Here and There

We can all use them, especially those of us who foolishly believed, however briefly, that Hillary Clinton would concede to logic:

Thx: Jenna

Though today is a good day, and I don’t totally feel like I need it:

I could do a search of my blog, and see if I’ve ever written my views about Fox “News.” (My views could be summed up by those two little punctuation marks around the word news.) But I feel it necessary to rearticulate them here. Now.

It’s a sham, to put it simply.

By an overwhelming margin, journalistic media these days are for-profit machines, driven in large part by advertising revenue. As readers/viewers drop, they develop schtick, be it condensed reporting, the introduction of opinion masquerading as news, or a newfound fascination with entertainment, allowing it to trump the first aim of responsible journalism: civic life.

Modern media have become this way, they’ve evolved in the face of so-called market pressures. They had to stay relevant in today’s cutthroat news industry.

But Fox is different. Fox was born well after The New York Times, The Washington Post, CBS, NBC, CNN. Fox was created, in part, with the mandate of countering what it perceived to be a liberal bias in the existing society and its media.

In other words, Fox founded itself on a lie. But it didn’t leave it at that. No, that wouldn’t generate a single Neilsen viewer.

What it did, instead, was to mold this lie in the most deceptive of dies. It claimed that it was “Fair and Balanced.”

Its aim was not simply to bring journalism back to some mystical center. No, it set out to pull a pretty balanced press (when taken as a cumulative total) and turn it into a right-wing message machine.

This is no more clearly evidenced than by contrasting Fox’s “coverage” (read: attempted destruction) of Bill Clinton with its “coverage” (read: unending praise) of George W. Bush.

It is because of this that I do my best never to link to Fox or Fox clips that happened to live on You Tube or some video-hosting site.

Why am I bringing this up now?

Two things. I watched a pretty hilarious and awesome segment on The Daily Show yesterday. John Oliver took Fox to task in a funny, yet striking, way:

Part One

Part Two

Good stuff. Then, this morning, I was treated to this segment-o-hate, courtesy Andrew Sullivan. (Again, I’m linking to Sullivan rather than Fox or You Tube because I’d rather not be responsible for even a single click toward their content.)

There’s so much more to say, but I think I’d rather go live my life. The weather is amazing here in San Francisco today.

He’s come out of the woodwork to dismiss Hillary Clinton’s trip to Bosnia in 1996.

First, I was throwing things at my Comcast DVR when it failed to record the new Saturday Night Live the other night and opted for a 1998 Chris Farley special instead. Then, I was disheartened to watch (clips of) Saturday Night Live’s former writer (and geeky/sexy librarian type-A hipster heartthrob) Tina Fey’s endorsement of HRC.

Aw crap, her character in 30 Rock endorsed Obama. Should I call it even and continue to geek out on her? Clearly she falls into Archetype 2: Elect a woman for woman’s sake. Ah Tina, shush. It would never work anyway.

Then come the reports of Hillary mocking the Obama campaign with her “celestial choir” comment. That’s a bit low, even for her “I’m the grounded one” message. To me, Clinton just ridiculed everyone who endorses Obama’s hopeful message.

And now comes Drudge’s reports of the Hillary campaign’s propagation of a picture of Obama with a headscarf. It is not uncommon for politicians to dress in the garb of locals when visiting abroad. However, apparently the emails from the Clinton camp contained a message that inferred that the reader should be outraged.

Oh, and there’s some Fox-News-ish rattling over Obama not being patriotic enough by not raising his hand to his heart over the pledge of allegiance. That’s the National Anthem morons, and why isn’t singing it patriotic enough?

Wait! There’s more. Want the lowest blow a Democrat can offer? Hillary is drawing parallels between Obama and Bush. I think it’s rather clear Obama’s foreign policy is nothing like Bush’s. Hillary is acting like a caged animal; She’s attacking anything she can.

Then, Howard Dean calls McCain out for potentially breaking a law he co-sponsored. There’s also that tizzie over at the NY Times over a possible affair eight years ago.

It occurred to me last night while watching the Oscars that Hollywood has really rallied together after the writer’s strike. It was inspiring to see a genuine camaraderie among everyone in a chosen profession and their art. It was a good year for movies, and I think that helped a lot. The Coen brothers, the number of international movie makers, the indie movie makers, and the indie rock artists who took the stage last night demonstrated a great deal to be inspired by.

