Movie Review - Mars Attacks

Mars Attacks (1996) - So let's see, Tim Burton directs, the cast includes Jack Nicholson, Pierce Brosnan, Sarah Jessica Parker, Glenn Close, Annette Benning, Danny DeVito, Martin Short, Michael J. Fox, Jim Brown (the NFL great), Rod Steiger, Natalie Portman, Tom Jones (the great Welsh singer) and Pam Grier.  It is a parody of '50s Science Fiction movies which means it has a RICH vein to mine.

So why does this movie suck?

And trust me, it sucks.  Ponderous, self conscious, unfunny, and totally missing the feeling of the movies it was trying to parody.  The idea is to twist the bad acting, writing and directing of the originals to create a quirky new look.  Instead we get a movie with bad acting, bad writing and bad directing.  There is NOTHING redeeming about this turkey.  Honestly.  Nothing.

The story is pretty much what you'd expect.  First contact with an alien race (Martians) results in the peaceniks vs the war mongers arguing over how to greet them.  When we finally do meet them the Martians immediately begin killing every Earth man, woman and child they see (all while laughing maniacally).  Eventually we discover that we can kill them with Country yodeling   Yes, I just gave away the ending.  You can thank me later.

Some movies are so good you can't take you eyes off them.  Then there are the train wrecks like this one.

Rating - * Don't Bother

The New You, Winter Storm Names and Facebook Study Madness

 "The View From the Phlipside" is a media commentary program airing on WRFA-LP, Jamestown NY.  It can be heard Tuesday through Friday just after 8 AM and 5 PM.  The following are scripts which may not exactly match the aired version of the program.  Mostly because the host may suddenly choose to add or subtract words at a moments notice.  WRFA-LP is not responsible for any such silliness or the opinions expressed.  You can listen to a live stream of WRFA or find a podcast of this program at wrfalp.com.  Copyright 2012 by Jay Phillippi.  All Rights Reserved.  You like what you see?  Drop me a line and we can talk.

Program scripts from week of October 15, 2012



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. 

 The New You                                                                                                          

I have talked here before about the ridiculous and antiquated system of demographics used by many media and advertising folks.  The times when we’ve talked about the classic 25-54 age group as a family reunion rather than a rational group for analyzing media use.  Or pretty much anything else for that matter.

So I was interested when I saw that NBC News Digital is trying to do something about it.  The problem of course is that while it’s easy to point out that demographic emperor is in his birthday suit what are you supposed to do in its place?  It may be bad but it’s better than nothing.  Well maybe not any more.  The folks at the Digital News Peacock are approaching the audience based on how they access the news.  I love simple concepts.  Their research says that news consumers come in four flavors.  The “Always Ons” who are constantly plugged in, the “Reporters” you know these guys, they’re the ones who are constantly saying “Hey, did you hear?”.  Then we have the “Skimmers” which is self explanatory I think and finally the “Veterans” who rely on traditional media for their news.  Otherwise known as “Old People”.

It’s a simple system designed to replace what had originally been intended as a temporary measuring stick back in the ‘60s.

The reality is that this is probably just a stopping off place as we begin to try and figure out how to measure the audience in our new media environment.  It would be great if we knew that this was a mature, stable media consuming environment.  Any even cursory examination of the last decade shows that it’s just not true.  By the early 1960’s TV had settled into a stable  system that was going to be around for a while.  The digital media environment doesn’t stay the same for more than a year or two at this point.  So figuring out how users will interact with that media is going to be just as fluid a situation.

At the same time I have to admit that it is nice to be viewed as a person based on what I do in my life rather than just being a number in an age group.  I mean have you seen some of the things people my age do?

Winter Storm Names                                                                                              

Do the following names mean anything to you?  Ike, Andrew, Irene, Agnes and Katrina.  That last one will probably tip you to what we’re talking about.  Those are the names given to some of the most destructive hurricanes to ever hit the United States.  Most of us are so accustomed to having storms named that we may not realize that it’s a relatively new tradition.  The devastating category four hurricane that hammered Galveston Texas in 1900, a storm that remains to this day the deadliest natural disaster in our nation’s history, is known simply as the the Galveston Hurricane of 1900.  It was in 1953 that the National Weather Service began naming them with women’s names in alphabetical order.  Men’s names were added in 1978.

