This Is Not News

I was reading a few newspapers today with reviews of the new Bridge to Terebithia movie. The reviews appear to be overwhelmingly positive, but there is no way you are getting me within ten feet of that movie even if you’re armed with a cattle prod and an offer of free cheesesteaks for life.

Spoiler Warning

I still remember reading the book, I believe in the summer between fourth and fifth grade; I’m not sure if any teacher had specifically recommended it, or I’d just heard about it, but I went through it at a pretty good clip. Kids create their own imaginary kingdom, what’s not to like? My summer camp took a day trip to Sesame Place, the theme park/water park in the Philadelphia suburbs, and I figured after I got home I’d finish the thing off. So I’m happily moving through the charming adventures and then all of a sudden

WHAM!

Everything goes horribly wrong. I remember continung to read, all of a sudden needing to get to the end, because there was no way the book was possibly going to actually turn out to be such a bummer, right? I was just stunned – the reading became a strangely joyless experience. I think it may well have been the first time I read a book where the good guys don’t get a happy ending; the closest thing to a downer I can remember is Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, and even there the kid gets a new dog at the end of it to make him feel better.

(Side note: speaking of Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, Judy Blume is responsible for my other childhood book not-what-I-was-expecting story. When I was around 10, my mother picked up some Blume books at a garage sale, without checking which books she was buying. She knew my teachers had read Fourth Grade Nothing and Superfudge, so she figured Blume was a safe choice. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how I ended up reading Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.)

I was in quite a funk the rest of that day. So while it’s a fine book and I hope the movie is quite successful, there ain’t no way I’m gonna go poke harder at that memory and bring that back up. Some lessons I don’t feel the need to learn a second time.

Wow, this is neat news. Keith Olbermann has not only re-upped to keep doing his Countdown show at MSNBC, he’s going to be contributing essays to the NBC Nightly News and doing two prime time NBC specials a year.

I wonder if those essays for the network news will be along the lines of his Special Comments. I have to admit to a slight fear that the whole Special Comment thing has been watered down now that people are expecting it. This could very well be a silly concern on my part. But once they become something that you’re promoting for the next night’s show, there’s a certain sense of spontaneity that’s lost. Then again, Olbermann’s always said it takes him a while to get the words just right on those commentaries, and I gotta respect anyone who’s as passionate about words as he is.

The other thing that comes to my mind is that if this means we can look forward to more Chris Matthews/Olbermann tag teams on election coverage, I think someone’s head is going to a splode.

Over at his own blog, Not News contributor Earl Green has a post breaking down one of his video editing do it yourself experiments. Earl’s been doing TV editing and postproduction work for years now, but he recently managed to acquire some solid equipment for himself. It’s been a lot of fun for me to watch him try and take his game to new levels. I’ve always absorbed behind the scenes books and documentaries like a sponge, but I’ve never taken it to that next step and actually tried to do it, even as a lark. But I do find it amazing the way that technology can make things like video production and broadcasting a potentially living-room-based process. Then again, it’s also let me broadcast my own scribblings to the world, so I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised, eh?

The train stations these days are plastered with posters for Tyler Perry’s upcoming movie Daddy’s Little Girls. What I found interesting were the first two lines of the promo copy:

She needs a good man.

He wants a smart woman.

Now, maybe this is me overthinking things. Wouldn’t be the first time. But look at the verbs there. She needs a good man – so she must be somehow incomplete or deficient without one. But the guy can apparently do without a smart woman – he only wants one. Hey, for all I know, the copywriters just didn’t want to repeat verbs. But unintended meanings are still meanings, and there’s an interesting message here about the different expectations that men and women face – and the different expectations they place on themselves.

Having just refreshed the playlist on my non-iPod music player, which can not play any of the music I’ve bought from iTunes, I was happy to see Steve Jobs say he’d just as soon not have anything to do with the whole Digital Rights Management thing. It’ll be interesting to see if the music labels listen. Can’t say I’m holding my breath.

I know I’m only about the nine billionth guy to blog about this, but the synchronicity is worth it, so bear with me.

I was flipping through the Music Choice stations on my digital cable, and one of them was playing Sick of Myself by Matthew Sweet, from 100% Fun. I distinctly remember when I bought that album (the first time), because I’m pretty sure it was the last time I didn’t know that one of my favorite artists was working on a new project well in advance. I just went into the record store one night, and bam, there was a new Matthew Sweet CD. An unexpected gift. Well, one that I had to pay for, anyway. But it got me thinking a little bit about the release-date-knowing, web-site-reading, from-Amazon-preordering entertainment culture of today.

