(iStockphoto.com)

by Linda Holmes

Blue language always makes for a very tricky discussion. This weekend, The New York Times ran a piece fairly openly lamenting, in what's intended as a news piece, the fact that there are more uses of what might be considered semi-swearing -- words like "bitch" and "douche" that aren't officially profanity but aren't considered nice words -- on television.

I have certainly sworn plenty in my life, though I do it less than I used to. As I've acknowledged before, I tend to resist efforts to scrub the language entirely, and I certainly resist the idea that profanity is inherently uncreative. In the right situation, it packs an entirely appropriate situation-specific punch, particularly when used sparingly. I often forget that swearing is even allowed on Mad Men until somebody unloads an unexpected non-broadcast-friendly word, because it doesn't happen very often at all. They dole it out in small doses, which means you don't simply stop hearing it. When somebody suddenly says "B---s---" on Mad Men, you sit up.

It's absolutely true that in a word like "sucks," you can easily see the evolution of these things -- when I was growing up, "sucks" was only slightly less bad than an actual bad word, and now it's really a big nothing.

So this is my question: How do you feel about that gradual process of coarsening that seems to be inevitable and unstoppable? Is it so inevitable that it doesn't really matter?

Admittedly, they're not multiple-choice questions, but you can still sketch out your answers in pencil before you submit them if you like. (iStockphoto.com)

by Linda Holmes

We are reaching a changing of the seasons. The big summer movies have opened; the awards-baiting movies haven't begun. Fall television is just starting with things like Project Runway and Mad Men returning and big network shows still about a month away. There's a bit of a lull, and what's a lull good for? A moment of reflection, that's what.

So this is where I invite you to audit the culture around you -- both the good and the bad -- and consider a few questions in the areas of movies, TV, books, games, digital culture...whatever "popular culture" means to you. You can choose one, or answer as many as you can fit into the character limit, or you can comment more than once, if that suits you.

1. What has been your biggest pleasant surprise of the last three months? (This takes you, so you don't have to do math, back to late May.)

2. What has been the rudest surprise of the last three months?

3. What are you most looking forward to between now and New Year's?

4. What are you dreading most between now and New Year's?

5. If, at this moment, you could only watch television between now and December 31, or you could only see movies between now and December 31, which would you choose if you knew you couldn't go back later and catch up on what you missed?

6. If you could press one book you have read this year into the hands of ten strangers when they were trapped during a blackout with nothing to do but read, what would you give them?

7. What are you currently trying to like and finding it difficult to like?

8. If you could guarantee that five people -- actors, writers, directors, whoever -- would have their calendars filled with funded projects for the next five years, to whom would you grant full employment?

9. What do you love in spite of being outside the target demographic? (Example: "I am a nineteen-year-old dude and I loved The Proposal.")

10. If you could personally wave your wand and stop one trend -- toy movies, remakes, crime procedurals -- what would be your target?

by Linda Holmes

IFC has this up-to-date explanation of the overuse of just about every version of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" to score everything from The West Wing to Watchmen.

But there are other offenders as well. I recall a moment in the late '90s when it appeared that just about everything was accompanied by Kate Bush singing "This Woman's Work." That whole business started here, in 1988, in a surprisingly sweet montage from the John Hughes film She's Having A Baby, for which the song was apparently written.

What would you nominate for the It's A Pretty Song, But Enough Already Hall Of Fame?

Dean Cain once was Superman, kind of: I am very embarrassed. Getty Images

 

by Linda Holmes

The idea of this particular game is to name the most embarrassing pop-culture/fandom object in your collection. You must either still have it or, if you no longer have it, you must have held onto it for at least, say, five years. You don't have to tell the story, you don't have to apologize; you just have to name the item you would least like to have found among your possessions if you suddenly were eaten by a fire-breathing dragon and the forensic investigation that followed asked the question: "Did this person have good taste in entertainment?"

Mine: A black-and-white 8x10 headshot of television's '90s-vintage Superman, reading: "To Linda: Super Wishes, Dean Cain."

You Mustn't Read This: Linda didn't much like Benjamin Button, but there are those who argue the movie's still better than the book.photocredit

By Linton Weeks

The literati can't stand to hear it, but sometimes a movie is better than the book it's based on. Even when the book is pretty good: Jaws comes to mind. And, arguably, Forrest Gump.

This year theaters are teeming with movies based on books. And some reviewers who've had a look at both are saying that the movies are better.

Take The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The tale, about a man who ages in reverse, is based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

"Having seen the movie and read the story," writes Fritz Lanham in the Houston Chronicle, "I'd say there's no comparison. As a book guy it pains me to admit it, but the movie is better. A lot better."