The names exist for two reasons.  First to help track the storms easily in the records and to help folks in the world have a handle on the storms as they approach.  It’s a distinctive if every so slightly silly practice.

But now the Weather Channel has announced that it will begin naming winter storms.  And with that we may have slipped into major silliness.  Why the Weather Channel?  Well because while there is a National Hurricane Center there isn’t one for winter storms.

The problem I see is that there is a very simple formula for naming Hurricanes.  Once they reach sustained wind speeds 39 miles an hour they are declared a tropical storm and given a name.  When they hit 74 miles an hour they’re a hurricane.  Easy.

But The Weather Channel has laid out the most complicated standards to determine if a winter storm gets a name you can imagine.  First it can only happen three days before the storm hits a metropolitan area.  Then things like snowfall, wind and temperature will be factored in.  Finally the day of the week and the time the storm arrives will also have an effect.  So presumably a big storm that hits the Great Plains on a weekend day won’t get named.  I guess.  On top of that the list of names for the first storms are just silly.  Athena, Brutus, Caesar plus names like Rocky and Zeus.

As we well know around here winter storms are a pain in the butt.  They’re dangerous and unpredictable.  And naming them isn’t going to make that any easier at all.

There’s nothing silly about a blizzard.

Facebook Study Madness

There’s nothing quite as much fun as hearing the media lose its collective mind over the latest study on...whatever.  Somewhere along the line it seems like we have lost the gene that allows to take a step back and consider the issues with even the tiniest bit of rationality.

I have no doubt that we are going to spend a lot of time in the very near future listening to people lose their marbles over a new study that says Facebook makes you fat and rude.

Yeah, really.

The study is coming from folks at Columbia University and the University of Pittsburgh.  The basic concept is easy.  Facebook with it’s constant system of “Likes” and “Friends” raises the self image of users while decreasing their self control.  As a result they are more likely to get into arguments, more likely to be aggressive in their interaction with one another.  At the same time that impulsive reaction to life can lead to poor decisions in what Facebook users eat and even in how they spend their money.  Because of that the study indicates that Facebook users can be overweight, resort to binge eating and carry higher levels of debt.  Even more depressing is that the study said the effect can come after as little as five minutes of cruising Facebook.  FIVE MINUTES!

I can already hear every parent out there who is looking for some reason, ANY reason to limit the amount of time that their kids spend on Facebook.  It’s the mother lode!!!!

Except it’s really not.  You see there was another study from the University of Salford in England that showed using Facebook resulted in feelings of inferiority.  Looking at everything that is going on in their friends lives made them feel like they were failures.  

The reality is that both of these studies describe only portions of the reaction that many Facebook users have.  Most of us manage to hang out with our friends, share photos and even have discussions without losing our minds, gaining tons of weight or sinking deep into depression or credit card debt.

In other words we can use Facebook and still stay rational.

We ought to take the same attitude about the latest batch of studies.

Call that the View From the Phlipside

Movie Review - The Philadelphia Story

The Philadelphia Story (1940) It is such a joy to come across a movie that truly excellent in every aspect.  Great cast(Katherine Hepburn, James Stewart and Cary Grant plus a top notch supporting cast), great scrip(based on a Broadway script written especially for Hepburn), and director(George Cukor)  each bringing their tasks home with skill, a complete package.  AFI put this movie at #5 for Romantic Comedies.  It's all of that and more.

On the eve of her second marriage wealthy and beautiful Tracy (Hepburn) has questions about how she really feels when her ex-husband (Grant) returns bringing a tabloid reporter (Stewart) along for the ride.  In the end she's not the only one who will re-assess how they feel and what they want to do with their lives.

This is a sharp smart movie with some really wonderful performances not only by the three stars (I keep forgetting how good Cary Grant can be) but from the rest of the cast as well.  But mostly they just need to keep setting the big three up and then get out of the way.  Think of this movie as Middle America's mid-20th Century riff on Shakespeare's "Taming of the Shrew".  Like the Bard's Kate Tracy is headstrong and unaccustomed to suffering other people's shortcomings.  America's Kate is stylish and coolly remote as the resident "goddess" winding her way among all the men in her life.  Her philandering father delivers one of only awkward moment in the movie.  His "explanation" of why husbands cheat is appropriate in the context of the movie's time but just sounds foolish 70+ years later. The other moment is in the opening of the movie when Grant grabs Hepburn by the face and shoves her to the ground.  The female character doesn't seem to be injured nor particularly upset by the move but it feels uncomfortable in this day and age.  Meanwhile Tracy ends up with no less than three men who want to marry her.  In the end she finds a much more modern partnership than her Elizabethan counterpart manages.

