Links for the Day (July 28th, 2007)

Links for the Day (July 28th, 2007)

By Keith Uhlich on July 28, 2007 in Links for the Day Jump to Comments (0)

1. "Muppet Reunion, with Paul McCartney, in the Works?"

["Sure, they've had their share of squabbles over the years. But that hasn't deterred Kermit and Miss Piggy from rekindling their romance. TV Guide has learned that a digitally enhanced pilot for a new version of The Muppet Show is in the works at Jim Henson Studios. "The show will have the original puppets but they'll be able to walk around," says a source close to the project. "It's going to be like the original variety show, not the cartoons that came out afterwards.""]

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2. "Report Uncovers Astronauts' Heavy Alcohol Use": Less filling. Tastes great.

["NASA administrators promised fast action today in response to an internal investigation that said astronauts had flown after drinking heavily on at least two occasions."]

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3. "Tuning in and flipping out": A blast from the past, courtesy our editor-in-chief.

["Something about this war is making TV newspeople think like movie directors. When that happens, it's worth asking why."]

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4. "Suspect in custody after 2 choppers crash covering chase": Anything for the shot...

["Two news helicopters covering a police chase on live television collided and crashed Friday, killing all four people on board in a plunge that viewers saw as a jumble of spinning, broken images."]

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5. "Firing Back": A Newsweek interview.

["He will go down in history as the guy who called the victims of September 11 "little Eichmanns"—a reference to the notorious Nazi bureaucrat who helped ship hundreds of thousands of Jews to concentration camps. Ward Churchill's comment, included in a long-forgotten essay dug up by an enterprising journalism student, stirred a national debate about the power of unpopular words—and the proper consequences for those who use them."]

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Clip of the Day:: Mark Malkoff visits every New York Starbucks

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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.

TAGS: links for the day

Jeffrey: Re: Bloom's moving tank shot: I agree that it revealed the depth and breadth of the troop movement, but that was something that could have been captured any number of ways, from an airborne shot from the vantage point of an Army helicopter to putting a camera on a portable crane and panning from one end of the horizon to the other. My beef with that shot, and with a lot of Bloom's work at the time, was the overwhelming "gee whiz" factor. At least 50 percent of the shot's impact came from the logistical improbability of what we were seeing; it seemed more about the gadgets and the reporter's ingenuity than the subject being covered, which I thought should have been treated with more gravity and less First-Prize-at-the-science fair giddiness.

There was another Bloom report with a shot that made me so annoyed that I wanted to throw things at my TV. He was reporting live from a base camp; he started out addressing the camera head-on, then started walking around tents and past soldiers and tanks, stepping over cables and boxes of equipment, delivering about a minute's worth of exposition while military people and hardware moved around in front of and behind him. This too, was very Spielbergian -- like something from the post-D-day sequences of "Saving Private Ryan." I remember thinking, "How long did it take you to choreograph that shot and practice your walking? And wasn't that time that could have been better spent talking to soldiers, catching up on the latest battlefield reports, or otherwise worrying about the story and not about impressing people with showmanship?"

Like I said, elsewhere he did good work for NBC, but his war reporting -- which pretty much everyone else hailed as genius after his untimely demise -- struck me as epitomizing everything that was wrong with the American TV news attitude toward the Iraq war in its early days. The overall sense was, "This is a huge event with potentially enormous consequences for the U.S. and the world. And man, the armored columns and smoke plumes are gonna be fuckin' cool, dude!"
Posted by Matt Zoller Seitz on 2007-07-29 16:20:00 1. Without Henson, there will always be a crucial something missing from The Muppets

I agree, but I wonder if today's kids will still embrace Henson-less muppets that walk around through the grace of CGI better than handheld puppets. I'm still with keeping them low tech. My other specific request would be lots and lots of rat throwing. That's always funny.

3. This piece is still impressive, even in hindsight. I agree with your larger points, but would take issue with Kevin Johnson's take:

Bloom's live shot from atop the vehicle "was amazing eye candy," said Kevin Johnson, editor and host of b-roll.net, an online clearinghouse for video camera operators. "But I'm not sure it gave me any useful information."

That shot atop the moving vehicle (which I recall seeing in other reports) did capture some useful information about the movement at the outset of the invasion - it showed the long fast trek over the empty Anbar desert that seemed to stretch for a long time. Johnson's comment seemed to see only the candy of it all. He reminded me of F. Scott Fitzgerald bad mouthing films for lacking depth. I wouldn't argue that the shot had a director's quality, or that it was sensational, but I think it was good visceral reporting - even if the glimpse it gave was narrow.
Posted by Jeffrey on 2007-07-29 06:12:00 1. Without Henson, there will always be a crucial something missing from The Muppets, and I suspect the people in charge of the franchise know it. I adore those characters, but once they became more a property than a de facto performance troupe (sometime in the early 80s, I think) they lost focus and energy. Although some of the movies were fun (particularly the first and third) a weekly series is the best showcase for them, so I hope this one works out, and works well. I tend to think it won't, though because of the detail that these Muppets will be able to walk around. If they mean that they'll occasionally cut to long shots where the characters have feet, fine -- Henson did that from time to time, to sell the illusion. But if they're going to be walking and talking throughout, that means the Muppets will be audioanimatronic or CGI or some combination, which is antithetical to what made the characters so indelible -- that intimate, improvisational freedom that only comes from having an operator right there below the frame line, essentially acting the roles of Miss Piggy, Kermit, etc. Keep it low-tech, please.

2. Of course one shouldn't drink and then fly enormous rockets. But on the other hand, this is a strangely humanizing story. After all the mythologizing of astronauts as steely-willed badasses, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that they stole a nip before going up because, well, going into space is really freaking scary.

3. I feel sort of bad for ragging on David Bloom a couple of months before he died in Iraq, but that coverage was pretty atrocious. The news divisions acted as if they were grateful that the Pentagon had given them billions of dollars worth of production values for free, and let the military set all the rules for fear of being cut off from the money shots. The "gee whiz" factor is a big part of the reason why we're in this mess and can't find a way out of it.

4. The FAA should regulate these fuckers. There is no reason why every news station needs to have a bird in the air covering the same chase. A pool chopper distributing the same feed to everyone will accomplish the goal of informing the public. News channels should be allowed to use choppers to ferry news crew to hot spots and get the story, but this vulture-like feasting on highway spectacle has got to stop. If the FCC were more than a rubber stamp for vast entertainment conglomerates, it would be holding hearings and issuing gigantic fines. Too bad.

5. I agree that the ethical charges against him seem trumped-up, though there's not enough information in the story to make an informed judgment. (But he has tried to buttress his Native American scholarship by falsely claiming to have been descended from ancestors in three tribes -- a claim for which there apparently exists not a shred of evidence. How lame is that?)

As for the inflammatory sentiment, Ward Churchill might have a valid larger point to make about citizens needing to realize that they represent America even if they don't wear a uniform or work for the government -- that actions have consequences, and "I was just doing my job" is no defense. But Churchill's explanation of the comment is so far-reaching and lazily constructed that it does seem as if he's saying that the victims of 9/11 deserved to die for the crime of being American. (And since when did Bin Laden's already conveniently long list of grievances/explanations include being pissed about sweatshops?)

Churchill gives the game away with this quote: "Implement policy for profit, to maximize profit, to increase dividends, blah, blah, blah. Which also, by the way, increases their commission, establishes their stature, leads to their promotion trajectory, leads to their quality of life, and in full knowledgeâ€”they may suppress itâ€”of the carnage that is induced in this profit-maximization profile. â€¦Basically, I said you are accountable for what you do in the world. And â€¦ if you are profiting from carnage â€¦ you are the moral and philosophical equivalent of Adolf Eichmann."

Sorry, Ward, but few of the people killed on 9/11 could plausibly be said to have had any active, participatory role in the misdeeds he lists. Going to work as a janitor at the World Trade Center is not the moral equivalent of setting up train schedules to deliver Jews to death camps. And if he honestly thinks it is, then he should be fired for passing off trite pseudo-radical gobbledygook as deep thought. The "blah blah blah" is quite astonishing -- it's as if Churchill is admitting that the words coming out of his mouth have no real meaning.
Posted by Matt Zoller Seitz on 2007-07-28 20:04:00