* = closing line from a local news broadcast from Providence, RI. The anchor said this just before cutting to footage of a horse swimming in a pool, which ran for 2-3 seconds before the commercial break.

When I was in São Paulo last week, one of the TV stations I got in my hotel room was CNN’s international service.  I’m not sure if this was CNN International under a new guise, or some other version of the network directed at international audiences.  Regardless, what disturbed me was first, the idea that CNN would present two different newscasts under the same name (“CNN”) with no mention of them differing from one another, and second, just how much smarter the version aimed at non-Americans seemed to be.  Instead of snarky tidbits and frothy lifestyle stories presented by former runway models, this international version of CNN featured long-format round-table discussions about the situation in Iran, and an entire show devoted to global press coverage.  And best of all, Lou Dobbs was nowhere to be seen.  After watching this CNN for a few minutes, I felt like I had actually learned something. (more…)

For obvious reasons I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about the severe economic crisis we’re experiencing (can anyone ignore this, even if they try?).  One of the interesting questions the crisis poses has to do with how younger Americans – say, people around the age of my undergraduate students – will react to it, and in particular, what kind of impact it will have on their attitudes toward the free market as an apparently intuitive part of social arrangements in this country.

Those of us who are now around 30, give or take a couple of years, grew up in a period of free market ascendence inaugurated by Reagan, Thatcher, and the rest of the conservative, pro-market politicians who dominated our childhood.  By the 1980s, the Soviet Union, bogged down in Afghanistan and rotting from the inside economically and institutionally (and with little moral authority to speak of), in no way represented the viable alternative to the free market that it did – or seemed to – in earlier decades, when large swaths of the developing world looked to central planning and maybe single-party government as effective means of achieving development.  The crumbling of the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe and of the USSR itself  in 1991 only confirmed that, as Fareed Zakaria put it in a recent speech in Silicon Valley, capitalism modeled on the U.S. was in the post-Soviet world the  ”only game in town.”  This became orthodoxy during the nineties, and why not, with the domestic economy booming and the stock market reaching heights never seen before?  

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In reference to the Bourne Supremacy Mark commented that he tends to take one scene from a trailer and decide: “This is what this movie is going to be about,” and then sit in anxious anticipation for said scene when actually watching the movie. This can lead to trouble when the only reason you went to see a movie was a 2 second moment that didn’t make the final cut, as Mark and I found out first-hand for “The Last Samurai.” However, sometimes it’s just impossible to not form some notion about what a movie is or is going to be based on the only available data you have: trailers. All of that is to preface that I know absolutely nothing about “The Bucket List” except for the advertising I’ve seen on TV.

Having said that, I guess I don’t understand what the appeal of this movie is. First off it seems like just an excuse to get the two senior statesmen of the acting world and parade them around in their age of decline. It’s like making a movie where Sean Connery and Sidney Poitier write each other’s eulogies and then act them out via interpretive dance. Maybe that could be a good movie, I don’t know, but the life seems sort of sucked out of the concept when the one-dimensional premise is splattered across the trailer. “We were supposed to make a list of all the things we wanted to do in our lives before we –” [in unison] “–Kick the bucket!!” Cut to montage of telling people off, snubbing your family, and skydiving. Can someone please tell me a reason why I still need to see this after having watched the trailer?

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