The stories behind the movie are almost as much fun as the film itself. Shot in just 8 weeks the movie apparently required NO re-takes.  The opening scene is great especially when it dawns on you that there is NO dialogue!  Stewart would win an Oscar for the role even though he always said that Henry Fonda should have won that year for "Grapes of Wrath".  For Hepburn the movie was something of jump start for a career that had hit a string of flops (she was listed as "box office poison" by a group of theater owners).

In the end the movie is just spectacular.  I was prepared to like it but not prepared to be drawn in by it the way I was.  This should be required viewing by most modern movie directors.

Rating = ***** You Should Own It

Movie Review - Father of Invention

Father of Invention (2010) - Kevin Spacey is one of those actors that I will always watch.  So this one had to be added to my queue solely on the basis that he stars in it.  I don't remember seeing any publicity at the time and the title means nothing to me.
   Spacey plays an infomercial superstar Robert Axle who falls when one of his products, a combination ab exerciser/TV remote, ends up costing users a finger due to poor design.  He does eight years in prison and comes to discover that his family and his company have moved on without him.  He has to try and find his place in the world and in his family once again.

So in the end this is a classic redemption movie.  Or at least it tries.  There are some very good moments in "Father of Invention".  They center largely around Axle and his daughter (played by Camilla Belle).  That's where the heart of the story can be found.  Unfortunately writer/director Trent Cooper (he shares the writer credit with co-producer Jonathan D. Krane) didn't choose to focus on the heart and ends up with a scattershot approach to the story that just drains the movie of any energy at all.  Astoundingly in the mini-documentary on the making of the movie he has the audacity to claim that watching the movie reminds him of Billy Wilder.  I was just aghast.  Wilder's worst day was better than this.

Having said that this is not a terrible movie.  It's simply not a very good one.  Some very good ideas and a perfectly workable cast never get a chance to really get on a role.  The opening 15-20 minutes are probably the worst.  The script reaches for cliché after cliché.  Seriously, we have a man hating lesbian gym teacher character.  Worse yet she becomes Robert Axle's love interest.  I wish I were kidding.  Axle's wife(Virginia Madsen) is a caricature, and his daughter's roommates (the man hater Phoebe played by Heather Graham and cute, rather vapid Donna played by Anna Anissimova) have no important role to fulfill.  The movie is filled with characters who could have been interesting and important to the story but are never developed.  Meanwhile we don't get nearly enough between Spacey and Belle who have some pretty nice chemistry.

I watched this movie on the perfect day for it.  A chilly, rainy Saturday afternoon when I had nothing better to do.

Rating - *** Worth A Look (but only barely)

Trouble After Harry, Televised Politics and James Bond

 "The View From the Phlipside" is a media commentary program airing on WRFA-LP, Jamestown NY.  It can be heard Tuesday through Friday just after 8 AM and 5 PM.  The following are scripts which may not exactly match the aired version of the program.  Mostly because the host may suddenly choose to add or subtract words at a moments notice.  WRFA-LP is not responsible for any such silliness or the opinions expressed.  You can listen to a live stream of WRFA or find a podcast of this program at wrfalp.com.  Copyright 2012 by Jay Phillippi.  All Rights Reserved.  You like what you see?  Drop me a line and we can talk.

Program scripts from week of October 8, 2012



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. 

Trouble After Harry                                                                                             

When I first heard that J.K. Rowling had written a new book following the blockbuster success of her 7 book Harry Potter series I knew she was in trouble.  And I’m watching that prediction come true right now.

Her new book “Casual Vacancy” hit the bookshelves at the end of September.  Since then it has done very well on initial sales.  The Publishers Weekly best sellers list that was released last Thursday shows Rowling comfortably at the top of the list.  That doesn’t surprise me since I’d be willing to bet that the pre-order for the book was huge even with a $36 price tag.

