I was able to attend and photograph the street performer auditions at Faneuil Hall this year. Dozens of hoping performers gathered here to compete for a chance to be an official street performer in front of popular Boston landmark/tourist trap Faneuil Hall. The rewards are great, but so is the danger. In particular, Bob at Large, the guy balancing on five cylinders, really took my breath away.
Drew Mcweeny’s Review of Thor
Drew McWeeny has published his review of Marvel’s upcoming Thor. In addition to being one of the first published reviews of the film, it also (as usual) contains some pretty smart insights about superhero films and film criticism in general:
[I]t’s both very funny and a nice humbling reminder that critics are defined by their overall diet of movies. We are only ever as good as the movies we are given to write about, and when I’m done with all of this in the future, will the sum total of my work be varying opinions about how well people crafted movies that primarily deal with dudes in funny costumes beating the hell out of each other?
E-mail Legal Disclaimers Are Useless
The Economist explains what we always knew deep down in our hearts.
Sugar Is Killing Us All
I’d read this piece by Gary Taubes last week about whether or not sugar is toxic, but it wasn’t until I watched Robert Lustig’s speech on Youtube (which Taubes’ piece responds to) that the point was really driven home:
Lustig is a fantastic speaker, and the content has some pretty frightening implications for each of us.
The Future of AOL/HuffPo
There’s a great piece at Capital New York that probably has the best forecast for what will become of this AOL/HuffPo marriage:
So, my final, gut prediction, which I would be very pleased to see falsified: Arianna Huffington will create a vital and interesting news desk that in the short term garners AOL praise as a remarkably ambitious and high-quality web-native news operation. It will gain traction against other web operations and will even look, for a while, like it’s making a little bit of a run at the big guys, like cnn.com and nytimes.com.
Traffic will increase—slightly. There will be reports of budget overruns and creative disputes. […] Within a year, several of the most high-profile editorial hires will leak out to a variety of other news organizations, some old and some new. Before long you will be wondering what happened to all those names. And finally, the fast-and-cheap view of “journalism” will return to AOL-Huffpo, amid reports of mild success after a rocky start, all judged on pageviews and profit margins; the “quality” and “journalism” buzzwords will be forgotten parts of the corporate lexicon. Because, to borrow a phrase from Buch, journalism and the “content” strategy of AOL are misaligned.
If I was a betting man, that’s where I’d put my money.
Because We Allowed Hotheads To Call The Tune
John E. McIntyre, writing about why the Civil War WAS IN FACT about slavery:
If we are going to celebrate our past, and we should, let’s acknowledge all of it. We sacrificed the lives of more than half a million young men, maimed tens of thousands others, and devastated an entire region because we could not resolve our political and economic differences peacefully and allowed hotheads to call the tune.
The Only ‘Hanna’ Review You Need To Read
We reviewed Hanna this week on the podcast. My colleagues loved it, while I sorta disliked it. But Gabe Delahaye at Videogum gets it! His review of Hanna sums up my thoughts perfectly:
Well, so, that happened. (Excuse me: that hannappened. LOL!) That is the thing about getting your hopes up: don’t! It’s like that old Holden Caufield quotation: “Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.” Except, instead of telling people anything, it’s get your hopes up for movies, and instead of you start missing everybody, it’s you are always mildly disappointed. Hanna had its moments to be sure, but it did not live up to the hype that I had created on my own in my brain for whatever reason. It looked kind of amazing, right? Was it just me? I don’t think it was just me. I know, for example, that it was also some of the people that I went to see it with this weekend. A child assassin! Snow! Eric Bana’s magical face! Some kind of mystery! Did I mention child assassin? Hanna promised us the world. What it delivered was a half-hearted, surprisingly dull action movie with way too much running and a garbage twist. Harumph.
Internet Comments Are The Worst
I don’t see eye-to-eye with James Rocchi on everything, but I wholeheartedly endorse his viewpoint on internet comments:
[I]t’s because internet commenters are either lazy, cowardly or stupid that I find myself relying on Twitter more and more. I disagree with lots of people in my Twitter feed — @jenyamato didn’t want to vomit from the Justin Bieber film, @mtgilchrist actually liked Tron: Legacy, @MarkReardonKMOX has a political sensibility so opposite to mine I’m amazed we don’t explode when we shake hands — but they are polite, and articulate and, please note, saying what they do under their real names. I think I’ve given up on internet comments about the things I write — reading them or caring about them — unless they’re from people who use their real names. Otherwise, it’s just opening up your life and brain to too much negativity and stupidity.