Good afternoon...
Running around NY has superseded finding a wi-fi signal, but thanks to the iPhone, here are a couple of items...
I was shocked to read a bit of bias spin as a front page story of the NYT today. The game was to position the sexism spin of the Clinton campaign, a rather desperate and vile piece of strategy that The Clintons used to try to w/sp-in the election their way months after having known they could never catch up with Obama short of a collapse or felony by that side. Like so many Clinton games, there seems little interest in the ugly afterbirth of the political spin.
What really struck me about this piece, written by 2 women who had done strong work during the campaign, including a March look at the media pushing back against Obama after SNL making "give Barack a pillow" life as swallowed Clinton spin, was that it played two distinct games. First, it made the media defend itself as though they were the only ones who felt they had been fair. This always makes the side self-defending look bad. And second, they somehow "forgot" the Pew/Harvard study that all put said that the bias was mythology. Instead they found a study by a George Mason professor of unknown methodology or legitmacy. Boo.
Then, the great Manohla, who I do think is great, spent the first graph and a half suggesting that the negative reviews of The Happening were based on predisposition, not the movie.
Bullshit.
I, for one, was hoping that this film would be good or great. Yes, there are brickbats a'ready. And some would be unleashed whatever the film was. But the notion that this was a strong performance by Mark Wahlberg, an actor who has become amazngly reliable and likeable, is about as tone-deaf a call as I have heard from this esteemed colleague.
The Happening would be a perfectly fine 30 minute episode. But it is stretched into a terrible film with out and out bad performances from actors as charismatic as Wahlberg, Leguizamo, and Deschanel.
Sad about Tim Russert and amazed it's been 18 years at Meet The Press. (The same reporter at NYT who co-wrote the Hillary piece this morning contributed to the breaking story and added a shot at Russert as being too outspoken on Hillary. It would be unkind and inaccurate to keep selling that smear as accurately reflective of his history.)
Anyway, I will get to the computer soon. For now, I remain waiting on line for Hamlet in Cental Park. Oh this too, too line-waiting flesh....
Read the complete post at http://www.mcnblogs.com/thehotblog/archives/2008/06/heckuva_town.html