In our well-developed societies, we feel an inevitable pull towards nature despite our constant progress (sea-spray scented shampoo, yule log TV program, organic food).  But do we also have an obligation as a species to push ourselves to the absolute brink of progress?  It was thought that the four minute mile was a milestone that would never be crossed.  Athletes have been using performance enhancing drugs for years, trying to gain an edge on their competition, but weren’t they also pushing the envelope of what we could accomplish as humans?  We have schools because we are not content to wander this world in a state of perfect discovery.  We have division of labor so that we can dedicate ourselves most efficiently to a job in our best skillset.  There is no rest to be found in progress, because progress is kinetic, it’s momentum, it’s evolving.  So much as we are pulled into this world of constant achievement, many of us hold back and lean towards a life that strives to commune with and be a part of nature.  The question that inevitably follows this line of thinking is, aren’t we natural?  This debate doesn’t come to a division of whether one way of life is natural or not.  This is a question of values.  Can we be satisfied with anything less than the best?  Can we appreciate the satisfaction we find in accepting less than an ideal?  This is the great question.  For me, I’ll take my progress in steps and look for satisfaction in the pauses.

(that’s Henry David Thoreau…I never read Walden, but there he is nontheless)

And then on Sunday, Phelps rose again.  In the final of the 4×100 Free Relay, Phelps swam the second leg and blew open a full body length lead (all six feet and four inches worth) on the rest of the field.  While Lochte couldn’t hold the lead his team had built through the anchor leg, the last 100 meters of the race, Phelps burned through the pool with the fire of a champion and gave the Americans the strong leg they needed to secure a Silver Medal.

Michael Phelps is the greatest competitive swimmer in the history of the world.  And this is the prediction that will prove true over the next two weeks: Michael Phelps isn’t done yet, 3 more Gold Medals are on their way.

Keep watching.

Meryl Streep won her third Academy Award this past Sunday for her performance as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 2012 film The Iron Lady.  Wait a minute?  This movie came out on January 13th, 2012…then why did she win Best Actress for the 2011 Academy Awards?  This is where Harvey Weinstein comes in.  The Iron Lady was a stinker, nobody liked it and outside of Meryl Streep turning in another great, great performance and it was a disaster at the domestic box office.  But if Meryl Streep is nominated for an Oscar, let alone if she wins, it will mean huge amounts of extra revenue in extended box office life and DVD sales.   This is what Harvey Weinstein thought and that is exactly what has happened.  According to IMDB.com and BoxOfficeMojo.com, the film didn’t have a wide release until January 13, 2012.  There was a limited release to four theaters on December 30th, 2011, which still wouldn’t qualify this film for the 2011 Academy Awards.  According to the Academy’s Rules of Eligibility the film needs to have a paid theatrical run to the public of at least seven consecutive days in Los Angeles County prior to December 31st, 2011.  While Weinstein made this run happen in time, this is hardly in keeping with the spirits of the 2011 Academy Awards.  Allowing this tactic to succeed shows the elitist bent of the Academy and shows that they don’t care whether the viewers, who pay the money to profit the films and finance the awards shows actually have a chance to see the film in the year it is being rewarded for.  This is unjust and infuriating.  There is a disconnect between what the people deserve from the Academy Awards and what Harvey Weinstein is willing to do to increase his return on investment.

*Now back to those gift baskets I mentioned.  With full page ads in Variety and gift baskets of swag sent to the right Academy members, Harvey Weinstein managed to fight aginst the public’s opinion to force a surprise Best Picture win for his film Shakespeare in Love over Steven Spielberg’s moving, character driven war film, Saving Private Ryan.  This should have never happened.  That makes two big black eyes for The Academy when it comes to Harvey Weinstein.  Disgusting.

