Something Old, Something New: Favorite Movies From 2024

Posted on January 1, 2025 by Ralph Hanson

Over the last year, I and/or my Dear Wife have watched 107 movies; some that were new releases (i.e Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga), some that were vintage or classics (i.e. Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison), and some that were repeat viewings of old favorites (i.e. Rogue One).

Here are my 10 favorite movies I saw for the first time in 2024. This is in no way a 10-best list, particularly since more than half of them were originally released before this year, sometimes long before (the oldest is from 1948). They are just the 10 movies I enjoyed the most that I hadn’t seen before. They are presented in the order in which I watched them, followed by a list of honorable mentions.

What movies would you put on your list of favorites?

  • The Holdovers (2023) – Director Alexander Payne’s wonderful Christmas-adjacent movie starring Paul Giamatti, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, and Dominic Sessa. Randolph won a well-deserved Oscar for best supporting actress for playing the the school’s cook who is the bereaved mother of a young Vietnam soldier. The Holdovers tells the story of a misfit classics professor (Giamatti) who has to look after a small group of prep school students who have no place to go over the holidays, and the staff cook who lives at the school. It is a bittersweet story of how three characters come to terms with the circumstances life has given them. (Viewed at The World Theatre, Kearney. Available for streaming on Amazon Prime.)

  • Rustin (2023) – One of the neglected dirty secrets of the 1950s & 60s civil rights movement was that it could have a distinctly homophobic aspect to it. And because of that, the story of how openly gay Bayard Rustin, a close adviser of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., played a key role in organizing the 1963 March on Washington where Dr. King gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, has been sadly neglected.This film, produced by Barack and Michelle Obama, helps bring Rustin’s story the attention it deserves.  Colman Domingo leads the cast as the activist Rustin, accompanied by Aml Ameen as Dr. King; Chris Rock doing a dramatic turn as Roy Wilkins, the president of the NAACP; and Jeffrey Wright as the U.S. Representative for Harlem, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. (We’ll see Wright show up again in a another of my favorites for 2024). (Viewed at The World Theatre, Kearney. Available for streaming on Netflix.)

  • Anatomy of a Fall movie poster.Anatomy of a Fall (2023) – A French murder mystery, with dialog in French and English, is a trial drama with actress Sandra Hüller playing a writer trying to prove her innocence in the death of her writer husband at a chalet in the French mountains. The less I say about this movie, the better, except to note that things are rarely entirely what they seem. The rare whodunit where the identity of the murderer may not be the most important question the movie will (or will not) answer.Anatomy of a Fall won the Oscar for best original screenplay.  Hüller will also show up in one of my honorable mention films, The Zone of Interest. (Viewed at The World Theatre, Kearney. Available for streaming on Hulu.)
  • Dune: Part 2 movie posterDune: Part 2 (2024) – The one big-budget blockbuster on my list of favorites this year. I was fortunate to see the second half of Denis Villeneuve’s epic presentation of Frank Herbert’s environmental science fiction epic at an IMAX theater near where my 97-year-old father lives in the Twin Cities.There have been multiple attempts to adapt Herbert’s sprawling, psychedelic book for the theater or television, and none of them prior to Villeneuve’s have been particularly successful (though David Lynch’s 1984 version was a fascinating misfire). Villeneuve took much the same approach as Peter Jackson did with The Lord of the Rings, staying true to the overall narrative but making significant changes to make the story filmable.  Watch it at home, but go see it in the theater if you ever get the chance during a re-release (Viewed at the AMC IMAX, Roseville, MN. Available for streaming on MAX.)
  • American Fiction (2023) – The second movie starring Jeffrey Wright on my Top 10 list for 2024 (even though both of them came out in 2023). Wright plays a frustrated college professor/author whose books get miscatagorized as “African American Fiction”  instead of as the correct “Mythology.” As an act of satire and defiance, Wright’s character creates a prison novel with every blaxploitation cliché under the pseudonym “Stagg R. Leigh.” He then insists that it be published under the unpublishable title of “F@#&,” except using the real word. To his horror, the book becomes a bestseller and Leigh and instant celebrity.Alternately laugh-out-loud funny and thought provoking, this is the perfect movie for a time when we pretend to talk about Critical Race Theory, wonder what is happening to publishing, and think about what is happening to our universities. Director Cord Jefferson won the Oscar for best adapted screenplay. (Viewed at The World Theatre, Kearney. Available for streaming on Amazon Prime.)