Reviews for the book seem to be mixed.  The New York Times reviewer was not at all impressed but there are plenty of others who found it quite acceptable.  The general consensus seems to be that Rowling’s writing continues to be very good.  The topics are very different from Harry Potter.  It tells the story of a small English town where a well known local figure who also sits on the local governing council dies just before a very important vote on a divisive local issue.  The story includes a variety of unpleasant real life issues like rape and includes a fair dose of obscene language.

In other words this is an adult book.  

And that’s what is really bothering a lot of her fans.  The customer reviews at places like Amazon and Barnes & Noble are utterly, utterly predictable.  People who claimed that they knew perfectly well that “Casual Vacancy” wasn’t Harry Potter clearly show by their reviews that they were expecting more of the same.  It is the greatest trap that any artist can confront because it’s a trap based on the success of your previous work.  People fall in love with the characters and the created universe and have a terrible time separating that world from the author.  These people are the ones who are given a chance to read a sample chapter (which in this case would have shown just how different this book is from the seven that preceded it) but don’t and then complain because the book isn’t what they expected.  In the end there’s no way to satisfy these folk.

The reality is that only time will reveal whether or not Rowling has really been able to make the jump from the young adult.  For the time being people are reading her book and talking about it.  And that’s what you need to happen.

Televised Politics                                                                                               

The Presidential election always comes with two big media “events”.  I hope you could hear the air quotes when I said “events” because I think it’s time to dump both political conventions and the Presidential debates from the media.  They are enormous non-events in any real sense as far as I can tell.

As always let me be clear right up front.  I am deeply interested in politics.  I believe we need to be informed, that we need to know what our candidates stand for and what the parties are advocating.  I just think that the current media oriented versions of the debates and conventions are largely a waste of time.  As such I believe they are actively turning off a new generation of voters who find the whole thing an utter wast of time.

Political conventions were created in the 1830s when the Anti-Mason Party, the Democratic Party and the National Republican Party (not the GOP) all had them.  They’ve been televised since 1940.  The problem is that the very nature of conventions are committee meetings and long speeches.  In the age of 140 CHARACTER tweets I’m not sure how you make that work.  But week long talk fests are just not on in the digital age.

In large part the same problem arises when it comes to the debates.  Their history is even shorter.  You may remember being taught about the Lincoln-Douglas debates.  You were probably never taught the format.  Hour long speech, hour and a half long rebuttal and closed with a half hour response to the rebuttal.  That would be GREAT TV don’t you think?  Debates as we think of them are really creations of television and the first one was the Kennedy-Nixon debates of 1960.  The problem is that the current format requires short answers to complex questions.  I heard an interview with one of the prep teams for President Obama talking about working hard to get the President to stop making long substantive answers.  And you can bet that Governor Romney’s team was doing the same thing.

What we are left with are beauty pageants.  It’s all about surface and appearance.  Things like actual discussion of the issues with carefully thought out answers to the complex issues that face us today have no place in either pseudo event.  It’s actually the media at it’s most shallow.

So let’s do the right thing and just dump them both.

James Bond

So this past weekend marked the 50th anniversary of the James Bond movie franchise.  Like most media icons Bond inspires many opinions.  So I figured why not weigh in as well.

I became a Bond fan first from the books.  So it never hurts to remember that the original stories were written between 1953 and 1966.  A lot of the mindset of that time remains in even the latest versions of 007.

But for the movie versions there are four important pieces to being a great Bond movie.  You need great devices (courtesty of Q), you need beautiful women, you need a great theme song, and of course you need the right actor playing Bond.

Best gadget?  Easy.  We all want our own jet pack.  007 got his in “Thunderball” in 1965.  The only other contender would be any of the Bond cars.  But they’re beyond mere gadgets.

Best Bond girl?  Yes, the whole concept is pretty sexist.  But it’s part of the Bond legend.  Sadly far too many of the Bond Girls haven’t been worth remembering.  And there’s the whole personal taste thing.  So how about a top 3?  Michelle Yeoh in 1997’s “Tomorrow Never Dies” simply because she is the rare female who can kick butt right along with 007.  Hard for me to put Halle Berry in 2002’s “Die Another Day” in second place because, well, she’s Halle Berry.  But first place for me has to be Ursula Andress as Honeychile Rider and the original Bond Girl in 1962’s “Dr. No”.

