Jonathan V. Last's Blog, page 37
February 4, 2014
Rules for Seat Reclining
The great Mollie Hemingway has heroically set forth some tentative social rules for seat reclining on airplanes. I’m in favor of them all.
Reclining your seat in an airplane isn’t the worst breach of etiquette in the traveling worlds. It’s not talking in the Quiet Car or showing up to dinner in jean shorts on the at-sea night. But it’s pretty bad. Just because airplane seats recline, doesn’t mean they should be reclined any time. And there out to be some generally-shared consensus on when it’s polite to do so.
For my own part, I never mind if the person in front of me reclines and they’re really big. Last week on a cross-country flight the guy in the seat in front of me was probably 6’6″. I kept waiting for him to push his seat back and I wouldn’t have held it against him, but he never did. Ditto for red eye flights, when most people are expecting to sleep.
At the other end of the spectrum are the times when a normal-sized person reclines immediately upon take-off, yet jabbers back and forth with their seat-mate for the whole flight. These folks don’t need the extra room and aren’t using it to aid sleep–they’re just taking it, because they can.
I don’t know where this sort of thing fits in the hierarchy of assaults on civilization, but it probably clocks somewhere around talking in movies. [Cue Santino rant in 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . .]
February 3, 2014
Philip Seymour Hoffman
A terrible shame, as the clichés have it, about Phil Hoffman.
I haven’t thought closely about this, but he might have been my favorite actor of my generation. I like to think that I was on the Hoffman train early–when I was in high school, he stuck out in one of the better Law & Order episodes, along with Billy from from Ally McBeal (Gil Bellows; how funny to have as young guest stars two future leading men; Dick Wolfe’s casting directors have always been money).
Hoffman added to Twister in a meaningless role (looking back today, it’s really something how much acting talent was hanging around the production; I suspect they all bought houses because of it) and blew the screen open during his short scene at the craps table in Sydney (otherwise known as Hard Eight). During the years when movies meant the most to me, Hoffman was a regular treat and the only times I winced were when he occasionally went took Oscar bait in flicks like Love Liza. But even then, I didn’t blame him for it.
That said, my two favorite Hoffman performances were in lesser movies.
The first was in the third Mission: Impossible where Hoffman played the villain. It was a remarkable piece of work because Hoffman’s character had two key aspects which cut against one another. First, he had to be kind of a nobody–remember, in the movie Hoffman isn’t the target, he’s just a mid-level bad guy being used to get to the big fish. But then the movie goes sideways when Hoffman’s character decides to get revenge and suddenly Hoffman has to play the heavy. And boy, does he. It’s not often that Tom Cruise has someone on screen with him who becomes the entire center of gravity on the frame. But Hoffman did just that. It was a neat trick.
But my favorite perf came in the otherwise forgettable Talented Mr. Ripley. Hoffman played Freddie Miles, a dumb, rich bully who becomes the first victim of Matt Damon’s Ripley.
In the scene which seals his fate, Miles is baiting Ripley, taunting him for being a peeping Tom. But suddenly Miles realizes, on an unconscious level, that Tom Ripley isn’t what he seems. There’s a moment when you see this recognition flicker in his eyes and what makes the turn so brilliant is that Freddie Miles doesn’t see through Ripley because he’s clever. So often in life big, stupid bullies seem to come hardwired with a reptilian sense of self-preservation–they can just sense when they’re in real danger. And Hoffman showed exactly that with Freddie Miles: He realizes that he’s in danger, even if he doesn’t quite know why he knows it. It’s a sensational bit of acting, and really the only thing special about the production.
January 23, 2014
Whedon-ism and the J.J. Abrams Star Wars Sequel
I don’t think we’ve fully grokked all the implications of Disney’s purchase of the Star Wars franchise. For instance, Marvel is now taking over the comic-book properties from Dark Horse.
And for another, J.J. Abrams seems to be bringing a very Disney sensibility to the sequels. (By “Disney sensibility” I don’t mean in terms of aesthetics or morals; I’m referring to the way in which Disney seems to conceive of the re-use of characters in franchise sequels.) Courtesy of Galley Friend B.D., there’s a very smart take over here on the conflict between what audiences want and what they need (the creator’s dilemma made famous by Joss Whedon):
What the audience wants is to see Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia and Han Solo again. The problem is, that’s impossible. Those characters are gone. They are a creation of celluloid well over thirty years ago. Without conducting the requisite thought experiments, though, the audience – and J.J. Abrams – will continue to “want” to see their heroes again, right up until the moment that they do. At which point, I think, a rather horrible collision between wants and needs will take place, right up there on the big screen.
What the audience needs, above all, is to not have their abiding affection for the original trilogy tampered with.
January 13, 2014
Liberalism Ascendent!
How do you know we’re at a real moment of American progressivism?
This morning on the drive in, I passed a recent vintage Toyota Camry sporting a brand-new Mondale-Ferraro bumper sticker. For reals.
