Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 1029
August 5, 2015
Fox News defeated Jon Stewart: Hosting “The Daily Show” might be the hardest gig in comedy — and it’s clearly taken its toll
It’s not hard to argue that Jon Stewart has become one of the key political figures of our time – someone so smart, funny and gutsy that he has almost brought clarity to this politically unpleasant decade and a half. The appreciations in his final week hosting “The Daily Show” have started to roll in, and he’s virtually got a place on Rushmore ready.
"I'm going to issue an executive order,” President Obama said when he made his farewell visit two weeks ago. “Jon Stewart cannot leave the show.” Last night, Denis Leary said he and Chris Rock would write jokes for Stewart so he could stay on the air. Amy Schumer paid what seemed to be unironic appreciation Monday. Variety columnist Brian Lowry writes that Stewart’s stepping down could be as significant as any similar departure since Johnny Carson left his show in 1992.
Stewart is so beloved – especially by younger, media-savvy liberals – and seems to be at the top of his game. So why, despite some talk about being “restless” and wanting to take some time with his children, does Stewart feel the need to step down? (Can’t Comedy Central give him a nice, restorative vacation?)
How Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley spawned Jon Stewart, Bill O’Reilly and all the horrors of TV news
Like any cultural phenomenon, Jon Stewart has both a history and a prehistory. I’ll have more to say about the longtime “Daily Show” host and his mixed legacy as liberal avatar and Barack Obama doppelgänger before his final signoff, but our topic today involves a trip in the pop-culture way-back machine. Stewart’s prehistory goes back at least as far as 1968, when I certainly hope his parents were not letting him stay up to watch the late-night talk shows.
That was a history-shaping year for American politics and culture in so many ways I can’t possibly list them. It was the year that both Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated, the year of the “police riot” at the Democratic convention in Chicago, the year Richard Nixon was elected president by peeling white Southerners away from the Democratic Party for the first time since the Civil War. (Nixon’s margin over Hubert Humphrey in the popular vote was tiny – 500,000 votes out of 73 million – but Humphrey only carried 13 states, and the Electoral College was a wipeout.) Each of those events changed the world on its own, and taken together they made America in 1968 feel like a nation poised above the abyss.
“People talk about political correctness as if they are being oppressed”: Bobcat Goldthwait on the healing powers of dark comedy, getting sober and the legendary comedian-activist Barry Crimmins
“Call Me Lucky” is director Bobcat Goldthwait’s affectionate—and highly affecting—portrait of curmudgeonly comedian/activist Barry Crimmins. This documentary is, like most of Goldthwait’s work, funny and disturbing. After comedians like Patton Oswalt, David Cross and Kevin Meaney talk about Crimmins’ talent for being a rude, funny, obnoxious truth-teller, there is a revelation that puts the comedian’s story in a whole different perspective. Suddenly, “Call Me Lucky” becomes a story about speaking openly and honestly to helping others overcome trauma and allow for coping and healing.
Goldthwait’s film is a mature and heartfelt entry in his career that began with his manic antics as an actor in “Police Academy” movies. (He now says those films “make me want to jump off a bridge.”) They eventually begat him directing dark comedies like “Shakes the Clown,” “Sleeping Dogs Lie” and “World’s Greatest Dad,” which addressed the respective issues of alcoholism, bestiality and autoerotic asphyxiation. Goldthwait continues to mine taboo subjects in “Call Me Lucky,” and the film shows how comedy and pain interlock.
The indefensible Hiroshima revisionism that haunts America to this day
Here we are, 70 years after the nuclear obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and I'm wondering if we've come even one step closer to a moral reckoning with our status as the world's only country to use atomic weapons to slaughter human beings. Will an American president ever offer a formal apology? Will our country ever regret the dropping of “Little Boy” and “Fat Man,” those two bombs that burned hotter than the sun? Will it absorb the way they instantly vaporized thousands of victims, incinerated tens of thousands more, and created unimaginably powerful shockwaves and firestorms that ravaged everything for miles beyond ground zero? Will it finally come to grips with the “black rain” that spread radiation and killed even more people -- slowly and painfully -- leading in the end to a death toll for the two cities conservatively estimated at more than 250,000?
Hollywood’s diversity crisis is even worse than we thought: Straight white men still rule, on screen and off
Hollywood’s diversity problem has increasingly come under the magnifying glass in recent months, with a string of Hollywood women speaking out about their experiences with ageism, objectification and inequality, LGBTQ performers being more outspoken about their experiences and artists of color opening up on issues related to diversity and racism in the entertainment industry.