The film critic for the Montreal Gazette, meanwhile, avers that the movie Slumdog Millionaire is better than the Vikas Swarup book it's based on.

When it's the other way around, after the jump ...

Continue reading "Open Questions: Books Into Movies, For Better Or Worse" >

by Linda Holmes

Okay, not your actual broken heart; not in the "Valentine's Day" sense. I refer here to something else.

When I saw He's Just Not That Into You, I was tolerating it pretty well until I saw Wilson Cruz.

Cruz played Rickie Vasquez on My So-Called Life, where he gave perhaps one of the most sensitive and intelligent portrayals of a teenager you'll ever see. Rickie was notable at the time partly because he was a sort-of-out gay teenager, but for the most part, he was just a very warm and lovable kid -- a weight-of-the-world guy who worried all the time about being beaten up for wearing eyeliner to school, but who also managed to be the worrier and the caretaker of all his friends. He took care of melodramatic, self-pitying Angela and brittle, alcoholic Rayanne, even as he struggled with obvious loneliness and a nightmarish home life. (The clip above is the rare moment when he ever wound up on the receiving end of this kind of support.)

In He's Just Not That Into You, he plays one of Drew Barrymore's completely two-dimensional Sassy Gay Friends. The ones who hover in groups and say "girlfriend" and allow a female character to get sound advice without the film confusing its message by implying that any of her women friends might be intelligent enough to advise her. (In this movie, women give only terrible advice and men -- both gay and straight -- give only good advice.)

It just made me want to weep, this terrific actor, to whom I have this intense nostalgic attachment, stuck in this terrible part where he got to do nothing that was worthy of him. In the fifteen years since My So-Called Life began, he's done other very respectable shows, including The West Wing and The Closer, but I just cringed in pain at the sight of him basically...reduced to this.

Have you ever had this experience? Not a hugely famous person in an enormously disappointing flop, but someone who ought to be getting better jobs and apparently isn't?

by Linda Holmes

When I can't go to sleep, I listen to Your Favorite Music, a 1999 Clem Snide record that I discovered in early 2005 while experiencing a bout of insomnia. That always sounds like an insult -- "This puts me to sleep!" -- but it emphatically isn't. Trains, planes, horrible days; if I desperately need to get some sleep and can't, this is how I settle my brain. It seems to resonate on the same frequency as something buried deep in my cerebral cortex, like I can plug it directly into a jack in my head instead of having to run it past my pedestrian ears.

So I'm curious: Do other people have things like this? A record especially for sleeping? Do you use Letterman as your soother? Something that thrums along with your internal tuning fork?

The "poverty porn" problem: A man in actual India walks by a poster depicting movie India. Is there a problem here? Pal Pillai/AFP/Getty Images

 

by Linda Holmes

As the Slumdog Millionaire awards train speeds along, with a (well-deserved) Screen Actors Guild Award bestowed on the whole cast on Sunday night, what might normally be a backlash against the movie itself (as almost always happens when acclamation begins to pile up) is taking the form of a lot of questions about whether the movie is, in the words you'll see most often, "poverty porn."

If you haven't followed this debate, you can start with this L.A. Times piece, in which an Indian film professor says that the movie is "a white man's imagined India." For a stronger negative view, try this.

It's not just the movie itself, either. Even before the film, you could take a so-called "poverty tour" of Mumbai's actual slums -- and the "slum tourism" industry has seen a big boost since the release of the film, in case what you saw on screen didn't make enough of an impression.

Interestingly, I've had this debate with people before, because before I saw intense images of Mumbai poverty in the high-culture context of an Oscar-nominated movie, I saw them in the thoroughly pop-culture context of The Amazing Race, which has filmed wrenching episodes in India in more than one of its world-traveling seasons. And when those episodes aired, there was inevitably a message-board debate about staring at poverty; filming disabled children panhandling from passing cars. The line between exploitation and the shedding of light on things the audience might otherwise never see is a tough one to draw.

I'm very interested in opinions on this question. Real poverty as part of a not-very-real story; an unsolved crisis as an element of fantasy. On the one hand, people are more aware than before of poverty in India in a way that may be more vivid; on the other..."slum tourism" sounds grotesque and creepy to my ear. What do you think?

Tonight, CBS airs the final CSI featuring William Petersen. (The show is currently pegged for 9:15 p.m. Eastern, though that's soft, based on the running time of President Bush's farewell address and the attendant coverage -- so be sure to consider that in the setting of your DVR, where applicable.)

