BIG IDEAS

…She goes and takes all that credit back. That there is a contingent in Hollywood defending Roman Polanski for his admitted statutory rape simply because he made some good movies is, frankly, just ridiculous. You’d expect it from the morally bereft, like Woody Allen (laughable) and Salman Rushdie. But now, Whoopi?

Follow this link to JEZEBEL for the clip from the view. Says Whoopi “it wasn’t rape-rape..”

Say What?

Absolutely. Can’t. Wait.

If you’re a foodie like me and you pay half a bit of attention to TV chefs, then you know of Gordon Ramsay. And you’ll know how completely hilarious this imitation is.

Grudgingly, I watched the HBO documentary Hard Times at Douglass High last night.

Grudgingly because I knew what I would see, and was afraid the filmmakers would turn it into a screed on the failure of the public school system and leave it at that. To their credit, the documentarians let the situation speak for itself for the most part. The lack of overwhelming commentary was a smart move in this instance.

But it was still tough to watch, mostly because I’m from Baltimore and am intimately familiar with Frederick Douglass High, as is nearly every African American in Baltimore. That’s because for well into 1950s, Douglass was one of only two high schools that Blacks could attend (the other being the basketball powerhouse Dunbar). If you’re 35 or over, your Mama or Daddy went to Douglass, just like every lawyer, doctor, judge, elected official, businessman, government worker and successful middle and upper middle class striver.

I remember as a kid flipping through my Mom’s Class of 1945 Yearbook and seeing the young faces of what eventually became the creme of the crop of Baltimore’s Black professional class. Later, I have fond memories of walking by Douglass after school and seeing my oldest brother practicing in his sparkling orange and blue baseball uniform and bragging to my friends about him being the team hero. That was about 1968, 60 or so.

And then…just a few years later, it was my tutn to pick a high school (circa 1975) and Douglass wasn’t an afterthought. It was in fact, a deal-breaker. The idea that I would go to Douglass as the closest neighborhood was the single reason I decided to test for a magnet school. Douglass just as not an option for me, my parents or any of the parents we knew. Only after 7, 8 years tops.

And now, this documentary and the sad facts: 1 out 1100 students passed Algebra. 158 out of 500 freshmen graduated four years later. 105 parents (guardians/aunts/whatever) out of 1100 or more on PTA night showed up.

What happened? Read more after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

I wanted to love this TV version, I really did. I saw the Broadway play with the same cast and was stunned by the continued power of a story based in the 50s. But after watching this new version and checking out the Sidney Poitier version again, one thing seems to be clear. The power of that play really lies in the broad interaction of the ensemble characters. And given that, it becomes really important to be able to see everyone and their actions as the story unfolds - on one set, in one room. By focusing on the faces of the actors and giving it a three-camera TV drama-style edit, the story lost a bit of its power.

The problem with close-ups is that they require a subtlety of expression and voice that tends to damp down the emotion. Great actors can pull it off, and there were indeed great actors in this version. It’s just that this particular script that seems to be almost tailor made for more broad acting. But then, I pretty much felt the same way about the 1985 Dustin Hoffman/ John Malkovich TV version of Death of A Salesman.

Still, it was a blast to watch (in between sneaking peeks of next Sunday’s The Wire on On Demand).  Though all the attention was on Diddy, Audra MacDonald is seriously under-appreciated as an actress and a visual presence. Even more so than Phylicia Rashad (in my opinion) she used the nuances of film to give her performance the requisite power necessary. My two cents.

If I were running the Obama campaign, somebody on the Advance staff would be getting his or her head rolled today.
If you were watching Obama’s victory speech from Houston’s Toyota Center very very closely, you may have noticed that for the first time in a very long time, only Black people were standing in camera view behind Obama. Nothing wrong with that inherently, but despite the wonderful diversity of Obama’s supporters, you can’t always rely on people choosing to sit next to each other in a diverse way. White friends sit with their friends, black friends site with theirs and so on and so on.

That’s to say the visual image of diversity in the Obama campaign, while accurate, is still the result of well planned crafting of Obama’s TV image. Usually, the Obama stagecraft staff does the job pretty well.

Last night, they screwed up and forgot to plan that healthy and diverse mix.Fortunately, someone on his staff noticed the problem. Unfortunately, however, they tried to change it on live television.

Dumb!

Look at the MSNBC video above.

This version of the video starts a little late into the speech and at a slight different angle, but at about 0:12 into the video look closely at the curly haired white guy behind Obama’s right shoulder and watch him try to wrangle past a black woman for position into the camera shot. Seconds later watch the Black woman say “O, Hell no” and push another white guy back where he came from. White guy #1 works his was to the right shoulder of Obama and tries to be cool with the other Black people whose seats he’s taking (who also are not trying to move). At about 4 minutes in, watch White Guy #2 work his way back into the shot.

By the end of the speech at least 4 white people who were not there before miraculously find their way into camera range. Pretty funny.

As a former media consultant, I can tell you this is done all the time. It was perfected by Ronald Reagan at his State of the Union addresses. But note to the Obama camp: Make those adjustments before the camera comes on.

But this time it’s Reginald Hudlin and the Viacom programming execs who are the butt of the jokes instead of Bob Johnson. In the clip MacGruder points to a trend that unfortunately is not unique to BET, that of black programmers and filmmakers forgetting real innovation and just transplanting black heads on existing content concepts - Frankenprogramming. Where’s Tim Reid and Frank’s Place when you need it?

Thanks to Undercover Black man for the tip.

Current TV, Al Gore’s seldom seen but still kinda good cable network, is running a mini-doc focused on the exploding metropolis that is Lagos, Nigeria. It’s a fascinating subject by itself, but the vid gets even more interesting about half the way in when the almost giddy young host gets all excited about offering a bribe to a neighborhood “Big Man” to let the crew film a street scene. Later, she bubbles with the thrill of adventure as she gets jacked for her cash by a roving band of thugs while sitting in bumper to bumper traffic. How cool is that.

If he were smart, Rep. William Jefferson would use this video as part of his upcoming defense. Seriously, if you can’t walk down the street in Lagos without giving someone a bribe, how exactly was he supposed to convince the Nigerian government to cut a $50 million wi-fi deal with an unknown American company?

“After the break, join Whoopi in her search for the Perfect Bra.” Enough said.