After the glimpse of integrity that was the Oscars last night, I can’t help but feel let down by politics again. There was a good deal of shame being passed around like Hepatitus at Ashton Kutcher’s birthday party.

It’s a cluster-fuck everyone! Is it a good thing to get it all out of the way before we even embark on the general election? Or is it a brazen attempt by politicians and media to dirty their profession and get voters apathetic about politics again?

Heath Ledger found dead in a NYC apartment today. Early reports said that the apartment was owned by Mary-Kate Olsen, but that information appears to be false. I’m sure you’ve read about Ledger’s death 1,000 places by now. I just wanted to clarify the apartment thing.

From Wired News.

This is one of those things I could stare at for hours:

The one and only.

I have to agree with The Chronicle’s Jon Carroll here. It’s one thing to make up stories when your job is to entertain, as is David Sedaris’s. It’s another when you’re the leader of the free world.

Apparently, The New Republic has run a story “debunking” Sedaris’s yarns. Oh really? I never thought any of those 3,034,583 stories of his were fiction. Not a single detail.

From Crooks and Liars … Fox News gets it the way they want it, again.

I was in downtown San Francisco the other day when I came across this:

If you can’t tell, it’s a USPS mailbox. On the back of the box was the web address http://www.uspsjedimaster.com. I snapped a photo, but wasn’t able to look up the site until later.

I’m thinking Wednesday’s announcement has to be Star Wars stamps. Awesome. Either way, R2D2 mailboxes are good enough, too.

Three winners on a single episode of Jeopardy. Awesome.

I started meeting them last week. You know the types … “Oh, The Departed doesn’t deserve to win Best Picture because it’s a remake” is their motto. They’ll admit to having appreciated the movie, some more so than others, as with any movie. But they’re not willing to admit to its proper place in the upper echelon of American cinema, and only because this filmic production of the story wasn’t its first.

A few years ago, I was lucky enough to have seen Infernal Affairs (one of the most infernally titled translations ever) at the Asian Film Festival in San Francisco. It was a nice surprise. What sounded good enough to me (a movie about cops and gangsters) turned out to be somewhat of a thinker’s movie. Wait, let me take that back. It was a popcorn movie, to be sure, but one that also makes you think, keeps you on the edge of your seat, and has some kick-ass fight scenes.

I may have seen another movie or two at that year’s festival, but it was Infernal Affairs alone that stuck with me.

When the rumblings began that Scorsese was remaking a Hong Kong cops and gangsters movie, the thought occurred to me that the original could be Infernal Affairs. Then I heard Leonadro DiCaprio signed on and I was equal parts thrilled and repulsed. But I knew the story, and I knew Scorcese’s ability as a filmmaker to be equally capable of killing a decent plot or seeing it out to its natural end. I saw The Departed.

Like Scorcese, DiCaprio is not always on the mark, but when he is, it’s a good time. And I really can’t think of any actor who wasn’t just this side of superb in the movie. From Alec Baldwin to Mark Wahlberg to Kevin Corrigan to Matt Damon, the characters were caricatured enough, but not too much, to be both believable and entertaining.

Now, about the re-write. People have been revisiting works of art for centuries. Cover songs, rewritten novels, remade movies, they’re uniformly viewed as legitimate forms of art in their own right. I don’t think it’s fair to dismiss a song, book, movie, or whatever outright just because the performer/author/director isn’t the work’s first render. Certainly it’s more complex than that.

First, the original has to be good, but not exclusively. Second, and here’s where personal preference comes into play, the remaker chooses between staying “true” to the original and making it their own. Those are the extremes, and there’s plenty of room in the middle. Scorsese was in the middle. He ported the Hong Kong thriller to Boston, Americanizing the story just enough as to render it palatable to those who never saw the original.

I think it’s really easy to take a good story and fuck it up (the Star Wars prequel trilogy, anyone?). It’s also possible to take a bad story and make it good. The Departed took a solid foundation and built upon it. Making it American, and doing a seamless job of it, automatically translates it for thousands, possibly millions, who otherwise wouldn’t experience it.

And I’m not necessarily arguing that winning an Oscar for Best Picture automatically validates a movie. I would’ve written this post regardless of last night’s ceremony. It does add a gram of weight to the argument that The Departed, though a remake, gets a lot of things right.

Only in Hollywood …