Listening to this week’s episode of the always-awesome radio show/podcast, The Business, I listened with amusement to the stories of reporters talking about what a nightmare it is to report on Hollywood.
I had no idea about any of this back in 1997, when I was working at the Potomac News and the second team for the $75 million disaster flick Deep Impact came to Prince William County, Virginia. They were there to film an evacuation scene on Interstate 66, heading out of Washington, DC as the comet approaches Earth.
My editor was told that we would be given a chance to participate in the scene — i.e., sit in my car on the blacktop for eight hours and write about the experience — which sounded like a fun little feature story.
I also got word that they’d be casting for said scene at middle school in Manassas in the gym. The news hole is always hungry, so I called for days and days, trying to touch base with someone — anyone — involved in the production to talk about what the process was like. Because movies don’t do a lot of casting in suburban northern Virginia, it was a story we all agreed would be of interest to our readership.
But I got nowhere with the telephone calls. The day approached and I said to myself, “Self, they’re meeting in a public venue” (this is obviously before the Columbine killings turned public schools across America into closed campuses) “and there’s no controls over who is coming and going, so it’s a public gathering. Just go and cover it.”
So I did.
The story came out in the paper, and a nice little slice of cinematic life it was.
And then a publicist for the production called up and screamed at my editor, saying I was banned from the set (Interstate 66) and that they didn’t want to see me anywhere near their production. My editor, Barb, eventually calmed her down enough to agree that another reporter could have the coveted sit-on-the-road-for-eight-hours gig. A non-features reporter got the story, and pretty much phoned it in.
This all seemed (and seems) highly irrational to me, but it’s apparently the way it goes in entertainment journalism, where information can be tightly controlled by the entertainment companies and the journalists are forced to dance to irrational whims. It was a shock to me, and I spitefully chose to not see the film, even if it does feature President Morgan Freeman.
In the end, Deep Impact commercially came in second to the other disaster-from-space flick to come out in 1998, Armageddon. I like to think it was my boycott that made the difference.
Although some critics and vampire movie fans like to poo-poo the Blade franchise, the blood shower scene in the original Blade film is easily one of the most iconic moments in vampire fiction, a great, shocking and jarring visual that easily stands up to the best in any other vampire films.
Unfortunately, that sort of story-telling is absent in Blade: Trinity
, which mostly feels tired, despite the gung-ho willingness of Ryan Reynolds and the terribly earnest Jessica Biel. Snipes’ one-note attitude gets cartoonish in this chapter and, honestly, any movie that makes fun of a vampire’s haircut but lets Blade’s pass without comment has some serious blindspots.
The film also relies on viewers having seen the second Blade movie, otherwise the tri-part vampire mouths on several vamps in this movie will just be baffling. This probably isn’t a big issue, since most viewers will have seen the other two movies in the series, but it seems careless not to address this in at least a single throwaway line.
Sloppiest of all, though, is the finale, where Blade’s “final gift” is never explained and is mostly a “huh?” moment.
The film retains the visual pizzazz of the original, but doesn’t have the sense of humor that made the grim elements work.
Still, worth seeing for fans of the first two films.
Here’s a bill sure to give journalists and pesky free speech types the night sweats until a court hopefully slaps it down with the constitutional sledgehammer:
WASHINGTON — Reporters who write about government surveillance could be prosecuted under proposed legislation that would solidify the administration’s eavesdropping authority, according to some legal analysts who are concerned about dramatic changes in U.S. law.
The draft would add to the criminal penalties for anyone who “intentionally discloses information identifying or describing” the Bush administration’s terrorist surveillance program or any other eavesdropping program conducted under a 1978 surveillance law.
Under the boosted penalties, those found guilty could face fines of up to $1 million, 15 years in jail or both.
Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, said the measure is broader than any existing laws. She said, for example, the language does not specify that the information has to be harmful to national security or classified.
“The bill would make it a crime to tell the American people that the president is breaking the law, and the bill could make it a crime for the newspapers to publish that fact,” said Martin, a civil liberties advocate.
DeWine is co-sponsoring the bill with Sens. Olympia Snowe of Maine, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. The White House and Republican Senate leaders have indicated general support, but the bill could face changes as it works its way through Congress.
David Tomlin, the AP’s assistant general counsel, said government officials with security clearances would be potential targets under DeWine’s bill.
“But so would anyone else who received an illegal disclosure under the proposed act, knew what it was and deliberately disclosed it to others. That’s what some reporters do, often to great public benefit,” he said.
Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said the language would allow anyone _ “if you read a story in the paper and pass it along to your brother-in-law” _ to be prosecuted.
“As a practical matter, would they use this to try to punish any newspaper or any broadcast? It essentially makes coverage of any of these surveillance programs illegal,” she said. “I’m sorry, that’s just not constitutional.”
The British have similar restrictions on journalists to a much more sweeping extent. Coverage of someone being in trouble for disclosing information the follow-up articles can’t even allude to is as bizarre as you might imagine.
So, we spent the weekend in Vegas.
Friday, we drove up to State Line — I’m clearly not yet a California boy, because “State Line” still sounds like where the crooks run in 1970s country-western songs. But, in this case, it’s the location of the Primm Valley, a very inexpensive (albeit not particularly cheap) way to visit Vegas while having a substantially better place to crash at night than the Budget Inn at a Budget Inn sort of price. Any hotel/casino with its own movie theater and log flume ride inside is all right by me.
