Ross and the Refrigerator of Doom

There is something acutely loathsome about most movie reviewers. Whenever you peruse their work, vainly trying to justify your feelings about a movie, you can rest assured those odious critics will almost always disagree with you in a condescending way.

This is not Bob Ross, long time movie critic for the Tampa Tribune. Instead of being the argumentative and condescending critic artiste, Ross is down-to-earth and deferential.

In his 22 years at the Tribune, he saw some great films, and witnessed a transformation in the way our society sees films. Nowadays, everything is a numbers game. The news media focuses on how much money a film made at the Box Office. That is the singular goal of today's film industry.

Oscar-worthy has come to mean a film you see once. Whereas the movies that make money are usually not intellectually threatening or unconventional in the slightest. This system rewards mediocrity and punishes the daring. A film about gay cowboys was hardly recognized in monetary or artistic measure. And yet, think of the money made by those three prequels spawned from George Lucas' syphilitic brain.

Here's a peek at the Box Office's top 100 films, there's some solid evidence that money earned does not equal quality of script or acting performance. Case and point: Star Wars Episode I and III are in the top 10. The only Indiana Jones film on the top 25 is the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels beat out the original.

If the Box Office is any judgment of how good a film is, then I must immediately submit my request to dissolve our society. We cannot be trusted.

For all its faults though, movie criticism has retained its sharp edge and unwavering loyalty to quality and not currency. "Movie criticism hasn't been battered into total mediocrity" unlike other forms of critical journalism, said Bob Ross.

For a long time, he enjoyed a community upheaval to every review he wrote. Some would never see a movie that he liked, while others would always go to see a film he reviewed positively. The perk, Ross said, is that "you get to inflict your opinion on large groups of people". By the way, love the use of inflict. Like a disease.

Honestly though, I applaud his ability to be deferential about what does and does not make a good film. I don't have that virtue. People who enjoy mediocre films, I simply cannot comprehend.

I think Ross would agree that the system encourages mediocrity. Tired plot devices and ludicrously flashy effects have replaced the soviet budgets of the films of yesteryear that came to define our culture. As a result the movies we now worship are ludicrous.

A refrigerator has the ability to shield its inhabitants from a nuclear blast because of lead paint? (Indiana Jones' diabolical new incarnation) Nonsense.

Walter Mears

"As a society, we're going to come to a conclusion that we can't do without this..." said retired AP Vice President and Pulitzer Prize winner Walter Mears.

The 'this' is newspapers, or generally, high quality journalism.

So what do we do, when all the money dries up, when no one wants to pay the AP, or any wire service, for ground-zero information? Sincerely, we are in for the long haul when news deteriorates into the "revenue-generating system" of Mears' prophesy.

Instead of addressing the symptoms: blogs, polarization and abandonment of hard news. What about the disease itself? Mears suggested that the problem goes as far back as high school civics. Or more importantly, how many Americans don't have this class anymore. Among other things, Civics taught students how to "disseminate information on an objective level."

Without this objective training, adults develop with no concept of fact, as bizarre as that sounds. Instead, people these days more closely portray the villain from Mears campaign anecdote.

While covering an event, a blogger asks Mears who he's voting for. Mears gives the traditional old timer response: none of your business. The blogger then inquired as to how anyone should know whether or not to trust him if he does not take a stand for one side or the other.

Now, this story seems a little ridiculous after thinking about it. Not to doubt its veracity, but maybe the context is a little skewed. Maybe I just have a problem admitting any human being could contain, in her or her skull, logic like that. Logic, which manifests from a brain which is physically identical to mine and every other human being. That is truly terrifying.

But, maybe the real problem is that we only have two choices. If Americans had seven legitimate parties to chose from in an election, and seven unique combinations of political dogma, then the intellectual dissonance might act as a crucible spewing unadulterated fact.

Alternatively, we might just be creating more weak arguments, as Manjoo claims, that would serve as six reasons why person number one is right, as opposed to just one reason in our two-party system.

Mears might have prophesized our doom when he recalled Barry Goldwater in 1964 with his cadres of Goldwater-ites shouting "Don't tell me anything I don't wanna hear." Its evident in his own hometown. Mears spoke about how when he's about town he encounters people who are totally disinterested with knowing the facts.

History's cyclical nature may be at fault. We may be headed towards a time when more than just nutcase Goldwater-ites reject objective fact.