But just because marginalized voices are getting louder doesn’t mean the problem is shrinking. In a staggering report called “Inequality in 700 Popular Films” from USC’s Media, Diversity, and Social Change Initiative, researchers analyzed the 100 top grossing films each year from 2007 to 2014 (excluding 2011). What they found was that Hollywood’s gender imbalance is even worse than it seems — and it seems pretty bad! — with only 30.2 percent out of 30,835 speaking roles in the 700 films going to women. What’s more, the numbers have hardly changed over seven years, with only approximately 21 percent of movies in 2014 featuring a female lead — the same percentage as in 2007.
Jon Stewart’s uneasy legacy: He was the avenging angel of cable news — but cable news is still a total disaster
Jon Stewart’s appearance on CNN’s “Crossfire” in 2004 is said by some to be the first viral video of note. At the time, nobody had ever seen somebody like Stewart savage an institution like “Crossfire,” which had been on the air since 1982 and had pioneered the way politics gets debated on cable news. It was a brutal, live humiliation, and the video went viral long before Twitter, before Reddit, back when something called thefacebook.com was getting popular on Ivy League campuses and when YouTube.com wasn’t even a domain name. Stewart spoke a truth that resonated, that cable news was poisoning political discourse, and the "Daily Show" host leaped into his position as America’s high critic of the press, the media establishment, and the way we talk (and don’t talk) about politics.
The video was, and still is, a must-see. “I’m here to confront you,” said Stewart, immediately shredding any sort of script the two hosts had and putting them on their heels. “You have a responsibility to the public discourse, and you fail miserably,” he charged. “You’re doing theater when you should be doing debate. This is not honest.”
Kristen Stewart schools Jesse Eisenberg on the art of sexist interviewing in spot-on “Funny or Die” video
In a time when sexist presser interviews are practically part and parcel of "viral culture," Funny or Die's parody couldn't have come a day sooner. In it, Kristen Stewart swaps presser cue-cards with "American Ultra" co-star Jesse Eisenberg. He quickly learns -- through superficial questions like "Who's your favorite designer?" and "Seeing anyone at the moment?" and "Do you get any work done?" -- how dreadful it is to be on the receiving end.
Watch the video courtesy of Funny or Die below:
Kristen Stewart and Jesse Eisenberg's Awkward Interview from Funny Or Die
What if the Democratic presidential primary were as bizarre as the GOP one currently is?
The Democratic National Committee and MSNBC announced Wednesday afternoon the name of the 10 candidates who will be participating in the first Democratic presidential debate of the 2016 electoral season. Only the top 10 candidates in the most five most recent polls will be allowed to participate in the debate, which will be moderated by MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews, and PBS's Gwen Ifill.
The meteoric rise of media mogul Oprah Winfrey (23%) is posing a threat to both establishment favorite Hillary Clinton (13%) and insurgent socialist Bernie Sanders (11%), both of whom must be concerned with what the beloved Chicago politician-in-training might say given that she's vowed to "hurt anybody" who criticizes her.
Bernie Sanders basks in key income inequality victory: Why the new CEO pay rule is a such big deal
Pretty soon, millions of American workers will know exactly how much less money they earn than their corporate bosses, as the Securities and Exchanges Commission voted in favor of a new rule today that requires every publicly traded company to regularly disclose the pay ratio between top company executives and their employees.
Although CEO pay is already revealed in a company's annual proxy statement, this new rule will force corporations to assess and disclose the ratio of a chief executive’s compensation to the median compensation of their employees, starkly illuminating income inequality company-by-company.
As the New York Times reports, the vote passed by a 3-2 vote, with the Commission's two Republicans voting against the measure, and will take effect in 2017 (although pay figures likely won't be disclosed until 2018). Mary Jo White, the chairwoman of the SEC who has faced mounting pressure to act on executive compensation -- including a searing letter from Sen. Elizabeth Warren -- voted in support of the rule.
The 7 douchiest quotes from Miles Teller’s Esquire profile: “He tells you the highball glass is modeled after his c*ck”
In her new Esquire profile of "Fantastic Four" star Miles Teller, writer Anna Peele circles around one pivotal, enduring question: Is Miles Teller a dick? The answer turns out to be a pretty resounding YA DUH BRO, as the cocksure twenty-eight year old proves himself to be a veritable treasure-trove of douchebaggy soundbites and behaviors, from comparing his drinking vessel to his dong to referring to Joaquin Phoenix as “Joaq.”
Here are 7 of his worst offenses:
1. When he tells a waitress that his highball glass is modeled after his cock:
"You've just told him, by way of making conversation, that according to legend the champagne coupe in your hand is shaped like Marie Antoinette's left breast, and he tells you the highball glass is modeled after his cock. Then he tells the waitress the same thing."
2. When he doesn’t know the word canon, but he knows that he should be a part of it:
