Annalee Newitz looks at the five most prevalent themes in Clinton-era sci-fi. I would have thrown in a shout-out to strippers, who appear prominently in both Armageddon and Independence Day. But then, I’m usually on the lookout for chances to throw shout-outs to strippers.
LIBERTAS accuses “millionaire filmmaker” Morgan Spurlock of –– SPOILER ALERT!! –– being too chicken shit to actually hunt down Osama Bin Laden and put a stake through his heart.
Bob Rehak contemplates the impact the HD format wars will have/are already having on the porn industry. “How will viewers respond to the pathos and suffering at the industry’s core — of capitalism’s antihumanism writ large across the bodies offered up for consumers’ pleasure-at-a-distance — when those excesses are rendered in resolutions of 1920×1080?”
NBC has decided that Access Hollywood will be the “news” division to cover the Golden Globes. Defamer mocks the ensuing outrage: “If the network had any interests but its own at heart, it would have made some attempt at incorporating the solemn ritual that usually begins each Globes ceremony–the consumption of Orson Welles’ transubstantiated body and blood in the form of filet mignon and stiff vodka-tonics–as a show of good faith.”
Craig McLean’s 3668 word profile of Natalie Portman in the Guardian is chock full of anecdotes about what a Great Person the actress is: she was nominated for an Oscar! She went to Harvard, and also reads books! She’s a vegetarian, and she’d stop eating eggs in a minute if it wasn’t so hard! But then there are the immediate fanboy takeaways…
First and foremost, Portman talks at length about her decision to disrobe for Hotel Chevalier, her feelings about the finished film, and the aftermath of being naked in a video distributed on the internet. “It’s not that I regret the actual thing. But it really depresses me that…it can be used afterwards for different purposes. My picture ended up on porn sites.” Which is pretty much what I said two months ago.
Portman also says she was hurt by negative reviews of her performance in the Star Wars prequels, which “made my confidence in myself go down, [with] people thinking I sucked after that!” Interestingly, she goes on to say that playing a stripper for Mike Nichols made it all better. More here.
Robert Greenwald, director of Iraq For Sale, Outfoxed and Xanadu, has launched a new campaign against FoxNews called Fox Attacks. A video associated with the campaign, available on its website and embedded via YouTube above, seeks to demonstrate that every single Fox News program is guilty of “pushing smut out on the airwaves.” Among other things, the video accuses Fox of adding “inappropriate sexual images to serious news stories,” exemplified by a clip of a story in which the hunt for a serial killer in Daytona Beach is illustrated with footage of a bikini contest, complete with numerous cleavage close-ups. Greenwald and friends want to inspire viewers to request “a la carte” cable packages excluding the network.
There’s a quote from Gloria Steinem on the Fox Attacks page, slamming the network for showing “more sexualized violence and humiliation than probably any other network — all in the name of condemning it.” I’m no Fox News fan, but obviously, Greenwald’s clip does the exact same thing. Their highlight reel of half-naked atrocities plays, in the context of YouTube, as straight-up softcore.
I don’t know if it helps his argument or hurts it, but Greenwald certainly knows a thing or two about gratuitous sexuality on TV; he got his start in the 70s directing made-for-TV exploitation flicks like Katie: Portrait of a Centerfold, which marked the leading lady debut of a young Kim Basinger. If you come across any clips of that on the web, do pass them along.
As I understand it, the Supreme Court is *not* arguing, as Nikki Finke puts it, to make it a “crime to see American Beauty or Lolita.” The Reuters report is, admittedly, poorly written, so I’m not entirely sure what’s going on. But I *think* the law would not make it illegal to make or see a film depicting an underage person being naked or having sex; I *think* it would ban anyone from promoting such a film as containing teen sex or nudity. So the image from American Beauty to the right would be a-okay within the context of the film, but could not be distributed as an advertisement for the film. Even though Mena Suvari was 20 when the film was released, because the character she plays is underage. Right? Am I wrong? Tell me what’s really going on so I can pick a side.
Annalee Newitz
Craig McLean’s 
