Thoughtful Preparations: Media Spin Blog

If you enjoyed the wisecracking space cowboy thrills of the original Star Wars Han Solo, then you must check out Firefly TV Series DVD. Captain Mal Reynolds has the right headstrong stuff. The Firefly TV series opener is a fantastic film length origination story of this vagabond space crew 500 years in the future. I’m going through the Firefly series before I check out the more recent Serenity, The Movie.

The writing is excellent, by Joss Whedon, a co-writer of Toy Story, Pixar’s first 3D computer animated feature. Joss has a very interesting background, being the third of his family’s generation to write for television. His grandpa wrote for The Donna Reed Show and The Dick Van Dyke Show.

Describing the inspiration for writing Firefly, the Production Notes on the Serenity web site explains…

Whedon conceived of the television series Firefly after reading Michael Shaara’s Civil War novel, “The Killer Angels.” The appeal of post-war survivors scraping by on the outskirts of society—in a science-fiction context—struck a chord with Whedon. “I was taken with the idea of a civil war and rebuilding from the point of view of people who had lost the war,” he says. “There were people after the war who internalized it so terribly that it completely destroyed them.”

The western flavor of the show feels sort of Australian, possessing a desperate, patched-together Mad Max Road Warrior tone to it. The soundtrack is cool, and varies between spooky, ambient mechanical noise to a yearning country fiddle echoing across the cosmos like an enchanted Celtic country music song.

I wonder what The Beverley Hillbillies In Space would look like… picture it, The Galaxy Spacebillies! Probably not much of a stretch for the mind of Whedon who wrote for Roseanne, Roseanne Barr’s TV show in 1988. Anyway… be sure to take a look at the Serenity movie web site.

The current maneuvering by CNN to outfox Fox News by hiring nationally syndicated conservative radio host Glenn Beck is an especially bad omen for messy cafeteria food fights to come between Fox and CNN. Here is an interesting blog keeping watch on CNN vs. FOX.

CNN Headline News categorizes Glenn Beck under “ENTERTAINMENT” in their Jan. 17, 2006 coverage of his hiring.

Beck’s hiring has fired up criticism from web-based media monitoring groups such as Media Matters for America in this Jan. 17, 2006 article.

Here is an audio clip of Glenn Beck on his recent notoriety and his opinion of Cindy Sheehan.

Television and radio are a far cry from the U.S. government’s Radio Act of 1927 which was a first attempt at establishing licensing regulations so that radio stations served the public interest. These days we are better off getting our news from the Internet, which is exactly what the new generation is doing, and is exactly why television and radio are resorting to serving up superficial commercial pap.

Found an interesting step-by-step instruction for drawing and painting an elephant in Photoshop. It’s a relatively new blog, Olduvai George, by Carl Buell a professional illustrator who specializes in paleontology subjects.  First rate stuff.

You can sign up to look for interstellar particles using an online Virtual Microscope at Stardust@Home.

As well as being the first mission to return samples from a comet, Stardust is the first sample return mission from the Galaxy. But finding the incredibly tiny interstellar dust impacts in the Stardust Interstellar Dust Collector (SIDC) will be extremely difficult.

Volunteers will appear as a co-author on any scientific paper by the Stardust@home collaboration announcing the discovery of the particle.

Something in White house Press Secretary Scott McClellan’s briefing today bothered me:

The President is fully committed to doing everything within his power to prevent attacks and defeat the terrorists.

Sounds terrific, but in the next breath, McClellan declares, “We do not negotiate with terrorists.” So, negotiating with the enemy is not within his power. What does doing everything mean? Doing everything means everything, not just things you feel like doing. A heroic leader does not have such limited bandwidth, he has inventive imagination and comes up with great solutions.

In reading the full text of Osama Bin Laden’s recent statement, I have mixed feelings of hope and guilt. The hope is in that he is offering insights and peaceful solutions, perhaps an end to a great divide filled with corpses of war. The guilt is with the tone in the USA, that good Americans aren’t supposed to agree with Bin Laden. There are many average Joe Americans whose knee-jerk reaction will be to curse and dismiss Bin Laden’s statements.

Authors of post Sept. 11 books listed here earlier, Education In Terrorism, foresaw the statesman role Bin Laden seeks to play. They made many of the same observations as Bin Laden, such as warning the US against depleting itself in Iraq and Aghanistan in the same way that the former USSR did in Aghanistan in the 1980’s.

Bin Laden recommends reading the book, Rogue State and accurately quotes many current events. The book’s publisher is Common Courage Press. The author, William Blum’s web site is killinghope.org.
I would be pleased to provide a link to recommended reading by President Bush, but as far as I know he hasn’t come up with anything lately. Perhaps he defers to Oprah’s Book Club List?

Recently watched the classic 1960 À bout de souffle (Breathless), which I hadn’t viewed since a History of Cinema college screening 30 years ago. Filmed in Paris, Breathless is Jean Luc Godard’s first feature, based on a story by Francois Truffaut. Heralded as a cornerstone of the French New Wave Cinema, it is shot in an edgy, spontaneous style of the beatnick jazz poetry of the times. The main character is a shiftless chain smoking car thief played by Jean Paul Belmondo. The film is often heralded as a turning point in filmmaking.

Naked, 1993 directed by Mike Leigh and filmed in locations around gritty parts of London. The protagonist Johnny, calls himself a cheeky monkey and is a similar chain-smoking, woman chasing, bad guy hero on the run cast from the same mold as Belmondo’s character.

My previous review of Kurosowa’s Drunken Angel covers the similar harrowing decline of a self destructive modern tough guy. Better him than me, eh Chuck-o?
So now that DV cameras are cheap, where are the new new wave of guerrilla cinematographers and little guys up against the odds of big established society? Perhaps they are with GNN: The Guerrilla News Network or Channel 101. We will know it when we see it: raw, jagged, real and maybe a little bit romantic.

I love this classic animation from the early formative years. Here is an archived 1937 cartoon by Paul Terry and his Terrytoons studio. It appears that a crucial shot early in the cartoon, where the little goat drinks alcohol is absent.

Fortunately, The International Animated Film Society: ASIFA-Hollywood has embarked on an ambitious project to create an animation archive, museum, and library for the benefit of the animation community, students and general public. The first phase of this project involves the creation of a virtual archive which will house images, movie clips and sound files pertaining to the art of animation. Their blog is loaded with art and information of interest to animation fans.