Hatchets in the Dark (B+)

Holy crap. Turns out Chris Evans can act.  He can hold his own against Tilda Swinton and John Freaking Hurt.  "Captain America" proves himself an actor who balances brutal action with believable character discovery in Snowpiercer.

A train endlessly circles the ice-encased earth.  Aboard the thousand carriages of this ark-on-rails, humanity's remnant survives.  The population is harshly striated, class determined by one's distance from the locomotive.  Evans leads the latest revolt, taking Jamie Bell, Octavia Spencer, and Kang-ho Song along in a quest for the holy engine.

Nurture Shock & Trophy Kids

Alex Gregory for The New Yorker

Recently, I listened to an interview with Ashley Merryman, co-author of Nurture Shock: New Thinking About Children.  She argues that we’ve raised a generation of trophy kids.  They are rewarded not for excellence so much as mere existence.  One example:  more money is spent on trophies by youth soccer organizations nationwide than on coach training or equipment.  Indeed, parents faced with little league budget cuts more often choose to save money by playing fewer games than by giving fewer trophies.

Some other highlights from Merryman’s interview:

Self-Reported Mischief

Tom Hiddleston as Loki, the Norse god of mischief.

Last year, Margo created a survey to gauge attitudes toward bullies by their middle school peers.  The questions took months to draft and vet for bias. The Institutional Review Board checked her protocol against NSF rules for the ethical treatment and informed consent of human subjects.  The survey was tested on a dozen middle schoolers.  Three of them misunderstood the wording of question 17.  Six more rewrites.

Next Margo sought guinea pigs.  She needed a representative mix of ethnicities and genders.  Some urban schools, some rural.  Private and public.  Bible Belt South and affluent Northeast.  Six weeks of research, e-mails, and snail mail.  The begging phone calls to sixty principals:  “Yes sir.  Completely anonymous.  I know, sir.  You’re absolutely right; the school day is precious.  I promise.  Fifteen minutes, max.”

The Scariest Comedy Ever (A)

Harold Lloyd, the most popular comic of the silent age, in Safety Last.

If you don’t know silent comedy, then maybe you’ve only heard of Charlie Chaplin.  If you took a Film Appreciation course in college, you might also know Buster Keaton.  But when Safety Last was released in 1923, Harold Lloyd was by far a bigger star than either of his better-remembered competitors. 

Lloyd’s masterwork follows a Midwestern rube to bustling Los Angeles.  He promises to send for his naïve fiancée when he makes good.  But he can’t afford married life on the hourly wage of a dry goods clerk.  When his manager offers $1000 to anyone who can dramatically increase the store’s visibility, Lloyd concocts a public event with his roommate, a “human fly” known for scaling skyscrapers.  Only the roommate never quite does his share of the climbing, leaving Lloyd to navigate twelve stories of obstacles without a net.

The Cosby Conundrum

Teachers of media history routinely screen episodes of The Cosby Show for their students.  We cite it as a turning point in the cultural depiction of African Americans.  A colleague of mine now wonders if he should be troubled by rape accusations surfacing against the series’ eponymous star.

Of course he should be troubled.  We should all be troubled by accusations of sexual misconduct.  Will Cosby’s personal life color his contribution to media history (and vice versa)?  Yes.  Does that complicate our appraisal of the Huxtables?  Does it add to the meta-conversations about black celebrity presented in Black Dynamite?  Yes, yes, and again… yes.

Avid, Apple & Adobe (Again)

Today's essay comes with a caveat:  We are always, always, always having this conversation.  Production folk don't ever stop talking about it.  I do not expect it to be helpful a year from now as the marketplace changes.  But because a colleague asked (she's on the cusp of a major institutional purchase), I'll submit some observations that feel true to me in the moment.

Our school (70 production majors at a liberal arts college of 3500) was firmly committed to Avid. The company had market share. They had ProTools. They had the edge in server-based file sharing. They had great student pricing. Then, in February, Avid stock was delisted by NASDAQ following some financial shenanigans. Even though they’ve been reinstated, I think institutions are (rightly) a bit wary of financial dealings with them.

If It Bleeds, It Leads (A)

Jake Gyllenhaal as video mercenary Louis Bloom in Nightcrawler.

One of my dearest grad school professors came to academia from the news desk of an Alabama TV station.  She wrote her dissertation on the relationship between morbidity and ratings, observing a significant increase in the coverage of violent crime and trauma during the ratings sweeps of February and November.  TV ad rates for the rest of the year are determined by the audience measurement snapshots taken during these periods. 

The pressure on local news programs is enormous.  Their ads typically account for more local revenue than any other programs a station carries.  Thus, low ratings frequently motivate personnel changes.  Anchors, reporters, news directors — they all live and die by the ratings book.  So the connection of ratings and revenue to the “if-it-bleeds-it-leads” headline is intensely personal.  You want to keep your job?  Deliver eyeballs.  Make people watch.