January 10, 2014
January 9, 2014
Wrestling Goes Over the Top
This is an interesting development: The WWE is creating its own channel–but not on cable. Instead of going with an NFL Network style cable channel, they’ve decided to do an over-the-top web channel, which will be streamed to Roku/Playstation/Android/Apple/etc. The service launches next week. A few points:
1) The Variety story seems contradictory in saying that subscriptions are $9.95 a month and will include PPV access, but that the WWE expects $600 in revenue per year from each subscription. Maybe the PPVs will be in-app purchases? It’s a little unclear.
2) The most interesting aspect of this is to what extent the WWE network will cannibalize existing revenue from TV deals and PPV. My sense–and this is just a guess–is that the company wouldn’t be making such a bold move if they thought there was lots of growth left in those areas. Instead, this seems like a hedge to protect declining revenues by cutting out middlemen.
3) Variety points to the influence of MLB, but it seems to me that the much more consequential influence in Glenn Beck’s Blaze, which continues to be almost criminally underreported as a business story. (For instance, in this otherwise good piece about conservative new-new media, note how little attention is given to it.)
4) This move is actually consistent with what HHH told Grantland in August when asked about a WWE network:
The question you probably always get after the Hall of Fame is the WWE television channel.
If I had to say what is one priority we think about on a daily basis, that is one of them. But it’s not so easy to put together. It’s not the NFL Network. You have to think about how our business is different. Don’t look at us as a Mayweather or De La Hoya fight, look at it asRocky. Rocky is a movie that just happens to be about boxing. It’s really about characters and story lines and relationships and all those things, and the backdrop is boxing. You can go back and watch the final fight in Rocky a thousand times. If you dig that movie, if you like the characters, you’ll watch the whole movie over and over.
But that’s a very limited number of people that go back and watch boxing matches, unless it’s like the Thrilla in Manila. But to go back and just watch a regular boxing match, or a Super Bowl, what’s the implications of that now? It doesn’t mean anything. Our stuff is different.
January 7, 2014
Happy Arctic Vortex
The Veronica Mars movie looks pretty great, actually:
And courtesy of Galley Friend A.W. comes what might be the greatest bit of wrestling nostalgia ever: Roddy Piper, Macho Man, Jake the Snake, Undertaker, Ric Flair, Hulk Hogan–and more–all in the ring at the same time, in a stakes match. There’s full video. And this awesome promo poster:
January 2, 2014
Cocooning at Salon
In (yet another) piece about white privilege, someone at Salon writes:
We ended 2013, the 150thanniversary of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation — a year in which one of the most popular movies, “12 Years a Slave,” chronicled the horrors of slavery in Louisiana . . .
I have no doubt that 12 Years a Slave was the most popular movie of the year (decade?) at the offices of Salon.
Out in the wider world? Here’s the 2013 box office list, which is a pretty objective measure of a movie’s popularity. 12 Years a Slave clocks in at . . .
#75
Let’s play a little game where I name a movie from 2013 and you tell me if it was less popular than 12 Years a Slave. And I promise right off the bat that this won’t be one of those trick quizes where there are no right answers:
* 42–Which was also about race in America!
* The Smurfs 2–I’ll cheat on this and just tell you: it made twice as much money as 12 Years.
* Jurassic Park 3D–This was just a 3D-ified re-lease of a 20-year-old movie.
* A Haunted House–Also a movie about race in America. Kind of. (It’s a Wayans Bros. joint.)
Okay, I lied. All of those movies made more money than 12 Years a Slave. But don’t worry, it was way, waaayyy more popular than Kick Ass 2.
December 20, 2013
This Is the End
George Effin’ Will.
On Twitter.
One of the things I’ve always marveled about concerning Will is his ability on television to speak in full, coherent paragraphs–in total contradiction to the imperatives of the medium. I’m not optimistic about his ability to subvert Twitter in the same way.
On the other hand, maybe this is a spoof account. A boy can dream.
December 4, 2013
Christmas Comes Early
A missive from Galley Friend X:
For reasons I won’t share, I was poking around Andrew Sullivan’s site this week and stumbled across the following: apparently, there’s a “porn gap.” In “high-income cities” the top five search terms on porn-video websites are “1. Gay 2. Ebony 3. Teen 4. Lesbian and 5. MILF while in low-income cities they are 1. Teen 2. Lesbian 3. MILF 4. Ebony 5. Gay.”
The first thing to cross my mind, obviously, was What would Charles Murray have to say about this?
But then, that question turns out to be easier to answer than you might think.
A weekend Wall Street Journal essay–”Charles Murray on the porn class divide”–practically writes itself. He would look back on the good old days, when both the upper and lower classes had to watch the same pornography, so that no matter how much money your family had, at least you’d have some shared social experience. And there’d be a quiz, so that the rich could realize how little they understand about blue-collar porn.
But the best part is that Murray could even recycle his last title: Coming Apart.
That. Just. Happened.