  • Hundreds of Beavers (2022/2024) – If this were a Ten Best list, should I ever have had to hubris to creates such a thing, Hundreds of Beavers would emphatically not be on it. But this black & white live action homage to the classic Looney Tunes battles among Elmer Fudd, Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck has to be some of the most fun I’ve had in a theater for a long time. It is almost impossible to describe, so I will keep it simple. It tells the story of a mighty trapper trying to tap enough beavers in the frozen north so that he has the money to marry his sweetheart. All of the beavers, bunnies and other animals are played by actors in mascot costumes. Yes, it is as silly as it sounds. And you want to see it. (Viewed at The World Theatre, Kearney. Available for streaming on Amazon Prime and multiple other services.)

  • Wicked Little Letters (2023) – This is a nasty little treat of a black comedy staring Olivia Colman that tells the true story of an investigation of a set of crude, rude and socially unacceptable letters sent out to residents of the small British town of Littlehampton in the early 1920s. As is generally the case with such movies, the story is heavily fictionalized but has a solid core of reality.One of the The Seven Secrets About the Media “They” Don’t Want You to Know is “All Media Are Social,” and this movie is all about how media (in this case, private letters) are emphatically social. Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley are a hoot as the antagonists over the long series of nasty letters. (Viewed at The World Theatre, Kearney. Available for streaming on Netflix.)Warning: The Red Band trailer below is definitely R-rated with profane language. Not for the children…

  • The Big Combo (1955) – One of the great film noirs that demonstrated how dark, daring, sexy movies could get made despite all of the limitations of the Code Era. The movie stars Cornel Wilde, Richard Conte and Brian Donlevy, along wtih Jean Wallace. No spoilers here, but it has one of the most explicit unseen scenes of any movie made under the Production Code. It shows up once or twice a year on Turner Classic Movies (which is where I saw it). But since it was not properly copyrighted, it is in the public domain, so you can watch the whole the whole thing on YouTube.

  • Poster for Heaven Knows, Mr. AllisonHeaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957) – There are a number of movies out there telling the story of a tough guy/sailor stranded on an island during The War and finding the only other adult there to be a nun/teacher/otherwise-unavailable woman. (See Cary Grant and Leslie Caron in 1964’s Father Goose as an example.) Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison is an exceptional outing in the genre, starring Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr as the leads. The screenplay got an Oscar nomination, as did Kerr.The movie itself doesn’t do anything special other than provide a fantastic canvas for these two actors to show how war and isolation can transform people. I saw it on Turner Classic Movies, but it can also be rented/purchased through Amazon.
  • The Wild Robot (2024) – A shoe-in for a nomination for best feature-length animated film, and if Pixar’s Inside Out 2 were not the animated feature box office champ, it ought to be in the running to win. But nothing will stop the Pixar juggernaut. It’s the sweet story of a misplaced robot having to care for an abandoned young goose. Likely the last in-house produced animation from Dream Works, it stars the vocal talents of Lupita Nyong’o, Pedro Pascal, Kit Connor, Bill Nighy, Stephanie Hsu, Mark Hamill, Catherine O’Hara and Ving Rhames. I defy you to show me another animated film with such a banger voice cast. If you can possibly find a way to still see it in the theater, please do so.  I saw it at my local Golden Ticket commercial theater, and I’m hoping The World here in Kearney will get it this spring.

Ralph’s Honorable Mention Films 

Along with the above list, here are several additional movies I really enjoyed in 2024.

  • Les Miserabes (2012) – Dear Wife and I were supposed to see the play in Lincoln last winter, but we were blocked from traveling by snow and bitter cold. So when we saw it was playing at the Council Bluffs’ AMC for a revival screening, we went. Wonderful to see on the big screen, and that’s where we saw trailers for Wicked Little Letters and The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.
  • The Zone of Interest ( 2023) – The banality of evil through the eyes of the family of the superintendent of Auschwitz . Winner of Oscars for best international feature film and best sound. (And a nominee for best picture, director and adapted screenplay.) Needless to say, not the feel-good movie of the year…
  • Civil War (2024) – More a journalism/war correspondent film than a war film. Kirsten Dunst plays a modern war photographer who echos WWII photographer Lee Miller (subject of the 2023 movie Lee that I hope to see early in 2024).
  • Furiosa – A Mad Max Saga (2024)  – I was underwhelmed by this prequel to Mad Max Fury Road when I saw it at the IMAX, but I suspect that’s in large part because it is unfair to compare it to Fury Road, one of the best action/chase films ever made. I need to see it again.
  • Call Northside 777 (1948) – The oldest of the films on my list this year, it stars Jimmy Stewart as a Chicago newspaper reporter trying to clear the record of the wrongfully convicted murder suspect played by Richard Conte (who played the very guilty gangster in The Big Combo). An excellent example of the docu-noir genre.
  • Lincoln (2012) – Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, dealing with the Civil War president’s efforts to free the enslaved people, was the the second 2012 film that I first saw in 2024. It was nominated for a dozen academy awards, winning best actor for Daniel Day-Lewis and best production design. Despite sounding like a seriously “good-for-you” movie, it was tremendously entertaining when I got to see it at a World Theatre screening.
  • The Best Christmas Pageant Ever (2024) – A fresh faith-based Christmas movie that manages to tell a heart-tugging story without getting all heavy handed as such films can tend to be. Based on the 1972 novel of the same name, it tells the story of six out-of-control, nearly feral children who take over a church’s Christmas pageant. When it was screened it at our local community theatre, it sold out all three showings.
  • Klaus (2019) – I cannot for the life of me understand why Klaus has not taken on the classic status of such animated Christmas movies as the Benedict Cumberbatch version of The Grinch. A fantastic non-standard Santa origin story.
  • The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (2024) – Guy Ritchie’s highly creative take on the true story of Operation Postmaster, the first mission of the the British WWII Special Operations Executive. Ian Fleming is a minor character in the film, and he used the leader of the raid, Major Gus March-Phillipps, as the inspiration for his James Bond series of novels. The book by historian Damien Lewis gives the full, unfictionalized vision of this incredible group of commandos and is well worth the read.

And one last movie from New Year’s Eve: The Six Triple Eight (2024) – One more little-told story from World War II about the Black women of the 6888 battalion, the only all-black female unit to serve in Europe. These women solved the mail-delivery-to-the-troops-fighting-in-Europe problem that no one else could or would tackle. Yes, it is a sentimental Tyler Perry film, but it tells an important story of hope at a time when we really need it. Currently streaming on Netflix. (Also, a prime example of why we need people other than just white males making movies!)

Those were my favorite movies first seen in 2024. What were yours?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Why is the NY Times Connections the most controversial online game?

Posted on December 13, 2024 by Ralph Hanson

When you are on Facebook, if you see the following graphic with some kind of comment below, you know that one of your friends has succumbed to the addiction that is the NY Times game – Connections.

Social media graphic that shows your success (or lack thereof) for the day with the online Connections game. For the unfamiliar, guessing one of each color means you had one word from each of the four separate categories in your guess, showing that you had the ultimate wrong answer. Clicking on the image will take you to the current game board.

The game is both deceptively simple and insanely complex. Each day, the Connections puzzle displays a 4×4 grid of 16 words (or occasionally symbols). The player is charged with putting the 16 words into four separate categories exhibiting some kind of similarity (or connection) that binds each set of four words together,  rated from easy (yellow) to very hard (purple).

Here is an example board from a year ago. Clicking on it will take you to an article from KSAT News about the game.

The game has a passionate following from millions, including your author and many of my friends. My Dear Wife no longer wants to hear anything I have to say on the subject over our morning coffee. Wyna Liu, the editor of the daily puzzle from The Times, inspires a wide range of responses from players depending on how they feel about the day’s puzzle, including professions of despair and hate.

Recently The Atlantic’s website ran a fascinating interview with Liu in which she talks about how the game’s boards are created, what types of connections the words can have, and how she feels about people’s intense reactions to the game.

There are also tools out there where you can create your own Connections board that will be even more interesting than the official ones. For example, here’s a post-election day one profanity-laced board from from science blogger Hank Green (who is also YA author John Green’s brother).

Are you a Connections junkie? Tell us about it in the comments.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Why is the NY Times Connections the most controversial online game?

New algorithms help animators with coiled hair for Black characters

Posted on December 3, 2024 by Ralph Hanson

One of the issues that has long been a problem for diversity in entertainment media is that creatives often have not been trained or had the tools to effectively portray people of color.

A new algorithm that can digitally generate coiled hair images has been created by Haomiao Wu, Alvin Shi, A.M. Darke, and Theodore Kim. Image from Yale Engineering.

Which is why it is so exciting to see new tools for effectively animating Afro-textured hair in films. According to computer science professor Dr. Theodore Kim, who has previously worked for Pixar Research,  “If you do a deep dive into the technical literature… you see that all of the supposedly foundational papers on this topic … feature just straight hair.”

Kim tells the WaPo that his colleagues at Pixar often had to put in large amounts of time on manual animation of Black hair because the existing tools couldn’t handle it. (Though the WaPo article doesn’t mention it, Dr. Kim has won two Technical Achievement Academy Awards for his work on computer animation techniques, the first in 2012, the second 10 years later in 2023. Also worth noting that in addition to studying computer science as an undergrad at Cornell University, Dr. Kim also had a concentration in English literature. STEM also needs humanities! )

You will need to read the article to get a handle on what the researchers needed to do to make curly hair work with animation algorithms, but essentially it was moving from a model that used straight lines to a model that dealt with three-dimensional helixes.

Early concept art from Hair Love as seen on Vashti Harrison’s Instagram account.

Learning about Dr. Kim’s work reminded me about one of my all-time favorite short animated films: the Oscar-winning Hair Love. Hair Love was the brainchild of former NFL player Matthew Cherry, who wanted to turn the online trend of viral videos of Black fathers styling their children’s hair into an inspirational (and fun!) animated film that celebrated natural hair. In the short, a Black father is struggling to style his young daughter’s hair before heading out of the house.

If you have any interest in animation and how an animated short can get made outside of the major studios, read the article linked above and watch the complete film below.

Watching the dad’s efforts with his daughter’s hair will help you understand exactly what makes curly hair so challenging for animators. (And yet, the crew for Hair Love, which included Pixar and Sony Animation alums, managed to animate all the hair in the film beautifully.)

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on New algorithms help animators with coiled hair for Black characters

Iconic “This is Fine” Dog echos a 14th century illuminated manuscript image

Posted on November 18, 2024 by Ralph Hanson

How long has the “This is  Fine” meme been around?

Would you believe the 14th century?

You all know the Dog-in-the-Burning-Room “This Is Fine” meme, right?

Artist KC Green’s comic “On Fire” which has become the omnipresent “This is Fine” meme.

As reported in the LAist blog, Green drew the iconic image as part of his comic Gunshot back in 2012 when he was fighting depression and feeling overwhelmed. The image has since been used uncounted number of times with a variety of texts by groups as diverse as the Republican National Committee and Comedy Central’s The Daily Show. 

While the image of the self-satisfied dog  sitting in a burning room with his coffee is undoubtedly original, it interestingly enough echos an illustration from a 14th century illuminated manuscript.

British King Vortigern had a “This is Fine” vibe in an ilustration from a 14th century illuminated manuscript.

As C. Keith Hansley wrote back in 2020 for The Historian’s Hut:

This illustration, from a 14th-century manuscript (labeled BL Royal 20 A II, f. 3 in The British Library) depicts a scene from British legend. Atop the burning castle is Vortigern, a legendary figure from the 5th century who is credited with inviting Saxons into Britain, setting in motion the eventual Anglo-Saxon domination of England that would last for centuries… This scene of Vortigern being besieged and ultimately dying in an inferno set by his enemies is what is depicted in the manuscript illustration featured above.

Thanks to Sarah Cardin on Threads for pointing out the rhyming imagery here. How often do we get to look at an example of Media Secret 4 – Nothing’s new: Everything that happens in the past will happen again with examples from one of our earliest media, hand copied books, rhyming with our most recent social media?

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Iconic “This is Fine” Dog echos a 14th century illuminated manuscript image

Riding With Strangers – 40th Anniversary Team Strange Airheads Grand Tour

Posted on November 15, 2024 by Ralph Hanson
Selfie of Ralph wearing motorcycle gear.

From my last day of collecting towns for this grand tour. For this one I took as many off-pavement roads as possible on my little Honda CRF 300L Rally.

NOTE: For the last eleven years, I’ve competed in a large-scale motorcycle scavenger hunt sponsored annually by Team Strange Airheads. This is a Twin Cities-based organization that got its start as a bowling team that evolved into a  BMW motorcycle club that now primarily sanctions a variety of short and longer-term motorcycle events.

This year’s event runs from April into November, and under the name of  “Gran Truismo Grand Tour” it actually offers two different events – one involves visiting race tracks, which I did not compete in; the second is the Team Strange Airheads 40th Anniversary Grand Tour. To complete this,  you need to collect the photos of town names that start with each of the letters of “Team Strange Airheads” followed by a “40” state or county highway sign.

I collected these photos over multiple trips, including one to Wyoming near the edge of the Grand Tetons and one following the Lewis & Clark Trail up through the Dakotas. I rode my V-Strom 650 for most the photos, but a few were with my Rally 300. These photos will be presented in the order needed to spell out each of the words.

Team

Rally flag at Torrington, Wyoming.

Torrington, Wyoming, June 14, 2024.

Rally flag at Elm Creek, Nebraska

Elm Creek, Nebraska, June 14, 2024

Rally flag at Arapahoe, Nebraska.

Arapahoe, Nebraska, June 22, 2024

Rally Flag at Maxwell, Nebraska.

Maxwell, Nebraska, June 14, 2024.

Strange

Selby, South Dakota, July 9, 2024

Taylor, Nebraska, July 11, 2024

Riverdale, Nebraska, Sept. 28, 2024

To those of you paying attention, this one was with my Rally 300.

Agar, South Dakota, July 10. 2024

North Platte, Nebraska, June 14, 2024

Gothenburg, Nebraska, June 14, 2024

Eustis, Nebraska, June 22, 2024

And just for fun, here’s a second photo of Eustis because I messed up and grabbed the same town on two separate rides to use two different places. Oops. Looks like I’m going out riding again before the end of the week.

Another visit to Eustis which won’t count as I can only use each town once. From September 15, 2024

Little rant about Eustis. This was where the awesome Village Pie Maker factory used to be where some of the best frozen pies you could get anywhere were made. And Eustis was the “village” in the name. Then the Rickets family (Pete Rickets is the U.S. senator from Nebraska and former governor) bought out the company, shut down the Eustis plant and moved it to Omaha. Now I get it, they needed to expand. But having a billionaire family come in, buy up the small business that’s a leading employer in a small town, then close it to move to the big city is just really a bit too on the mark for the world we seem to live in now. You can still get lunch at the grocery store in Eustis. Last time I ate there, you could get a sauerkraut and summer sausage pizza. If you ever wanted one… Rant over.

Airheads

Axtel, Nebraska, Sept. 15, 2024

Indianola, Nebraska, September 15, 2024

Ravenna, Nebraska, Sept. 28, 2024

And if you should ever visit Ravenna, stop at The Creamery on the north side of town for a burger & fries, or ice cream, or pie. (Or have all three; I won’t tell.) Ride for this one was my Rally 300.

The Creamery Drive In in Ravenna

Hershey, Nebraska, June 14, 2024

Eddyville Nebraska, Nov. 15, 2024

Readable close up of Eddyville village signs. Nov. 15, 2024

Eddyville, Nebraska was the town I needed to get to today, the last day of the 40th Anniversary Grand Tour, to pick up my missing letter “E.” Fortunately the weather was pretty good for mid-November in the state, with temps in the low 60s accompanied by a fair bit of wind. Seems appropriate I would finish up a Team Strange event with the town of Eddyville.

Atlanta, Nebraska, Sept. 15, 2024

Douglas, Wyoming, June 15, 2024

Spencer, Nebraska July 8, 2024

40th Anniversary

Nebraska Highway 40 to signify 40th Anniversary, Sept. 28, 2024

Nebraska Highway 40 was the third photo I collected on the Rally 300

And so I finish up my 11th Team Strange grand tour – of which I have completed 10. The only one I entered that I didn’t finish was the 2022 steam engine-themed one I ended up bailing on for a range of reasons, including the two “live” steam engines I was supposed to visit that didn’t work out – one didn’t have a licensed operator and the other was actually gas powered while wearing a steam engine costume. Still feel bad about that one.

Anyway, my V-Strom (vanity plate FAFHRD) is now ready for winter with a full tank of stabilized gas and the Battery Tender plugged in. The little Rally (vanity plate MOUSER) will likely get taken out a time or two more before getting tucked in for the cold season. Though with any luck, both will get out occasionally during the winter. Ride safe, everyone.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Riding With Strangers – 40th Anniversary Team Strange Airheads Grand Tour

Happy ARPANet-Goes-Online-in-1969 Day for those who celebrate!

Posted on October 29, 2024 by Ralph Hanson

Each mainframe computer in the original ARPANet configuration communicated over the network using a Interface Message Processor, a minicomputer that could handle all of the network communication, allowing otherwise incompatible computers to talk with each other.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANet), the first wide-area packet-switching  network, made its first successful computer-to-computer connection on Oct. 29, 1969. Unlike some earlier conceptions of the network, it was  intended to serve the needs of academic researchers, not to survive nuclear war.

The network was built by a farsighted division of the Pentagon called the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). In 1968, the contract to build the network was given to a Boston-based consulting firm on the condition that it be built in less than one year. By the fall of 1969, ARPAnet connected four different institutions, and the first component of what would eventually become the internet was running.

As the hand-drawn map of ARPAnet shows, the initial nodes were University of California–Los Angeles, Stanford Research Institute, University of California–Santa Barbara, and University of Utah. ARPAnet came online at about the same time as the first moon landing. Whereas Neil Armstrong’s “one small step” was noted throughout the world as one of the great achievements of humanity, no one outside of ARPA was aware that a new, world-changing medium had just been born.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Happy ARPANet-Goes-Online-in-1969 Day for those who celebrate!

What Has Happened to the Washington Post?

Posted on October 28, 2024 by Ralph Hanson

Editor’s note: Last week, the Washington Post’s publisher and CEO William Lewis announced that the paper for the only the second time in 50 years would not be endorsing a candidate for the presidency of the United States. In a column published on the Post’s website Oct. 25th, he wrote:

“We recognize that this will be read in a range of ways, including as a tacit endorsement of one candidate, or as a condemnation of another, or as an abdication of responsibility. That is inevitable,” Lewis wrote. “We don’t see it that way. We see it as consistent with the values The Post has always stood for and what we hope for in a leader: character and courage in service to the American ethic, veneration for the rule of law, and respect for human freedom in all its aspects.”

According to a story from the Post, the paper’s editorial board had written an editorial endorsing the Democratic Harris/Walz ticket and was preparing to publish it when it was killed by owner Jeff Bezos, who also founded Amazon.com and the Blue Origin space launch company.