Having seen the episode, I can tell you that Petersen's send-off contains elements of send-offs past from other shows (you'll know them when you see them), as Gil Grissom's departure shares space with the permanent installation of Laurence Fishburne's Dr. Raymond Langston, the new lead. Honestly, Fishburne doesn't seem to be moving entirely comfortably in the character quite yet, but taking an extremely high-profile position in an ensemble that's been together since 2000 can't be easy, even for an actor of his caliber.

Some shows manage what seem to be crippling departures surprisingly well: M*A*S*H, of course, did it a few times; ER gradually lost its entire original cast and survived commercially if not artistically; Cheers lasted long after Shelley Long bailed on the enterprise. Here's the question: What departures have worked the best? Maybe it's a big one, like when Clooney left ER, but maybe there's a small character whose absence was wisely leveraged into a great story. As television's top-rated show loses its lead, I ask you: what TV departures did you most admire?

by Linda Holmes

The other night, I attended a sort of dinner-club-ish show with a singer/piano guy backed by a small band. Not very edgy, this event; he performed "Love Will Keep Us Together" as well as "Weekend In New England." I'm just saying; there was nothing raucous or rip-roaring about it. Not an every-man-for-himself mosh pit. It will be important in a moment.

Anyway, when everyone else had come in and been seated, and before the show actually started, an (I'm guessing) intoxicated lady came toddling down the aisle (in her party dress and feather boa, thank you very much) and plopped into the lap of someone she knew. Her noisy arrival meant nothing good for anyone in the room, but it was particularly bad news for the people behind her, who couldn't see a thing with her wrapped around this guy and teetering on his lap. If a piano player is going to wear bright red tails with sparkles for his performance, you'd like to be able to at least see him.

Boa Lady is confronted by the mob and how you can help, after the jump...

Continue reading "Open Questions: The Live Audience's Guide To Life" >

When Facebook tells me whether I like the same movies as my friends, one set of films causes more hiccups than any other. I like the same movies as this person, EXCEPT. I would be "Best Friends" with this person (movie-wise), EXCEPT.

The "except"? The Lord Of The Rings.

I'm just not a creature person. Hobbits, elves, animatronic doodads, The Dark Crystal, that Genesis video with Reagan and Brezhnev...it's not my thing. One of my friends -- and now I can't remember which one, so I'm unable to credit this rather fantastic and useful theory -- makes it a rule never to see or read anything where any character has inappropriate punctuation (like a randomly dropped apostrophe) in his name. That rules out much of the fantasy genre, as you know.

At some point, I just didn't make it on board the Tolkien bandwagon (those movies predated the time when I was doing much writing about anything other than television, among other things), and I'm not inclined to start now. I've made it this far, right? Someday, probably, when I'm trapped on a plane or I'm sick with the flu, I will be tempted, but you know what? I think I will still refuse. It's not a judgment either on the material or on the people who like it. It's just not for me. Think me a heathen; you won't be the first.

What have you made it this far without? It's okay if it's Casablanca or James Joyce; we won't tell.

by Linda Holmes

On Patton Oswalt's gut-busting comedy record Werewolves And Lollipops, there's a marvelous bit about how he realized at one point that if he had a time machine, he wouldn't use it to meet Abe Lincoln or stop wars or anything like that.

Can this man be saved? If so, when? And who else deserves a career intervention? Lucasfilm Ltd.

 

No, he would go back and kill George Lucas before he had a chance to make the Star Wars prequels.

Now, I am not asking you to embrace bloodlust, even in jest. But I think we all have writers/actors/directors/musicians we would perhaps think of more fondly if we'd been able to go back in time and persuade them in a nonviolent manner to retire before they ruined themselves.

Stephen King before he became an Entertainment Weekly columnist? Ben Stiller after Zoolander? Perhaps Aaron Sorkin after the second season of The West Wing?

Feel free to argue strenuously — not only for your preferred candidate, but also for the precise correct moment for the nonviolent coaxing to occur in order to maximize the payoff.

by Linda Holmes

Open Questions Week continues, and today, I want to ask about pushing and shoving.

We all do it. "You have to watch this movie. Sit down. I'm putting the DVD in. Hey-hey-hey -- don't try to stand up. Sit down. On the couch. Stop talking. I'm pressing 'play.' Don't try to go to the kitchen, or I'll make you watch it twice."

Or maybe you do it with music: "I'm putting this on your iPod, and if you try to remove it, your iPod will blow up, and if you don't listen to it within a week, it will start destroying files. You don't want that, do you? I didn't think so."

This is cultural proselytizing by brute force, and you only do it with people you really like, because anyone else would probably be rather unsettled by it.