We drove into Vegas to see the biggest, glitziest show in town, by any yardstick: Celine Dion’s “A Brand New Day.” While her core audiences were represented — gays, Canadians and gay Canadians — the audience was packed in general. Word had gotten out that this was a show to see.
There’s a giant (I think someone said five stories high) LCD video monitor comprising the back of the stage. Combined with good old fashioned stagecraft — clever tricks of the light, smoke machines, set pieces rising and falling into the stage floor — the screen served to create probably a dozen different sets. Then, on top of this, add in the Cirque du Soleil‘s former director creating a show full of surreal images — flying piano movers with a floating piano, for instance — and a modern dance choreographer packing the stage with all the hopping, twirling, flipping dancers millions and millons of Caesar’s Palace dollars can buy.
The net effect was of cranking up the sound and fury of a big rock concert to 11, and then adding the baffling nature of modern dance atop it. There were two dancers always on stage: A yellow bellhop who sometimes apparently tried to interfere with the other dancers, and a guy in a white skullcap up stage left, who sometimes seemed to be an idealized romantic figure, although both of them, frankly, were pretty creepy. (My in-laws loved them both. Apparently there’s a modern dance appreciation gene I do not possess.) It was all very French (Canadian).
As my sister-in-law pointed out, though, you don’t have to be a fan of Celine’s songs to appreciate that she puts on a hell of a show, and surprisingly little of it involving a full-force blast from her mighty Québécois lungs. She had a lot of covers in the show, for one thing. If you don’t enjoy a smoky version of “Fever,” you should be in jail.
Saturday, Jenn and I bummed around Vegas, riding the new monorail (two thumbs up here) and staying out of the cold wind.
It says something about Vegas that you have to specify which roller coaster in/around/above a hotel you rode. In our case, it was Speed at the Sahara and it was all it was cracked up to be. One of the most fun rides I’ve ever been on, without question. It’s also one of the last vestiges of the family friendly experiment Vegas has abandoned since the last time Jenn and I were there: Everywhere, Vegas had gone back to sexing it up, with giant billboards of womens’ thong-clad (well, as much as thongs clad anything) buttocks everywhere, advertising sexy new shows at seemingly every hotel. Vegas is once again an all-smoking, all-drinking, all-horny, all-gambling city of sin. One of these days, I expect a Nevada/Utah border war to break out.
We also had so-so Italian for lunch at Caesars, saw the lion habitat at the MGM Grand, checked out the flamingos at the Flamingo and basically just wandered around until we hooked back up with the in-laws for dinner at Margaritaville.
Now, I will confess to being one of those parrotheads — and after a dozen or so Jimmy Buffett concerts, I think there’s probably no escaping that label — who felt uncomfortable with Jimmy’s slide (well, drop off a cliff is more accurate) into hardcore commercialism, but that said, Margaritaville rocked. The restaurant design was a hoot — the deep sea fishing boat booths were an especially great touch — the food was a solid mix of island cuisine and New Orleans-inspired dishes and the booze was really, really good.
After that, we capped off our weekend in Vegas with that most seminal of Vegas entertainment — no, not boobies, the in-laws were along — celebrity impersonations. In a weekend full of surrealism, this was probably its peak. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a Jackie Wilson impersonator, but I’m glad to learn there’s a place where someone who looks like Prince can find something other than fear and suspicion. Jackie, Prince, Celine Dion, Whitney Houston and, of course, the King of Rock and Roll, were all excellent. (The Blues Brothers seemed like they found a chubby guy and a tall guy who could, in theory, play the harmonica. They sounded, looked and danced nothing like the actual McCoys, who I think are probably below the level to qualify for even this sort of variety act.)
You’ll notice the one thing I haven’t mentioned is gambling. We did play a little video poker while at Buffalo Bill’s at State Line, but it was mostly to kill a little time and to see if I could get more Southern Comfort and Coke than I would be paying for normally, if I wasn’t sticking my bills into the poker machine and slowly playing a quarter a hand games. (Naturally, this screws up my odds-estimating ability, which is the whole point of the exercise from the point of view of the casino.) But I don’t get the visceral thrill that actual gamblers get from the moment of risk. I find slot machines especially baffling, as they eliminate all pretense that the gambler has any control over their fate: You could pay a monkey to play the slots for you, or indeed, just to take your money from you to start with and blow it all on booze and monkey floozies.
Bottom line: We had a lot of fun, drank a moderate amount of booze, gambled a little bit, saw two great shows, saw other things both cool and surreal and will definitely be coming back soon. The only Vegas thing I really want to do that I haven’t done yet is stay in a hotel actually on The Strip. I’m thinking The Flamingo might be the way to go when that happens. I actually liked The Rio better, but it’s too far off the beaten path (and monorail track).
Tracie Troha over at the Daily Press has a good one today, about a new shopping center going up next to I-15 and Main Street.
Speaking on the behalf of Hesperia, I invite everyone to come to our city, barely use our roads, and drop sales tax revenue in the city’s collective piggy bank.
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