The controversy exploding from this is not so much that the paper has discontinued endorsements at the presidential level as that it was done just 10 days before the intensely controversial 2024 presidential election. Criticism of the move by Bezos and Lewis to cancel the endorsement has been massive by the current and former staff of the Post, who see the move as being done out of fear that Bezos’ companies would be hurt should Trump win the presidency again. It has resulted in a number of resignations from the paper’s staff.  One of the most outspoken has been former editor Marty Baron.

This has also led to a massive number of people publicly cancelling their subscriptions to the Washington Post in hope of sending a message to the paper. I have argued on social media that nothing readers can do will hurt Bezos. But cancelling subscriptions can and will hurt the journalists and opinion writers at the paper, none of whom had anything to do with cancelling the endorsement. 

For the record, I have continued my subscription, which I have had in one form or another since the 1980s. I value the paper intensely, as I do the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Omaha World-Herald, the Lincoln Journal-Star, and the Kearney Hub — all of which I have paid subscriptions to, all of which have driven me crazy on one occasion or another. 

I am reprinting below a social media post from award-winning WaPo food journalist Tim Carman, who is also an alum of  the University of Nebraska at Kearney where I teach. I think he gives us an important look from inside the Post about how this controversy is affecting the staff. (Full disclosure: Tim is a friend of mine, and I am reprinting this by permission.)

Washington Post Food Journalist Tim Carman writing on Facebook:

Washington Post food journalist Tim Carman speaking on the UNK campus in October of 2023.

Over the past two days, while laying in bed, sick with flu, I’ve watched one friend after another announce that he/she/they have cancelled their subscription to The Post. I understand the anger that fueled these decisions. A similar anger can be felt among the rank and file at the paper — and in my own heart.

I also understand that, as money and power are consolidated in the hands of so few, we the people feel the need to express our anger/frustration/pain in tangible, meaningful ways. I understand the resentment sparked when one person decides to place self-interest above the public good. I understand how this single act can, almost instantly, destroy the trust that The Post has built over multiple generations.

I’ve been at ch almost 14 years now. I’ve worked with editors and reporters across multiple sections: Metro, Foreign, Business, Style, Food, and others. I know the impenetrable wall that separates the Opinions department from the News/Features department. They operate independently, each serving its own function, though I think their roles are often blurred in the public’s mind.

I know the people who produce the news, graphics, features, videos and more that you see daily. These people are journalists of the highest caliber. Their standards for publication are demanding, rigorous and, most important of all, accountable to readers. This kind of independent journalism is dying before our eyes, its demise fostered by people who have a vested interest in not ever being challenged.

Our country needs more serious journalism, not less. If you’ve already cancelled your subscription, I hope we can earn your trust back. Don’t give up on us. There are hundreds of reporters working daily to hold people accountable and to inform the public about things they might not otherwise know. It needs your support more than ever.

You’ve probably seen this link already from my colleagues, but I’ll post it again. It’s another way to express your anger. I hope you’ll give them the full measure of your rage.

Watch for more to come on this controversy.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on What Has Happened to the Washington Post?

Everyone’s Gone To The Movies – Day 2 Clips for Media Literacy

Posted on October 10, 2024 by Ralph Hanson

Dear Basketball – Oscar for Best Animated Short 2018

 

Gone With The Wind – Staircase Scene – 1939

Gone With the Wind is a controversial film these days because of its problematic portrayal of race. But it is still an important film. I show this clip to help illustrate how GWTW was able to play fast and loose with the production code rules of the late 1930s, in part because it was such a big budget studio film that it had to be allowed to do what the filmmakers wanted to.

Love With The Proper Stranger – 1963

This little romantic drama tells the story of a relationship between jazz musician Steve McQueen and shop girl Natalie Wood. In the movie, McQueen gets Wood’s character pregnant from a one-night stand, and Wood wants McQueen to help her find “a doctor.” Given that this was made during the Production Code era, the filmmakers made an entire film about getting an illegal abortion without once using the term “abortion.”

Midnight Cowboy Trailer – 1969

Midnight Cowboy was the first, and only, movie to win the Oscar for best picture while having the toxic X-rating. The ratings board tried to get the producers to make some minor changes (remove a single frame) so they could say the movie had been re-edited and give it a more acceptable R rating, but the film’s producers refused. The rating board still went ahead and claimed the movie had been edited and gave it an R rating.

Titanic – 1997

Like Gone With The Wind, Titanic was a movie that was “too big to fail,” so it ended up with  a PG-13 rating to make it more accessible to the target teen audience even though it had an attempted suicide, extended nudity, a sex scene, violence against women, and an extended, disturbing death scene.

Jaws – 1975

Jaws was the first of the big summer blockbuster films featuring the very young Steven Spielberg as director and the iconic score that helped make John Williams the most sought-after composer in Hollywood.

