‘Dancing With the Stars’: Brandy is dandy again; Bristol Palin surprises
Brandy and Maksim Chmerkovskiy perform last week. Photo credit: Adam Larkey/ABC
How wise is it to pull out your greatest-hits reel before starting your regular show?
“Dancing With the Stars” tonight reminded viewers of Helio Castroneves, Nicole Scherzinger and Apolo Anton Ohno before starting rock night. The ABC dance contest counted the Top 10 dances in the show’s history as picked by viewers. At No. 2 was the Argentine tango performed by Gilles Marini. And No. 1 was was the freestyle by Drew Lachey. Cheryl Burke was the partner on both top dances.
The highlights put the current contestants at a disadvantage, although it was a grand night for Brandy.
First up was Audrina Patridge on the paso doble, and she trained by punching a photo of Bruno Tonioli. Hey, whatever works. She and Tony Dovolani strutted confidently and stylishly through “Another One Bites the Dust.” Len Goodman complained that the dance lacked character. Tonioli wanted more fire, too. But Carrie Ann Inaba saw improvement. Points: 24, which is pretty good for a dancer lacking character.
Kyle Massey wanted to bring up his scores and prove he was a contender on the tango. His posture and intensity were impressive. Could it be a turning point for him and Lacey Schwimmer? Much better than last week, Tonioli said. Goodman also saw improvement. Points: 23, with 7 from Goodman.
Jennifer Grey seemed to have fun on the paso doble, although she and Derek Hough had some ragged moments. The end was especially messy with noticeable flubs by both dancers. Inaba described Grey as “the chosen one,” but said it was a rough, rough dance. Tonioli said she said got the rage right, but urged her to tone it down. Points: 20, with 6 from Inaba.
Rick Fox looked robotic and stern on the tango. Goodman liked the hold and the posture. Inaba was amazed, but added that Fox seemed too severe. Points: 24 points.
Bristol Palin incorporated a little air guitar on her tango. It was her best dance so far. “Ridiculously amazing,” Inaba ruled. Goodman said she had gone from a chimp — her costume for the dance last week — to almost a champ this week. Points: 23.
Kurt Warner tried to inject his paso doble with the attitude of Bret Michaels. The routine was big, showy and awkward. Inaba said the dance wasn’t polished. Goodman said it didn’t come off. Tonioli said the movements were more consistent with karate. Points: 18. He looks the most vulnerable.
Brandy, after a difficult rehearsal time, ripped into the tango with ferocity. The dance of the night, Goodman ruled. Tonioli compared Brandy to Tina Turner in “Mad Max.” Points: 26 points, with 8 from Inaba.
In the second round, the couples went into a dance marathon. Brandy won the contest, and Grey placed second. Warner was the first celebrity ejected, reinforcing the impression that he’s likely to go Tuesday.
The results will be announced in a show that starts at 9 on WFTV-Ch. 9. Kylie Minogue and Heart will perform.
‘Nikita,’ ‘Hellcats’ get full seasons from The CW
Maggie Q stars in The CW's "Nikita." Photo credit: Matt Sayles/AP
Neither new series has generated as much heat as “The Vampire Diaries” did last season for The CW. Granted, that would be hard to do. But “Nikita” and “Hellcats” will have full first seasons, the network announced late Friday.
“We’re thrilled that they paid off for us,” CW Entertainment President Dawn Ostroff said in a release.
How did they do that?
“Nikita” is the second most-watched CW series after “The Vampire Diaries.” The CW trumpeted that “Hellcats” has the best retention of any series to follow “America’s Next Top Model.”
The CW also decreed that “One Tree Hill” will have a full season, too. That drama is in its eighth season.
WKCF-Ch. 18 in Central Florida is one of the strongest CW affiliates in the country.
Frank Rich: Fox News Channel is ‘a huge factor’ in this election; is it?
Sarah Palin talks to supporters at a Saturday rally in Orlando. Photo credit: Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel
Frank Rich, the liberal op-ed columnist at The New York Times, has been one of the most withering commentators about the crazy election season. On CNN’s “Reliable Sources” this morning, he weighed in on Fox News Channel’s role in the midterm elections.
“I think Fox News is a huge factor, and not because it’s not fair and balanced,” Rich told. “But the fact is that Karl Rove is a regular speaker on Fox, and he is not just appearing in the way that, say, [James] Carville might appear on this network. He is a full-time operative raising huge amounts of money in a cycle.”
Kurtz noted that money has been put at $30 million to $40 million.
Rich also cited that several possible Republican candidates for president are on the Fox News payroll: Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum.
“Almost all of them except [Mitt] Romney,” Rich added. “So you actually have a network that really is promoting a political brand. … These are signature personalities. They cycle among the shows all the time.”
MSNBC might tilt as a liberal network, Rich said, but it doesn’t have potential presidential candidates on the payroll.
Do you agree that Fox News Channel is a huge factor in this election?
‘Blue Bloods,’ ‘CSI: NY’ give CBS the Friday night edge
Donnie Wahlberg of "Blue Bloods" was a big winner in the ratings. Photo credit: John Paul Filo/CBS
Behind the crime dramas “Blue Bloods” and “CSI: NY,” CBS won another Friday night.
In fact, CBS was ahead the whole night with “Medium” (6.5 million viewers), “CSI: NY” (10.3 million) and “Blue Bloods” (11.1 million). The good showing for “Blue Bloods” was a reaffirmation of the drawing power of Tom Selleck and Donnie Wahlberg.
CBS was not only tops in total broadcast viewers but also in the 18-to-49 age group. Here are the prime-time averages: CBS with 9.3 million, Disney-owned ABC with 4.3 million, NBC with 4 million and Fox and The CW with 2.5 million apiece.
