Movie Review - Senna

Senna (2010) - This is for racing fans.  The documentary follows the racing career of the great Brazilian Formula One driver Ayrton Senna through his tragic death at Imola in 1994.  Senna put the world on notice  from the moment he slid down into the cockpit of an F1 machine.  Astoundingly fast, intensely competitive and brilliant in the rain Senna was beloved by fans (especially in his home country).  At the same time he was something of an anomaly in the racing world being overtly religious and unapologetic about it.  That faith led him to be far more direct and honest than is sometimes wise in the extremely political world of F1.  His rivalry and crashes with the great French driver Alain Prost added to the drama.  In the end result if Senna had a good car under him he could be virtually unbeatable.

Unfortunately in the final racing season of his life Senna did not have a good car.  In fact the argument could be made that no one did.  The previous season had seen the addition of many electronic driving aids that disturbed the competitive balance and removed some of the influence of the driver's skills from the race.  The resulting cars were skittish and hard to handle.  The San Marino Grand Prix was marred by a series of accidents.  Young Brazilian driver Rubens Barichello had a tremendous shunt during qualifying, rookie driver Roland Ratzenberger was killed later in qualifying and then at the start of the race proper there was a spectacular accident on the grid when Pedro Lamy drove right up the back of JJ Lehto when Lehto's car stalled.  Just 7 laps later Senna's Williams race car would fail to make the turn at the Tamburello curve and slam into a retaining wall.

The movie does a wonderful job of presenting all the sides of Ayrton Senna.  His brilliance, his humility, his ruthlessness, his spirituality.  Fans of Alain Prost may have reservations about the less than complimentary view of him.  Formula One is filled with strong personalities and lots of politics.  The movie itself makes great use of Senna family movies, in car footage and news coverage.

A split rating for this one.
Rating = **** Recommended (for the average viewer) ***** Gotta Own It (if you're a racing fan)

Newsweek, the Price of Immediacy, Tracking You

 "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 22, 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. 

 Newsweek Goes Digital                                                                                        

It really feels like I ought to be doing one of my RIP commentaries.  The ones I do when someone or something has passed away or closed up shop.  The passing of an icon, something like that.  But it’s not really that.  At least not yet.

Last week Tina Brown, a publishing icon in her own right and editor of Newsweek magazine, announced that effective later this year the news magazine would completely cease the printed version and go all in on a digital version.  It is the end of an era even though it’s not the end of the line.

This news is really no small thing.  Newsweek has been around for just shy of 80 years.  It never rose to the top of the pile constantly trailing “Time”.  At the same time it was the second largest weekly news magazine in the United States.  I remember getting a copy every week during my high school Current Affairs class to study.  It even got mentioned in a popular Paul Simon song.  Newsweek has probably felt the shift in paradigm of the print media as painfully as anyone.  How else do you explain the sale of the magazine by owner The Washington Post Company to 92 year old audio innovator Sidney Harmon in 2010 for a dollar.  You heard me right, one dollar.   Harman took on the magazine’s debts in the deal as well.

I’ve always felt that magazines were probably better positioned to make the move to digital better than newspapers.  The daily paper has to concern itself with the news plus the minutiae  of day to day life.  Magazines have the opportunity to range more widely, delve a little deeper and explore issues from more angles.  Consequently the opportunity that the new Newsweek, to be called Newsweek Global, has is to use all the tools of the new media world as it presents its case for continued existence.
Of course the problem is that magazines are pretty much by their nature long form and the digital world has been a bit more short form in its nature.  There are plenty of things that go well beyond Twitter’s 140 character limit.  Newsweek might be able to offer a winning package as Newsweek Global.  The highest hurdle may not be making the new digital world work but whether it can make enough money fast enough to deal with the legacy debt burden it brings with it.

This may not be RIP for Newsweek but it certainly feels like the patient is in need of some serious care.

The Price of Immediacy                                                                                             

One of the great innovations of the world wide web has also turned out to be one of the great pitfalls as well.  It’s immediacy, the fact that what you post to the world wide web is in fact world wide in just a split second.  Because there is so little processing time that immediacy has been a great assist to things like people’s revolutions like the Arab Spring.  The fact that it is spread so widely and quickly means that it’s virtually impossible for governments or censors to have much impact.  By the time you realize you have a problem it’s long past the time when you can do anything about it.

Of course that immediacy also causes problems when people post ideas and thoughts before they’ve had a chance to really consider what they are saying.  The list of athletes and celebrities who have gotten themselves into trouble by posting whatever pops into their heads in a kind of stream of consciousness foolishness.  I suppose it was only a matter of time before we took the step from foolish trouble to real trouble.

That happened last week.  The financial markets wait with bated breath for the earnings reports from all the big companies.  If earnings are better or worse than expected it can cause big changes in the value of a variety of stocks and other financial instruments.  So the that information is very carefully handled.  Now take the case of Google.  Information of all kinds is taken VERY seriously at Google.  Paranoid would not be over stating Google’s approach to their corporate information.