Star Wars – 1977

While Star Wars did not have digital effects in it, it was the first movie to have computer-controlled motion cameras that could make multiple passes making the exact same motions each time, allowing for spectacular practical effects.

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow – 2004

Sky Captain was the first feature-length American released film to have entirely digital sets. The movie was a financial and critical flop, but it showed how you could make an incredible-looking film for a reasonable budget. The techniques pioneered with this film have now become a standard for Hollywood.

Mad Max – Fury Road 2015

Mad Max – Fury Road has been credited with bringing back practical effects to big budget movies. Maybe… While it has lots of computer generated imagery in it, they have mostly been created out of scenes that were actually shot in the field with real-life stunts. The CGI looks so good in this movie because they are all based on things that actually happened.

Black Panther – 2017

Black Panther illustrates one of the ways to make a movie profitable. Make a movie for a big budget ($200 million), load it up with movie stars and an up-and-coming director, then promote with lots of marketing tie-ins. Because it had a great director, cast and script, and was well promoted. it is in the Top 10 all-time box office.

Everything Everywhere All At Once – 2022

Everything Everywhere was made for a modest $25 million budget but made $143 million globally. It it had had a Black Panther-level budget, it would have been a failure. But with low costs of production and promotion, it didn’t need to make a lot to be a success. All those Oscars didn’t hurt, either.

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Everyone’s Gone To The Movies – Day 2 Clips for Media Literacy

Hip Hop’s T-Pain Goes Unplugged on NPR’s Tiny Desk

Posted on October 2, 2024 by Ralph Hanson
Hip Hop artist T-Pain from NPR's Tiny Desk

Hip Hop artist T-Pain from NPR’s Tiny Desk. Image from Entertainment Weekly.

Back in 2014, hip-hop artist T-Pain was famous for his creative use of Auto-Tune software, not to put his voice on the correct pitch but rather to produce a sound that was instantly recognizable as his own. But that wasn’t what he delivered when he showed up to do a stripped-down show for an NPR Tiny Desk Concert. (NOTE: This video contains potentially offensive language.)

“The audience was expecting to hear classic T-Pain, his trademark autotuned voice with its robotic-like pitch singing over a hip-hop beat that gets the club moving,” says NPR Weekend Edition host Ayesha Rascoe in a program looking back at the concert series. Instead, they got T-Pain sitting in front of a crowded bookshelf with his keyboard player, a classic soulful R&B singer with a subtle jazz-infused accompaniment. He was singing his hits, but in an all-new way sitting back behind show producer Bob Boilen’s tiny desk, no other technology in sight. (NOTE: If you have a little time, listen to the stream of Rascoe’s program. Much better than reading the transcript!)

The reaction to T-Pain’s Tiny Desk was so fantastic that three years later he followed it up with a short acoustic tour at small venues. (As of this writing in early 2024, T-Pain’s Tiny Desk had more than 27 million view on YouTube.)

Tiny Desk got started in 2008 when NPR Music producers Bob Boilen and Stephen Thompson were in Austin for the South By Southwest music and tech festival. They tried to hear musician Laura Gibson at a bar, but the noise there was so bad, they couldn’t hear a thing. So they told Gibson that she should come to their office at NPR headquarters in Washington, D.C., and play some music at their desks. Thompson says he was “half joking” about it, but three weeks later Gibson showed up, the producers recorded her singing for about 15 minutes in Boilen’s office, and history was made.

It took two months before the second show in the series with the late Vic Chestnutt, but they now come out on a steady basis. Audiences and performers love the shows, which are streamed via video over the internet rather than airing on the radio. By 2022, Tiny Desk was an institution, hosting its 1,000th concert with West African singer and activist Angélique Kidjo. (NPR used to be known as National Public Radio, but as of 2010 it started going by just its initials because it sends out as much programing online as it does on its affiliate radio stations. )

It’s almost impossible to classify what kind of music you will get from a Tiny Desk. Artists who have appeared include hip-hop star Megan Thee Stallion from before her ”WAP” fame, pop music queen Taylor Swift, jazz greats Chick Corea and Gary Burton, the cast of the Broadway musical Wicked, and even cello legend Yo-Yo Ma.

Senior Tiny Desk producer Bobby Carter says that when he’s prepping artists for their show, he tries to explain how different this will be from their regular shows: “We always let them know, like, listen, whatever you’re used to doing on stage, once you come into this building, it is going to be the complete opposite. This not a soundstage, which many artists think it is. This is an office and a real desk, real shelves, real NPR employees.”

