View From the Phlipside - Oscars and censorship

My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media. TV, radio, the movies and more. I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion. Call this the View from the Phlipside.

Well Sunday night was Oscar night, the big night  

for the big awards when it comes to the movie world. If you were surprised by any of the winners of the top awards you probably weren't paying attention. It was pretty much a night for the favorites with The King's Speech coming away as the big winner. Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. I'll be circling back to it in just a moment.

I know there's a small dedicated band of folks who are grossly disappointed that Inception didn't win some big awards maybe especially Best Picture. I saw Inception and liked it a lot but it won where it should have won in the effects categories. There was a little controversy prior to Melissa Leo's win for her self promotion in some of the trade journals for the award but hey I give her extra points for being honest. You hear a lot of actors say they don't care about the awards. That probably means you hear a lot of actors lying through their teeth. I don't think there's a single award this year that you can point to and say it was a gross miscarriage by the Academy.

Now to circle back to The King's Speech. I just heard that a PG-13 version of the movie has been prepared. They do this primarily by eliminating one scene where Colin Firth's character goes on an obscenity laden tirade as part of the therapy for the future king. The scene is shocking only at first then becomes poignant and finally quite funny. But it involves the repeated use of what we now call the F-Bomb. There's a whole industry out there dedicated to "cleaning up" movies for those with apparently delicate sensibilities. And it makes me crazy.

There is gratuitous use of obscene language. For me it has always been the comparison between Richard Pryor's stand up comedy and Eddie Murphy's early work. Pryor used it for a purpose, Murphy just used because it was shocking. The language in The King's Speech is for a purpose. It shows the necessary breaking down of barriers for Firth's character to overcome his disability. When you take it out you screw up the story. All for those people who simply can't deal with the raw-er side of real life. If a few carefully chosen words that are an integral part of a great story are just too much for you then you probably shouldn't get out of bed in the morning.

But do me a favor. Don't screw up a perfectly wonderful movie because of it.

Call that the View From the Phlipside.

"The View From the Phlipside" airs on WRFA-LP Jamestown NY.  You can listen to WRFA online HERE
Copyright - Jay Phillippi 2011

View From the Phlipside - 2011 Movies

Somehow I managed to trash the script for this program.  No idea, these things just seem to happen to me.  So instead here's the audio of the program as it aired on WRFA-LP Jamestown

"The View From the Phlipside" airs on WRFA-LP Jamestown NY.  You can listen to WRFA online HERE
Copyright - Jay Phillippi 2011

View From the Phlipside - Xoom Stupid

My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media.  TV, radio, the movies and more.  I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion.  Call this the View from the Phlipside.
Call this my just being fair commentary.  You see I rag on Apple for this particular failing so it's only fair that I point out when someone else is doing it too.

In this case it is the impulse on the part of a technology company to decide before hand about how I'm going to use their product.  I'm not talking about normal limitations, every technology has boundaries.  Cars are great but they don't fly and they don't act like boats.  This is more in line with say an auto maker deciding that it felt driving in the early morning hours wasn't in your best interest so they designed the car so it wouldn't start between the hours of midnight and 6 AM.  It's a stupid, pointless intervention into how the end user can use the product.  It's a technological "nanny state".  Apple has done it by deciding that despite the fact that Java is a huge part of the way the web works they won't let it run on their products.  It's stupid.

But the folks at Motorola may have finally surpassed Apple for this kind of corporate arrogance.  Their new tablet computer the XOOM was featured in some

Motorola Xoom

Super Bowl advertising.  Tablet computers are the hot item right now and once again everyone is looking up at Apple.  The iPad currently commands something around 80% or more of the market.  The Xoom will apparently debut at the high end of the price range for this market which doesn't strike me as the brightest move of all time.  But it's the fine print that is truly outrageous.  In order to activate the WiFi on your new Xoom you will be required to buy a minimum of one month's data plan from Verizon.  FOR YOUR WIFI.

WiFi, which doesn't even use the Verizon network.  WiFi, which connects your some other service for your internet connection without ever even sniffing Verizon.