But to be fair, Harvey Weinstein is a genius.  He provides a major channel for the release of foreign films in the U.S. in addition to his long-standing relationships with Woody Allen and Quinten Tarantino.  Here are some of the best of what he’s distrubuted through Miramax and The Weinstein Co.: My Left Foot, The Grifters, Reservoir Dogs, The Piano, Clerks, Pulp Fiction, Il Postino, Sling Blade, Trainspotting, The English Patient, Swingers, Good Will Hunting, Air Bud: Golden Receiver, Life is Beautiful, Skakespeare in Love, Amelie, Chicago, The Hours, The Aviator, Tsotsi, The Queen, Gone Baby Gone, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, There Will Be Blood, The King’s Speech, and the latest and the 2011 Best Picture winner The Artist.

If you’ve curious to read for yourself the Rules and Eligibility for the Academy Awards, it’s not a bad read.  Here’s a link:  http://www.oscars.org/awards/academyawards/rules/84aa_rules.pdf

It’s easy to start with the best as there was one clear winner, Ferris Bueller…who else?  Many people knew this one was coming as the buzz on the web and Twitter came on real strong from a YouTube teaser earlier, and this spot lived up to the hype.  It’s been 26 years since this movie’s release, but Matthew Broderick didn’t miss a beat in reprising his iconic role as a grown up, skipping work, and driving around his Honda CRV.  The only disappointment around this commercial was that we had to count its run-time in seconds instead of minutes and that it seems this was just an ad after all and not a very clever preview for Ferris 2.

Full version is like visiting an old friend, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhkDdayA4iA

And now for the worst.  Bud Light Platinum.  That’s a name for a credit card, not a beer.  And in two separate commercials, Bud told the audience nothing about it’s product.  This was as poorly constructed a set of commercials as I’ve seen with this much at stake.  The audience was really expected to buy into Bud Platinum on the visual tease of a vibrant blue beer bottle.  Forget taste or substance, people should drink this beer because it’s got an intriguing colored bottle.  This is not a strong message, even in the image conscious culture of young beer drinkers.  I anticipate that there will be many, many follow ups to those two Bud Plat commercials, but so many people have tuned out and turned off that this brand has an uphill battle to fight.  Instead of putting the money behind Bud Light, which is the strongest seller in the brand and usually the Super Bowl darling, Budweiser came out swinging with…well, who knows what it is other than its name?

In commercials, the best way to succeed is to either inspire or entertain the audience.  Don’t educate us and don’t scare us, that’s terrible.  Now inspiring commercials don’t usually get as much play as comedic or entertaining commercials, but there were two stars in this category tonight…and one failure.  The two stars were Best Buy Mobile and their phone and app geniuses and the night cap of great commercials, the NBC 24-hour Sports Network spot.  The big ad that didn’t work was voiced by a legend, but it just didn’t work.  Poor Clint Eastwood, didn’t anyone think that a quiet, word-driven commercial wouldn’t play well during a Super Bowl party?  If the audience would have watched this commercial, what they would have seen was a semi-political, preachy, incongruent, discordant, and weird (why does it switch from color to black and white?) ad that tried to win on imagery alone.  This was terrible.

The last subset of commercials to discuss could be lengthy because there were a lot of them, the movie preview commercial.  Big budget action movies come out in full force to a big budget event like the Super Bowl and there was no shortage of previews this year, The Avengers, : John  Carter, Battleship, G.I. Joe: Retaliation, and then Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace.  All of these movies  are big budget releases, but they are not at all equals.  Of all these trailers, two big ones stand out above the rest:  The Avengers and Star Wars.  I’m up for a good preview any day, but John Carter will not be profitable, it’s too high-budget for its unrecognizable main character who everybody is going to confuse with John Connor from Terminator until they see him dressed up like Conan the Barbarian.  Battleship is a big stretch as well.  Using a board game to inspire a movie has been done a ton of times, but the nostalgia toy box must be getting pretty thin if Battleship is sailing onto the big screen.  And G.I. Joe 2?  Well…that’s probably all that needs to be said, except that if a bunch of ninjas with swords are hanging from a mountain by ropes and dueling with swords, I don’t know why they just don’t cut the ropes of the bad guys and save us all trouble of watching a totally unnecessary sword fight among a bunch of soldiers with guns.
The Super Bowl itself had an amazing finish, but the football definitely outweighed the poor overall quality of the commercials.  They were only entertaining in the margins and if it wasn’t for the stars mentioned above and a couple of cute Doritos spots to lighten the mood, we would have been left with very little  to cheer and nothing to spend our money on.  One last little ad to put a smile on your face from NBC:  The Olympics are coming!  London 2012, see you there!