For theme song (not the classic Bond theme but the song for each movie) I was astounded to see a survey that put Paul McCartney and Wings “Live and Let Die” at the top.  That’s silly.  It’s a fine little pop tune but it’s not BOND.  You want Bond theme song you want Shirley Bassey’s “Goldfinger”.  No contest.  I think Adele has a shot at creating that kind of sound for the new movie.

And as for who plays Bond, why is this still discussed?  It’s Sean Connery first and last.  Daniel Craig is second, Timothy Dalton third.  If you think that Roger Moore or Pierce Brosnan should be on the list don’t ever speak to me again.

The 22nd movie in the Bond franchise, “Skyfall”, opens November 9 in the United States.

Call that the View From the Phlipsid

Book Review - Goodbye Mr. Chips

Goodbye Mr. Chips by James Hilton (1934) When I realized how much I had enjoyed "Lost Horizon" I kept my eyes open for his other work.  This is one that I had heard about for years but never got around to reading.  So when I finally got a copy for my Nook Color my first surprise was learning that the book only runs about 40 pages!  A friend who taught at a private school at one point in his life said this book was pivotal in making the decision to do it.

This is a warm and charming look at an English Public school Brookfield (what we would think of as private schools) and a modestly talented instructor named Mr. Chipping.  His tenure at Brookfield runs from 1870 into the mid-1920s or so.  Chipping is nicknamed Mr. Chips and becomes a beloved fixture at the school.  It takes us through his brief but very happy marriage to a younger woman, his relationship with generation after generation of boys and his struggles with the changing world outside the school's grounds.

There is a certain sentimentality to this story, one that probably struck a very strong chord in the English readers when the story was first published in a magazine.  The years following Queen Victoria's death including two World Wars and the abdication of a King tore at the fabric of the English people's understanding of themselves.  Chips expresses that longing for the order of a different age even as he defies the social norm during the first World War by insisting on including the name of a former German instructor who died fighting for the Germans when the list of alumni who had died in the war was read.

You could easily come away feeling that this is a rather sad book.  At the same time it is a story of a man who learns to live with his own shortcomings, who found true unqualified love and who did what most of  us hope we will do in our lives, he made a difference.  He knows that no one may remember him just a few years after he dies but he continues to do what he is gifted to do for as long as he can.

In the end I found myself to be one more of Mr. Chip's "boys" who have been touched by his gentle charm.

Rating - **** Reccommended Read

Movie Review - Smokin' Aces

Smokin' Aces (2006) - Rated R -

OK, start by thinking Tarantino.  Think Grindhouse.  Then take away any sense of humor, any wit or any real style.  What you're left with is "Smokin' Aces".  It's violent, its obscenity laden, it's bloody in the extreme.  Add in, shall we call it, leisurely pacing and you end up with a movie that leaves you thinking about what might have been.  A good cast and an interesting concept just never mesh for anything interesting.

Buddy "Aces" Israel is a Las Vegas headliner with deep ties to the Mob who decides to become a snitch.  That results in a million dollar bounty on his head and heart.  The field of hit men and women who want to cash in on Israel grows quickly.  Meanwhile the FBI is trying to make sure that he stays alive to testify against the aging capo who had been Buddy's mentor.  Along the way bullets fly, the body count rolls up at a tremendous pace and secrets are suddenly revealed.  There is a cute kind of double twist at the end but it only leaves you wishing the rest of the movie was as clever as the twist.

I have a category of movies called "Spot the Stars".  This one is a surefire entrant.  Ray Liotta, Alex Rocco, Wayne Newton, Ben Affleck, Peter Berg, Andy Garcia, Alicia Keys, Chris Pine, Curtis Armstrong, Jason Bateman and Matthew Fox (the cast includes Nestor Carbonell and Kevin Durand who would appear with Fox on "Lost").  Taraji P. Henson who currently co-stars in "Person of Interest" plays Keys partner.

So an interesting concept and a fun cast.  Somehow Joe Carnahan who both wrote and directed the movie never seems to find the key to make it all happen.  There are a few interesting moments but not enough to really save the movie.  If you like lots of action and have a couple hours to waste go for it.

Rating - *** Worth A Look