Assuming that they'd sell you a Xoom without the WiFi activation, which I doubt, you'd end up with a tablet computer that was incapable of connecting you to the web.  In this day and age we're talking about an almost totally useless device.  All so they can squeeze and extra $30 out of you for a function that should be considered base equipment.  It's unbelievable and it's likely going to cripple sales of the device.

Going back to our car analogy let's just say I'd rather walk.

Call that the View From the Phlipside.

"The View From the Phlipside" airs on WRFA-LP Jamestown NY.  You can listen to WRFA online HERE
Copyright - Jay Phillippi 2011

View From the Phlipside - Bieber fans go Kanye

My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media.  TV, radio, the movies and more.  I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion.  Call this the View from the Phlipside.

About a year and a half ago we saw something happen in the music world and you figured it was just so out there that you'd never see anything like it again.  When Kanye West jumped up on stage to make an idiot out of himself and ruin a great night for Taylor Swift you had to believe that he had set a whole new standard for low brow foolishness.

Never underestimate the power the stupid.  Justin Bieber's fans seem to have found a whole new bottom on that page.

It began with the Grammys just over a week ago when the Canadian teen heart throb lost the "Best New Artist" award to little known, but highly regarded Jazz artist Esperanza Spaulding.  The win was a complete and utter surprise.  It would be like my beloved Pittsburgh Pirates winning this year's World Series.  But it's not as if she were a total nobody (like my Pirates at the moment).  She's performed at the White House, was a child prodigy and at age 26 is a member of the faculty at the prestigious Berklee College of Music.  Bieber was clearly surprised and disappointed by the loss.  His fans promptly lost their minds.

Spaulding's web page was hacked and all kinds of statements were inserted. 

The nicest was that she had somehow "stolen" the award from Justin.  The worst were of the sort that say things like "Go Die in a hole".  This is par for the Bieber fanatic course.  This month when photos circulated showing Justin with Kim Kardashian she promptly began receiving death threats.  Death threats!  Just because she had talked and had her picture taken with him.

So a quick reality check for those with a case of BieberFever.  Get a grip.  There are upset winners every decade or so in this category.  You are aware of course that the only person more surprised than Justin that night was Esperanza Spaulding, right?  She stole the award?  Why not talk to the people who vote for it?  And last but certainly NOT least please remember that this is the least important Grammy of an artist's career.  Yes, the Beatles, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Bette Midler and Mariah Carey all won this award.  So did the Starland Vocal Band, Milli Vanilli and Amy Winehouse (who beat out Taylor Swift by the way).

There's nothing wrong with just being insanely popular.  There is something wrong with being insanely stupid.

Call that the View From the Phlipside.

"The View From the Phlipside" airs on WRFA-LP Jamestown NY.  You can listen to WRFA online HERE
Copyright - Jay Phillippi 2011

A Driving Rant

Coming home from meetings in Buffalo today and had one of my favorite pieces of stupid driving take place.

Here's the scenario:

I'm in the right hand lane, usually doing a couple MPH over the speed limit.  Another car comes up in the fast lane and passes me.  There is no other traffic in our vicinity.  Clear in front of me for about 1/4 of a mile and nothing in his lane as far as the eye can see in front or to his rear.

He then pulls into my lane about two car lengths in front of me!

Why?!?!?!?!

This is an incredibly unsafe pass.  A small problem with his car, or an animal running into the lane or (a recent likelihood) something blows into the road and we can be looking at MAJOR problems.  If he needs to brake suddenly in front of me I'm parked in his back seat.

AND THERE'S NO REASON TO CHANGE LANES THAT QUICKLY!

He has all the room in the world to move safely into my lane.  This isn't racing as much as some morons out on the Interstates seem to think it is.

Unless I HAVE to move over more quickly I wait (as I was taught) till I'm 6-10 car lengths clear of the car I'm passing.  The easy thumbnail is to wait until the entire front of the car you're passing is easily visible in your rear view mirror from your normal driving position.  30 years later my daughter was taught the exact same thing by her driving instructor (not me).

Travelling down the road in vehicles that weigh 2 tons or more at 60 or 70 miles an hour (or more for those of you in some kind of stupid hurry) is a dangerous activity.  Insisting on driving in an overly aggressive manner is just a sure way to end up dead.

I would kindly ask that you do that somewhere that won't result in your taking me with you.

You moron.