Lets start off with a really good one, and the brief story of its discovery. I was listening to a podcast replay of Terry Gross’s interview of David Carr on Fresh Air. Carr is a writer for the New York Times and they were discussing his career and especially the events surrounding the documentary about the New York Times, Page One. With a little help from Netflix, I was able to insta-watch the movie. Only about ten minutes in, we got our first Look-e-Like and I still haven’t finished the movie. Without further ado, Entertainthing presents Clay Shirkey: writer, teacher, and consultant in the field of Internet Technology.

You may also know him as…Tom Hanks.

There’s only one more Look-e-Like in this edition, but I always have my eyes open for more. This one came about when I was watching TV in my room after sleeping in a bit in Las Vegas. The sun was completely blocked out by the heaviest curtains in the world and while the shower poured away in the granite studded bathroom, I lazily left the TV turned to an old episode of Law and Order: Criminal Intent. First, a non-look alike caught my attention. Her name is Callie Thorne and when I’m not sharp enough on the DVR remote, I catch her face on a promo for her show Necessary Roughness while I’m watching Psych. She’s not a feature of the article, but here’s her picture anyway.

Now that I think about it, she does look an awful like an actor that shouldn’t have her own show…

Starring along with Callie in this episode was a guy we’ve seen a lot before, in Quantam of Solace, The Green Hornet, he’s been all over TV. But this time, looking like the stressed-out criminal boyfriend of a criminal murderer girlfriend, he looked to me an awful lot like an Emmy winner. Ty Burrell from Modern Family. David’s on the left.

Now tell me they couldn’t be brothers!

I’m sure more great Look-e-Likes are just around the corner, please e-mail if you see any. Ok, one more for the road.

Suzy Amis, Edie Finneran from The Usual Suspects and Eric Stoltz.

Being second best is never good enough for Mr. Cowell and he’s officially turned XFactor USA upside down in order to close the gap with the king of sing, the number one rated, American Idol.  Some of these changes were expected, but there was one very big surprise in store as well.

Viewers had hoped for revenge on former judge Nicole Scherzinger for the frustration she caused and the tears she brought from favorite contestants, Rachel Crow and Drew Ryniewicz.  Nicole could have saved either of these popular girls, but her immaturity and cowardice forced early exits for these contestants, even against Simon Cowell’s wishes.  It seems that it was only a matter of time before Simon returned the favor.  Namaste, Nicole.

Not as impactful, despite his seemingly important role as the host of the show, Steve Jones will also be leaving XFactor.  This handsome and friendly guy didn’t add much to the production and certainly had very little X-Factor himself, but he did a competent job.  When you trail your competition by six million viewers, the theory is that if you don’t add something, you’re subtracting.  With this in mind, Steve got the axe.  This also makes Cowell the only Brit on the show with an authoritative accent to match.

Now the  big surprise.  Paula Abdul has just announced that she is also leaving XFactor behind.  She has given the impression that it was an amicable breakup, but a breakup nonetheless.  It will be sad to see Paula go as she really did make a good match for Simon.  They had some very warm and funny moments in between their usual squabbles and their old charm worked well to break up some very dry moments on the panel.  On paper, losing Paula looks to be Cowell’s riskiest move yet, but it shows that Simon understands something fundamental about the success of his show: He’s got to have the X-Factor on the panel if he’s ever going to make one on the stage.

