the winged models of an ongoing marketing theme, an angel fallen only as far as the Christmas tree stand? If the Fashion Show is any indication, then you should press Option 3. The promos feature women who, scantily clad though they are, are not highly sexualized. Moving like exquisitely engineered automatons and strapped into theatrical costumes—custom plexiglass is not lingerie—they are less alluring than strange: Glamour Girls from Planet Opulence.
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Tiger Woods is being called a sext-happy philanderer by the National Enquirer, is getting hounded by the Florida Highway Patrol, and is facing the possibility that his wife could go to jail for domestic abuse. On the plus side, Woods made the cover of the upcoming issue of Golf Digest. The cover line: "10 Tips Obama Can Take From Tiger." The inside of the magazine features a slightly unfortunate pullquote: "For everyone's sake, Woods should encourage Obama to shield his game from the public." Uh, that's his golf game.
Full disclosure: Back in October, I compared Obama's Nobel Peace Prize to Woods' 1996 Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year award. While I stand by that comparison, Woods' behavior this week—clamming up, dodging the cops, and pulling a no show at his own golf tournament—hasn't quite been presidential. Nevertheless, Golf Digest, which depicts Woods as the president's caddy, argues that Obama might learn from the golfer's mastery of "the quick recovery." Tiger is "a good role model," David Owen explains, "because he has always been able to pull himself together after setbacks." Woods also comes in for praise due to his agility with the press. (An illustrative quote from the cagey star: "My dad taught me that when I'm asked a question, I have control of the answer.") And Joe Queenan argues that Obama could benefit most from a Woods-like agility with image control. "Tiger never does anything that would make him look ridiculous," he writes.
Bret Hopman, Golf Digest's publicist, explains that the magazine went to press well before Woods' Nov. 27 car crash. Hopman emphasizes that the issue focuses on how the Obama administration should embrace golf due to the game's positive impact on the economy. There's also a complementary list of 10 things Woods can learn from Obama. "It's about two great leaders in their fields, both with their strengths and both obviously have their shortcomings," Hopman says.
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