Peace

View From the Phlipside - Radio's Back?!?

My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media.  TV, radio, the movies and more.  I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion.  Call this the View from the Phlipside.
I've got to be honest with you.  I was not sure that I'd ever write another commentary about radio unless it was another death of radio stories just like the ones I keep seem to be writing about print media.  The oldest of all electronic media keeps shrugging off the death notices however.

Radio was the dominant cutting edge media from the 1920s through the 1950s.  When TV came along that was supposed to be it for radio.  Instead it reinvented itself as THE music delivery system resulting in a whole bunch of us growing up with transistor radios stuck to the side of our heads.  When portable forms of music came along like cassettes and CDs followed by digital music players it looked like the string had run out on radio once again.  So explain to me why some of the most cynical, cut throat folks out there are suddenly on the radio band wagon again?

The folks I'm talking about are the advertising buyers, the agencies and corporate advertising buyers.  With the economy looking up again some more money is flowing back into the media.  You would expect that this would be the time when we would see the big move into the new media and the final stroke for the old.  Yet a recent survey by STRATA Marketing shows that while TV is still king and digital is firmly in the #2 slot Radio holds a comfortable lead in third place over fourth slot holder Print.  Not only that but the number of buyers who reported being more focused on radio than a year ago stands at an amazing 24%.  Equally impressive is that radio is only 5% behind digital in the category of most focused while it is a full 9 points ahead of print.  That's right it's closer to second place than it is to fourth.

So the question is why?  And the honest answer is no one has any idea.  Traditional media is doing better than it has the last couple years.  Even print at its perilously low rates is better than it's been recently.  So there may be a certain familiarity factor working here.  I think there might be another thing working for radio and that is that it translates to the digital world much more easily than Print or even TV.  Basically you can just stream EXACTLY what you've been doing for decades.  Radio doesn't have to change much at all.  TV can require a lot more bandwidth while print needs to learn a bunch of new tricks.

Radio just needs to do what it does best.  Same as it ever was, same as it ever was.

Call that the View From the Phlipside.

"The View From the Phlipside" airs on WRFA-LP Jamestown NY.  You can listen to WRFA online HERE
Copyright - Jay Phillippi 2011

My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media.  TV, radio, the movies and more.  I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion.  Call this the View from the Phlipside.

3 Movies and 7 books

The King's Speech  - (2010) Quite simply this is the best movie I've seen in a very long time.  Fabulous script, incredible acting, wonderful story.  THIS is what movies are supposed to be about.  This is the story of a man who was never supposed to be king and never wanted to be king.  Albert was raised in a fairly nasty family that took great pleasure in mocking his speech impediment, a stutter.  When his older brother David (King Edward VIII) abdicates his throne for the love of an American divorcee who is loathed by his family and advisors Albert becomes the king.  He knows he must conquer the stutter and ends up in the hands of a decidedly unorthodox and irreverent speech therapist.  It's funny and poignant.  I can't tell you how much I enjoyed this movie.  The swearing scene (you'll know it when you see it) is one of the funniest things I've seen in years.  Yes, it is FILLED with obscenities (to be perfectly honest there's basically not any clean language in the entire section) but it pushes past the whole "dirty words" issue and becomes fall down on the floor laughing funny.  I know a little bit about the history of the story and got a couple new insights into it all.  There haven't been many (any?) sympathetic looks at Wallis Simpson but this may be the most unsympathetic of them all.  Colin Firth is great as Bertie, Geoffrey Rush is amazing as the Logue the therapist, Helena Bonham Carter plays Bertie's wife Elizabeth (one of three Harry Potter alums in the movie along with Michael Gambon as King George V and Timothy Spall as Winston Churchill).  A definite front runner for Best Movie I think.  Go see this movie!

DreamGirls (2006)  I expected to like this movie but not as much as I did.  Based loosely on the story of Diana Ross and the Supremes it is a story of the Black music industry of the '60s and '70s.  The cast is stellar with Beyonce Knowles (who needs anyone else after that?), Jamie Foxx, Eddie Murphy, Danny Glover, and Jennifer Hudson in the role that launched her.  The music is incredible, the story is engaging, the acting is outstanding.  The movie was a Broadway musical hit first and some of the numbers remain very Broadway stagy but that's pretty much the worst thing I can say about it.  The rest of the movie is wonderful.  Enjoyed it a lot!