And then I did some blog surfing and discovered that Joss Whedon has announced that he won’t be working on the Wonder Woman movie after all – he just couldn’t come up with a direction that he and the studio both liked. Whedon announced this on the Whedonesque fan site, and the comments thread to his posting contained a lot of people upset, because they had built up their expectations and were really looking forward to a Whedon Wonder Woman movie. There are some folks who are finding a bright side, though – now Whedon has time to work on the other movie project he’s announced, a film called Goners. Whedon is still polishing the script to this movie, but it apparently has earned many devoted fans since it was first announced.

And the cycle begins anew.

I just went to the R.E.M. home page and discovered that earlier this week, Mike Mills joined dada on stage and sang “Dizz Knee Land” with them. Apparently he also helped re-enact the “I just flipped off President George” line.

On the one hand I’m sorry I missed it, but on the other hand, I do think that if I had been at a dada show and Mike Mills showed up, they’d be picking up little bits of Dave from the floor.

Between this and the Crowded House reunion, I’m working on the assumption that 2007 is gonna be one fine musical year. Don’t let me down, guys.

Earlier in the week, Pattie and I deleted several unwatched episodes of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip from our DVR. Once I stopped watching, I realized I had absolutely no desire to catch up. And I’m trying to figure out how this happened, given how promising everything seemed at the start.

One of the fundamental problems, and I may have written about this before, is that Sorkin is just not a very good plotter. He doesn’t seem to be interested in thinking through the consequences of anything that happens in his stories. The result is just an accumulation of things that don’t ring true, and because they don’t ring true, you don’t really care how they turn out. One of the more famous examples of this is probably Sorkin’s claim that he decided to give President Bartlet MS because he was working on a story where Bartlet needed to be sick in bed for a period, and so he figured, hey, why not give him MS. I’ve ranted about the problems of The American President ad infinitum. I think the best example of this, though, comes from Rob Reiner’s commentary on A Few Good Men. If you’ve seen the movie, you know that there’s a point at the end where Tom Cruise is cross-examining Jack Nicholson, and catches a very basic contradiction in Nicholson’s story. Reiner says that Sorkin hadn’t included this in the script – Reiner noticed the contradiction, and thought it would be something that Cruise should bring up. That’s the kind of not-seeing-how-things-fit-together that I think gets Sorkin into trouble.

I think this habit bothered me more on West Wing than it did on Sports Night because the stakes were lower on Sports Night, and the stories focused on the character intereactions a lot more. I thought Studio 60 would be the same, but instead Sorkin’s tried to use the show to discuss Big Issues, and it’s fallen flat. Plus the one major character arc that he was exploring while I was still watching the show was the romance between Matthew Perry’s and Sarah Paulson’s characters, and going back to Sports Night and the bizarre “dating plan,” it’s pretty clear to me that Sorkin has difficulties writing romances that I find believable or engaging.

Maybe I’ll check the show out again in a few weeks, but it’s definitely off my must-see radar. I guess that’s an easy way to clear the backlog.

I got the renewal notice for my Philadelphia Inquirer subscription. I don’t think I’m going to do it.

After the most recent round of layoffs at the Inquirer, it occurred to me to check how much of the paper’s content was being generated by the paper itself. In the front page “A” section, where the national/international news go, there are usually two or three stories by Inquirer staff writers on page 1. Inside, there might be one or two Inquirer-written sidebars. Everything else comes from the Associated Press, the New York Times, the Washington Post, or another news service. I don’t need the Inquirer for that – I can read it on the Web, or just buy my own copy of the Post from a newsstand. (I’d check into home delivery if I didn’t think Pattie would kill me.)

On the philly.com Web site, a lot of Inquirer and Daily News writers have blogs, chats and Q-and-A forums. And that’s great, but you know, analysis and opinion isn’t really the niche newspapers are suited to fill. I can get analysis and opinion from any number of blogs and web sites. Honest to god reporting, though, that takes resources and skill. It’s what I wanted to support by buying the Inquirer. But if they’re not going to give me any, why should I bother?

I opened up today’s edition of the Inquier, and there was no local analysis of the State of the Union speech. Nothing from Pennsylvania’s newly elected senator or the new representatives from the Philadelphia area. No discussion of how Pennsylvania’s new health care proposals might intersect with what Bush wants to do. Zip. What was there was recycles from the more-extensive coverage provided by the Post, the Times, or other outlets.

I don’t need to kill more trees to bring an out of date news aggregator to my doorstep once a day. And I don’t need to keep paying money for something I don’t want and that doesn’t give me what I’m paying for.

It’s hitting the Australian papers that what was previously thought to be a Neil Finn solo record is now going to be an official Crowded House project, with a 12-month world tour to go with it.

Word on the official frenz.com message board is that Mark Hart is involved with the project, and since I think he helped lift the material on Together, Alone to be the strongest album that Neil Finn’s ever been involved with, I gotta say I’m already waiting to buy my tickets.