So imagine their unhappiness when someone at financial publisher R.R. Donnelly released quarterly earning report before the report was finalized.  Given that the news in the report was not particularly good it set Google’s stock into a tail spin.  A 22 Billion dollar tail spin.  Google had planned to release the report AFTER the market had closed to try and ease the damage.  But that’s when immediacy jumped into the equation.

In theater we say that timing is everything.  In the age of immediacy timing is even more vital than that.  And the only way to make sure you’re handling the timing right in such an environment is to slow down and take a little more care along the way.

Tracking You

It’s not something most of us think about.  But our computers are tracking where we go, what we watch and what we do online.  Everything.  Let me tell you a slightly embarrassing personal story as an example.

A couple months ago I was looking for a particular style of let’s just say undergarment.  I couldn’t find it at our local stores so I went online.  I spent a grand total of about 15 minutes researching the subject.  Ever since then I spend most of my time when I’m on Facebook looking at ads that feature men’s behinds.  Seriously.  Sometimes two at a time.  It’s not my idea of a good time.

Now how does that happen?  Simple.  My computer tracks where I’ve been and some websites, like Facebook, make use of that information.  Those sites even sell that information to other websites.  It’s called tracking and a lot of folks don’t the concept.  So there has been an ongoing push to give users (that’s you and me) control over who tracks us.  It’s called the Do Not Track movement.

Well don’t get too comfortable just yet that you will be able to decide who gets your info.  The National Association of Advertisers is raising a huge stink about Microsoft actually making Do Not Track the default setting on the newest Explorer browser.  They claim that Microsoft should side with the advertising community who wants that data rather than the overwhelming number of users who want Do Not Track.  As much as I like to pick on the folks up in Redmond  Washington I have to give them credit this time for choosing what their users want.

So what’s the bottom line?  For me there is a little bit of a balancing act here.  I understand the need for advertising to help pay for what is out there on the World Wide Web.  At the same time where I go and what I do is the center of the privacy discussion.  I want the final decision to be mine.  I don’t believe that the advertisers have any “right” to that information.  They need to do a better job of selling why we should allow them to track us.  And they need to let us determine just how much tracking we are comfortable with in our browsing.

I’d be happy if they could just forget those 15 minutes of my life.

Call that the View From the Phlipside

Book reviews - Philip K. Dick and Trivial Knowledge

I'm a little behind on the books.  Lots of travelling gives me lots of time to rip through my reading list.

Confession of a Crap Artist - Philip K. Dick (originally published in 1975 but written in 1959)  This is a strange but fascinating story of  Jack, a man who views the world from a peculiar and unique point of view and his narcissistic sister Fay and her husband Charley.  Jack suffers from some kind of mental disorder and isn't really prepared to deal with the real world head on.  He ends up living with his sister and brother-in-law and realizes that there are worse conditions in the world than his.  It is Charley who dubs Jack a "crap artist" which would translate as "bullshitter" today. Eventually the mutually destructive nature of Fay and Charley's relationship will drive them to destroy everything they love.  Along the way they will take others right along with them.  It is a delightful and idiosyncratic look at life in California in the '50s.  At least among a certain set.

Dick is really working his writing genius in this one even as he largely strays from the mysticism and science fiction that most of us associate with him.  The point of view of the story moves from character to character with very little indication that it's about to happen.  Yet within a few chapters I didn't find it at all difficult to follow along.  You figure out pretty quickly that Jack may be the only sane person in the book.  He is consistent in pursuing his vision of how he should live his life.  Everyone else is deeply caught up in their own illusions which end up destroying all of them.

This isn't his best known novel but it's well worth your time.

Rating - **** Recommended Read

I'm going to lump these next books together.  They are of a category that I have always loved.  Call them "Volumes of Trivial Knowledge".  I was the kid who would lie on the floor on a rainy weekend and read the encyclopedia.  Just pick a volume at random and open it at random and start reading.  When things like "The Book of Lists" and "The People's Almanac" came along I was in seventh heaven.  These books belong in that same category.

A Little Bit of Everything for Dummies (2011), The Trivia Lover's Guide to the World (2012), and A Short History of the World (2012) are all great additions to the tradition.  Each one has it's own slant.  The Dummies book is just what it says, a little bit of everything tapped from the vast ocean of material that the series has covered in the last 20+ years.  This includes fun stuff, lifestyle stuff, social stuff and even some around the world stuff.  Which led quite nicely into the Guide to the World which is geography based.  I pride myself on being above average in geographical literacy but it got me going several times.  Two of my favorites - What is the first foreign country you come to going south from Detroit MI and what South American country do you hit first if you drove south from Chicago IL?  Answers?  Canada and none.  As a wise man once said "You could look it up".  The Short History attempts to give you a quick but thorough overview of the history of the globe.  Taking what the author believes are the most important events he weaves a connected narrative rather than just a recitation of facts.  They're all fun reads.

Rating ***/****  Worth a Look (for the average reader)/Recommended Read (for the Trivial Knowledge Junkie)

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)