Frisky Dingo: You should watch. No, really, you should watch. Adult Swim

 

For me, on New Year's Eve, it was Frisky Dingo, an Adult Swim cartoon I discussed in the year-end TV-on-DVD piece. You almost have to force Frisky Dingo on people, because they will almost certainly have never heard of it, the concept (superhero parody) doesn't exactly sell itself, and the name sounds like it refers to either something very child-oriented or something very adult-oriented, depending on your point of view.

But it's riotously funny, and I find that most people can be hooked within one or two 11-minute episodes. It's just a matter of getting them into the handcuffs.

So what do you find yourself pushing most frequently? Is it something obscure? Something popular that most of your friends eschew as hopelessly middlebrow? A movie everyone else has forgotten all about? You never know; maybe you can pick up a convert, and isn't that what it's all about?

by Linda Holmes

I mentioned here last week that I have been, at times, an outspoken defender of Celebrity Rehab With Dr. Drew. Yes, it's the worst title in the history of reality television, quite possibly, and that's already a field with an impressive history of bad titles. Yes, the world might be a better place without either celebrities or rehab, let alone the meeting of the two.

But it's also a show where, every now and then, someone accidentally says something weirdly insightful, mostly because he or she forgot to be a self-centered yahoo for about ten seconds and a little window opened up that let a beam of light crack the otherwise impenetrable wall of superficiality. Intermittent reinforcement, right? The most effective kind of all.

I'm always fascinated by other people's "outspoken defender" experiences. It's not the same as "guilty pleasures," exactly -- guilty pleasures are the things you know have no merit but enjoy anyway. I'm talking about being the one person who truly found The Love Guru hilarious, or being the biggest fan that the ABC show Cavemen -- which was based on the insurance-selling cavemen, by the way -- ever had. The best thing you can bring to your consumption of popular entertainment is a genuine ability to think for yourself (as opposed to an ability to disagree with the majority, which is totally different, of course), so in some ways, this may be your mark of genius.

So let's throw it open: Are you an outspoken defender? Of what? Do you admit it to your family? Your friends? Have you suffered what one of my college professors would have called the disapprobation of your peers as a result? If I can admit to mine, after all, you can admit to yours.

The President-Elect: Can't get enough facts about him, even if you have to write them yourself? We're here to help. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

 

by Glenn McDonald

The UK Telegraph recently ran an intriguing piece called "Barack Obama: The 50 facts you might not know." As you may be aware, a certain percentage of Europeans -- the technical term is Pretty Much Everybody, I think -- was overjoyed at the notion of an Obama presidency. So the list runs down some rather endearing facts about our next president.

For instance, he collects Spider-Man and Conan the Barbarian comics. His favorite music includes Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, Bach and The Fugees. And he took Michelle to see the Spike Lee film Do The Right Thing on their first date. (All true.) (According to the Telegraph, anyway.)

Here at NPR HQ, we decided to apply our vast editorial (and, um, creative) resources to the task, and have come up with a bonus 25 More Facts You Might Not Know About Barack Obama.

- He can not only turn water into wine; he turns it into 1787 Chateau Lafite.

- A renowned spot shooter at Chicago pick-up basketball games, his specialty is a 3-pointer made by bouncing the ball off Mayor Richard M. Daley's forehead.

- His tears can regenerate severed limbs.

- Whenever a Republican strategist cries, Obama gets $10 richer, somehow.

A lot more facts we totally do not stand behind, after the jump...

Continue reading "You've Got Obama Facts; We've Got Space For Them" >

He knows it's a confounding oxymoron, but Mo Willems is trying to become a radio cartoonist.

He's tried it before.

And legendary New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia tried it way before, when he read comics on WNYC during a 1940s newspaper strike.

This being the 21st century and all, we're giving you the chance to out-caption the six-time Emmy winner. Below are a couple of caption-less cartoons just begging for, well, captions; leave your suggestions in the comments section, and we might use your submissions for future on-air pieces.

-- Eyder Peralta

Cartoon #1

Your Caption Here

 

One more cartoon after the jump...

Continue reading "Cartooning On The Radio: You Too Can Join Our Strange Enterprise" >

Alison Bechdel introduced her readers to 'The Rule' in 1985. Read on for more; click here to see the whole strip and hear the All Things Considered story.
Alison Bechdel/Courtesy Firebrand Books

Americans watch an average of five hours of TV a day — but how much of it is actually good? Twenty-three years ago, cartoonist Alison Bechdel had one of her female characters cite a simple rule: She'd only go to see a movie if it had:

1. At least two female characters, who ...
2. talk to each other about...
3. something besides a man.

It became known as The Bechdel Rule. It seemed like such a simple idea -- and it still resonates, because it articulates something often missing in popular culture.

More Bechdel, more rules — yours included — after the jump...

Continue reading "Parsing the Bechdel Rule, and Writing a Few of Our Own" >