Best of Blogs: Liberal Gibberish

I did my best to find some interesting conservative blogs - you know, that weren't overtly racist - but I guess I will have to achieve that goal next time. I just cherry-picked the top of the Top 100 Blogs e-mail from Professor Thelen.

1: The Huffington Post

It's equally hard hitting columns (on the left of the screen) mixed with liberal drive-bys trickling down the right side of the screen. The front and center top of the homepage has the same tired economic stories that now engender perpetual brain dump in the populace. The presentation is top notch though. Every scroll down the page continued to engage me with the kind of stories I love to laugh at. Jon Stewart is crucifying CNBC and Jim Cramer. Bill Maher is debating Ann Coulter. Palin's teen-preggo daughter split with her racist jock boyfriend. Holy crap! It's a liberal orgasm.

Holding it's pitiful own on the left of the Huffington Post's homepage are featured blog posts and Arianna Huffington's own blog posts. This is where the intellectual gravy of the blog ladle rests.

2: The Daily Kos

Like the Huffington Post, the Daily Kos highlights other blogs from the internet along the side of the screen. Unlike the Post, these guys have a much shorter list of stories. These focus mainly on interesting perspectives on current events, as opposed to just reporting them. Kos reports on a change in the approval rating of Congress and interior plots by Republicans to oust Michael Steele. This is a perspective we don't often hear from in the mainstream press, which is more focused on what has already happened. At the same time, this blog is clouded with advertisements, and terrible graphics. This blog instead incorporates whole stories into the home page instead of giving readers the option to pick and chose what they want to read.

3: The Daily Dish

I prefer this blog's look above all the others. It doesn't have a list of other blogs stealing the spotlight. Instead this has a certain visual flow more reminiscent of a newspaper. The Daily Dish has a flag, and a bar at the top with links to other facets of the website, which really help it organize into something less than a paint splat on the internet. Andrew Sullivan's website is a collection of innocuous innocent topics, like "A dog that fetches you beer". The blog is a lot less of a liberal hit job and more a collection of interesting goings-on.

This blog feels personable. That's something I haven't noticed on the others I've looked at. They all feel corporatized. Andrew Sullivan's blog captures what concerns him most, and probably helps him touch some of his readers on a deeply personal level.

The Art of Martin (Fennelly)

Ars Moriendi, if you can’t guess by the name, is the art of dying.
See, people used to believe this crazy hoopla about how you composed yourself on your deathbed. If you were submissive and penitent you’d go to heaven, if you were choleric and cursed God, you’d go to hell. Crazy stuff.

Enter Martin Fennelly. Sure he’s a sports writer. But, in the cocaine arms-race that is modern sports (my suggestion; not Fennelly’s) a lot of bodies fall to the wayside. Fennelly’s job is to capture that moment of death, the ars moriendi and give us that “one little morsel” that births a human connection with the deceased.

His grim obsession with everything morbid took on an interesting spin with me. Depictions of the dead and dying are fresh in my mind from a book I’m reading for another class: “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War”. Basically, it catalogs first-hand accounts of death, dying, coping and mourning through 250 soul-crushing pages. Not unlike Martin Fennelly.

Ars Moriendi is what popped into my head when Fennelly explained trying to capture human moments from the deceased. Collectively humans want to frame death in a way that is comfortable with our worldview and reassures us that the dead are going to a better place.

What’s ridiculous to redundancy is his funereal humor and preference for man shorts – the kind that dangerously suggest the faint borders of the fur all men bare.

Fennelly got into writing because of a program his school had when he was a teenager. A subversive paper that allowed him to use satire to critique anything he wanted, and it was circulated within the school. Our cushy society and school system wouldn’t abide so much as a discussion of ever making this reality again. Maybe that’s part of the reason print is dying.

So this is the guy: the court jester whose responsibility it is to tell the truth about unpleasant things.

With a death toll around 6 – no wait! – 7 – sure it isn’t higher? – Fennelly is perfectly qualified to divulge the secrets of mortality. Apparently, that secret is just to do your best. Cope the best you can and do your job the best you can.

The loved ones of the deceased he told us about were often forwarding with information. It was just as shocking to us as to him that these people would want to tell a scummy journalist about the recently deceased. And yet, at the moment of most profound tragedy, it helps to tell that person’s story just one more time.

As he said, it’s probably the last, and for most people, the only, time your name will ever be in print.

And majordomo? Who uses that word? Bonus points.