The Men Who Stare at Goats  (2009)  In looking at some of the reaction to this movie I see a lot of folks trying to draw a connection to "The Big Lebowski" which also starred Jeff Bridges as a counterculture shaman.  There really is NO connection at all.  Based VERY loosely on some real life experiments done by our military back in the '60s and '70s it tells the story of an Army unit that worked on psychic powers as for intelligence purposes.  Now straight up that might be moderately interesting.  You could certainly play it for laughs too and that might be moderately interesting.  Instead it's presented as satire, played without so much as a wink at the audience.  These guys BELIEVE in what they're doing despite the obvious absurdity and repeated failures.  Great cast - George Clooney, Bridges, Ewen McGregor, Kevin Spacey, Stephen Root,  and Robert Patrick lead the way through a story that is madness itself to everyone except those in the middle of it.  This is a funny movie in its own slightly warped manner.  It may contain the only funny IED moment in movie history.  In the end I'm not sure the story "goes" anywhere so the ending left me feeling a little unsatisfied.  But at just over 90 minutes long it's a quick, funny journey into the madness of male bonding, war and the institutional military.  Well worth your time.


The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis - A Hugo AND Nebula award winner this is just one of many award winners for the author.  And somehow I had never heard of her prior to reading her book "Black Out" (which I reviewed earlier).  The story involves the same general group as that other book, a group of historians in the very near future (2048) who travel back through time to do their research.  In this one a graduate student gets caught in the Middle Ages at the time the Plague arrives in England.  I've enjoyed both books with one small complaint.  Her characters tend to dither a bit when things go wrong.  But then these are historians who clearly start from the position that they've got the process under control.  When confronted with the truth that things go badly rather quickly they react like academics rather than story book heroes.  So they're realistic.  I just want to slap them sometimes.  Willis has won 10 Hugos and 6 Nebulas and has been inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame so she's the real deal.  Enjoyed the book a great deal and I'm looking forward to reading more.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles (a Poirot mystery) and  The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie  Haven't read a lot of the Grand Dame of mystery but enjoyed both of these.  Secret Adversary introduces two minor characters for Christie, Tommy and Tuppence, who appear in a couple more books.  The Mysterious Affair at Styles of course is one of her great characters the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot.  Both very English in tone and both a lot of fun.

Death at the Excelsior (And Other Stories) by P.G. Wodehouse  Don't think I've ever read any of Wodehouse before although I think I listened to an audiobook of one of the Bertie Wooster and Jeeves books a couple years ago.  This is a collection of short stories by the English humor author that include some mystery stories along with other lighter stuff.  Lots of fun and a quick read.

Soul Identity  and Soul Intent by Dennis Batchelder    One of the very first current books I got for my NookColor was Soul Identity.  It was free and looked interesting.  It was all of that and more.  The story revolves around the idea that "soul identities" pass down through the human race.  Not reincarnation but a shared soul that is separate from our personality.  It is charted by the lines in the iris of the eye.  Soul Identity is also the organization that is the caretaker for items passed along from one bearer of an individual soul identity to the next.  No matter how long it takes for that soul to be identified.  Put this in the same category with Dan Brown's stuff but without the dubious history and bad theology.  Batchelder apparently couldn't find an agent to touch his novel so he self published.  I'm astounded they all passed but it's quite good.  The second novel in the series isn't quite as good because it's much less about the concept of soul identities and more about a hunt for Nazi gold.  Still good though.  I recommend them both.

Septimus Heap, Book One : Magyk by Angie Sage  Also one of the first current books for the NookColor.  This is the first of 5 novels in a series about a young magician.  Very much a Harry Potter kind of read but in a completely different world.  Like Harry Potter they read very well for both young and adult readers I'd think.  The writing is very readable and the story perks right along.  Septimus is the seventh son of a seventh son but gets lost by his family.  His adventures end up with lots of people in places they never expected to be.   I really enjoyed this one too and will be looking for the following novels as well.  Word is that the movie rights have been purchased and I would expect that once the Harry Potter series is done with we will see these hit the screen.  I'd think they'd do well.

 That's enough for now.