You might think that Tiny Desk with its basic setting and no room for lots of equipment would focus more on singer-songwriter coffee house type performers, but as we have seen, it’s a major home for hip-hop presented in a new way. Producer Carter says, “I’m fulfilled the most when we really, really nail a hip-hop Tiny Desk because in many ways, that’s the biggest adjustment for most artists because that’s not the way they originally recorded these songs. So with hip-hop Tiny Desk, you usually almost get a completely new interpretation of the records, and you make them new.”

You can find all of my Tiny Desk posts using the link below:

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Hip Hop’s T-Pain Goes Unplugged on NPR’s Tiny Desk

National Banned Book Week Has a Lot to Observe This Year

Posted on September 23, 2024 by Ralph Hanson

Banned Book Week logoEditor’s Note: This week is the American Library Association’s Banned Book Week. The following blog post looks at a history of book challenges in the US and how these efforts have massively escalated in the 2020s.

Books are capable of inciting great passion in readers who love them and those who hate them. So wherever there are books, there are people who will want to ban or control them for one reason or another. Attempts at control can range from removing the book from a school library to threatening to kill the author.

Until recently, most book censorship efforts in the United States were local rather than national in scope, with efforts focused on removing specific titles from school libraries or reading lists. Typically, the focus was on books thought to contain sexually explicit material, offensive language, violence, or offensive treatment of religion. Other reasons given are for being “unsuited” for a given age group or for being “anti-family.”

Occasionally, though, a book’s publisher would instigate the censorship. Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 tells the story of a “fireman” whose job is to burn books rather than put out fires. (Fahrenheit 451° is the temperature at which book paper starts to burn.) The book was originally published in 1953, but in 1967, Ballantine Books brought out an edition for high schools that modified 75 passages in the text to eliminate such words as hell, damn, and abortion. This was done without Bradbury’s knowledge or consent. When he found out about it 13 years later, he demanded that the edited version be withdrawn.

Different titles show up on various lists of banned or challenged books, but a few appear repeatedly. Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings has had its position on many school reading lists challenged because of its description of the rape of the author as a child. Other frequently challenged books include the Goosebumps series by R. L. Stine, J. D. Salinger’s coming-of-age novel The Catcher in the Rye, and Kurt Vonnegut’s account of the firebombing of Dresden, Slaughterhouse-Five.

But in the 2020s, there started to be coordinated efforts nationwide to remove all books from public schools that included depictions of sexual activity, LGBTQ+ content, material that could make people feel uncomfortable about race, and material that was critical of police.

In 2023, the Washington Post took a deep dive into the issue of who was objecting to books in schools and what kinds of books these people disliked. Reporters looked at more than 1,000 challenges filed during the 2021–22 school year from 150 school districts nationwide. Topics objected to included a biographical book on assassinated gay San Francisco politician Harvey Milk, a story about a boy who dresses as a mermaid, and a story about a Black child’s reaction to the killing of a girl by police in his hometown.

WaPo reporters also found that a small number of people were responsible for a large proportion of the challenges. In fact, the Post’s research found that just 11 people were responsible for 60% of all the objections. That meant that 6% of the objectors were responsible for 60% of the objections. One woman who submitted 24 challenges went online looking for books she might object to, checked them out from a local library, and then filed her challenges. Among the titles she was attempting to remove were Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. Other efforts to challenge books have come from activist groups such as Moms for Liberty who would look for books they might object to by searching for “keywords such as ‘incest,’ ‘rape,’ and ‘pedophilia’” in the school library’s catalog.

Work done by the writers’ group PEN America found 2,362 instances of book bans in the United States during the 2022–23 school year. PEN’s research showed that in addition to activists working to remove books, several states have passed laws requiring school districts to remove whole categories of books from libraries and classrooms. Florida, which passed stringent limits on books that could be housed in schools, had more than 40% of all book bans in the United States, followed by Texas, with 625 book bans.

The American Library Association has been tracking the most-challenged books for many years. Challenged books are those that some individual or group has attempted to remove or restrict. The challenger does not need to have been successful in getting the title banned for it to appear on the list.  Not all challenged books are contemporary. Several classics have received complaints as well. According to the American Library Association, the following books are frequently challenged:

  • The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, because a book about adultery conflicts with a community’s values
  • Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, because it contains profanity
  • Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare, because the comedy is perceived as promoting homosexuality

In a North Carolina school district, merely discussing school book censorship became controversial when district officials told principals not to have their schools participate in events tied to the American Library Association’s annual Banned Book Week. The message to principals said, “It is not something we teach in our classrooms or as supplementary material for out of school learning.” The district was also concerned that discussion of banned books might violate a new state law that said parents had the right to control what their children learned in school. Edward Helmore, writing for the British newspaper The Guardian, said that this might be the first time that “efforts to draw attention to banned books has itself been banned.”

Have you encountered efforts to ban books from school or public libraries in your community? If so, tell us about them in the comments.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on National Banned Book Week Has a Lot to Observe This Year