Touch is the story of Martin Bohm (Kiefer Sutherland) who is the single father of a speechless, autistic young boy named Jake who just may have the key to salvation in the numerical way he sees the world.  Through a series of interlocking stories, this preview shows the incalculable ways each person’s actions affect everyone else.

Touch worked incredibly well in its dramatic television format.  This type of story has been attempted many times in a feature film format, but high pressure comes with a high budget and a film only has one chance to tell its story.  With story lines from Tokyo to Iraq and Dublin to New York, this was a debut whose total result was equal to much more than it’s parts. This would be a must watch series except for a couple of things.  Too bad one of those things is that the main characters were the least interesting part of the show.

By far the best part of this preview is that they used the kid and his numbers as the catalyst for an incredible mixing of characters and story lines. From the preview for the next episode (over a month from now!?), it’s clear that the show is going to ditch all of the side characters they developed in the preview for the next episode so we’ll just be left with Bohm and Son, Kiefer and kid.  What we’re being told by the creators of Touch is that instead of taking the time and putting in the effort of developing seven or eight interesting characters for the arc of the series, the plan is to make this an episodic effort which will be more mission than character based. One of the best shows of all time, L O S T, was so incredible because those writers made the effort and took the risk of giving their substantial character base the time to develop their individual and shared stories to the very end.  Touch isn’t committed to taking that risk and they’re going to leave the audience with a formula which will never recapture the promise this “Preview” had.  It’s a shame that such a huge and obvious investment in talent and time, with the world to work with, is going to develop the invented mystery of math instead of character.  Well, it was only a preview, we’ve still got a shot at being surprised when the show comes back…March 19th.

2011 saw some stiff competition for Idol with The Voice and the top-talent filled, Simon Cowell hosted, XFactor USA.  Between these new singing competitions and another season of a Randy Jackson led judges panel, American Idol could find its ratings take a big slip.  While American Idol has produced some top-selling talent, it was XFactor which actually discovered and developed the best singing voice since the American Idol era with the incredibly talented Melanie Amaro.  From the very first audition, millions of viewers knew who would win that show.  XFactor was built on its huge production value and the diverse talent of its performers.  Huge stages with pyrotechnics and crews of dancers and backup singers filled the small screen every week. 

American Idol’s huge value comes from being first.  They were the first big show of its kind since Star Search and it hasn’t looked back since its first season.  This isn’t to say that American Idol doesn’t have something to learn from XFactor and The Voice (probably not so much from The Voice though).  Idol can find itself being repetitive and very, very long.  It can take a long time to sift through the large group of competitors and Idol producers have clearly made the choice to trade off some amount of quality for a huge increase in the quantity of episodes they produce.  Now that the alternatives to American Idol are growing, people may start to fall off.  The only way to see for sure would be a head to head competition, but XFactor has just finished its run and American Idol doesn’t debut again until later this month.  Guess we don’t have to choose just yet…unless you choose not to watch at all.  We’ll find out soon enough, American Idol is back with a two-night debut January 18th and 19th.

Ira Glass is not someone you’d think of as a closer.  He’s not Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross.  He looks like a mix of Buddy Holly and Billie Joe Armstrong and he sounds like your average run of the mill nerd.  But boy, he makes sense.  He cuts his pitch down from the general and talks to the individual.  He talks to the addicts who are still listening even to the pledge drive.  He makes sense.  He also makes you feel guilty, not in the terrible guilty where you end up eating a dozen donuts, but the guilty where you pick up the phone.  The other day, after calling a big-listening non-donator at home, he actually got the guy to say, “I’ve been a scoundrel.”  That’s incredible!  He got a grown man to call himself a scoundrel and then donate.  And imagine all the dozens of other scoundrels listening to that who called in afterwards.  Ira Glass could be as good as Ron Popeil, “Pledge-it and Forget it!” an expert pitchman.

Ira Glass is an incredible reporter, but he might be an even better pledge-drive pitchman.  Now back to your regularly scheduled program.