NBC offered “School Pride” (another weak showing with just 2.8 million), a “Dateline” hour on the crash that killed Sen. Ted Stevens (4.3 million) and another hour of “Dateline” (4.9 million).
ABC countered with a repeat of “No Ordinary Family” (3.7 million), “Primetime: What Would You Do?” (4 million) and “20/20″ (5.2 million).
On The CW, “Smallville” and “Supernatural” each pulled in 2.5 million. Fox offered a “House” repeat (2.6 million) and a new “Good Guys” (2.3 million).
You Can’t Make an Omelette with Only One Egg
By Vignesh Pillai
Denise Chong, Egg on Mao: The Story of an Ordinary Man Who Defaced an Icon and Unmasked a Dictatorship. Toronto: Random House Canada, 2009.
In her book Egg on Mao, Denise Chong chronicles the life of Lu Decheng, a seemingly ordinary man who committed the very extraordinary act of vandalizing Mao Zedong’s portrait during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. At the heart of the book is an exploration of morality under Communist rule in the Hunanese village of Liuyang, beginning with the lead-up to Lu’s birth in 1963, his formative years, his involvement in the 1989 protests, and his incarceration. Chong draws her narrative both from interviews with Lu, who now lives in Canada, and from interviews she conducted in China in April and May of 2007. Her focus on Lu gives her book a personal perspective which, from a historical point of view, has both benefits and drawbacks.
One of the immediately discernable benefits of this approach is its ability to convey Chinese history at a captivating and visceral level. Instead of showing how policies shaped China on the large scale, reducing people to facts and figures, Chong gives us an emotional understanding of those policies as they affected individuals on a personal level. For example, Chong makes brief mention of how China was recognized by the United Nations for its success with the one-child policy. But she contrasts this with the pressures the underage Lu and his wife, Qiuping, were under to have an abortion, and the difficulties Lu had finding treatment for his illegal child. The later death of the child and Qiuping’s grief is only one example of how Chong, in adopting this personal perspective, conveys the very real impact the Chinese Communist Party’s policies had on the lives of Chinese people.
Chong’s focus on the personal also leads her to explore how the Party’s pervasive involvement in the day-to-day lives of the Chinese people has perhaps resulted in the development of unique character traits. Lu Decheng’s father, Lu Renqing, is the best example of this. In Lu’s eyes, Renqing has become a man who “believes whatever he is told,” “doesn’t have an original thought in his head,” and is often guilty of “mindless bowing to someone else’s stronger will” (66, 104). Chong later mirrors these traits in the general town folk of Liuyang, noting their inability to critically think about the robbery trial of a local teacher. In this way, Chong subtly asks us to speculate whether this inability to think critically is an inescapable result of authoritarian society.
The character traits of Lu Decheng’s grandmother and his mother are also explored, but they serve another purpose for Chong. In these people, Chong portrays a morality that seems to endure very much in spite of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It is also a morality that Lu comes to adopt for himself. Importantly, these people also allow Chong to explore the issue of morality as it pertains to society as a whole. For Lu, Chong writes, his mother’s death “came to delineate a time before, when he knew happiness and believed in goodness, and a time after, when he would see that this virtue had lost currency” (50). This sentence is the most poignant of Chong’s book, and, in many ways, is its central argument: Communist China is a society where morality has no value; “authoritarianism had emptied the Chinese people of their humanity” (185).
This is a very powerful argument, and Chong portrays this in her book aptly. But from a historical perspective it raises questions that Egg on Mao does not address. Chong never asks us to grapple with the moral calculations which the CCP or the student protesters would have had to have made. Why did the CCP institute the policies that it did? Why did the students turn Lu and his friends over to the government after their attack on Mao’s portrait? These questions are given only cursory attention, and we must be satisfied with simplistic answers: communists know “only the language of brutality,” and the students’ “ability to stand on principle” had been “undermined” (219, 214). From a western perspective, which often takes as a given the moral superiority of the democratic system, and views authoritarian government as intrinsically evil, this may not seem to be a problem. But from a historical perspective this treatment does not do justice to the complexity of the situation.
But this is very much a product of the personal approach which Chong took. Involving us so deeply in the mind of Lu Decheng, Chong provides an emotional and intimate perspective of life in Communist Chinese society. In the process however, we become dependent on Lu to inform us of the realities of that society. This means that the treatments we get of groups like the CCP and the student protesters are heavily biased and often lack nuance. Although this does not undermine Chong’s portrayal of the Chinese people as having “lost their moral compass,” it does not properly address the question of why (184).
Egg on Mao is a powerful and captivating tale of an ordinary man’s act of protest. Its portrayal of Chinese society as one where morality has “lost its currency” is convincing, primarily because Chong shows us this society at such a personal level. However, this dependence on the personal perspective also hinders her ability to capture the complexity of the situation, limiting the historical scope of the book. For this reason, Egg on Mao would serve best as a supplementary source that can shine a personal light on what is often impersonal history.
Vignesh Pillai is an undergraduate majoring in English and History at Simon Fraser University.
Kylie Minogue, Heart to perform on ‘Dancing With the Stars’
Kylie Minogue at Fashion Week in Milan last month. Photo credit: Antonio Calanni/AP Photo
Next week is rock week on “Dancing With the Stars.”
The seven remaining couples will perform the tango and paso doble to rock songs on Monday’s performance show at 8 p.m. on WFTV-Ch. 9.
On Tuesday’s results show at 9 p.m., pop icons Kylie Minogue and Heart will perform. You’ll get “Barracuda” from Heart and “Get Outta My Way” from Minogue.
And that should be quite a night on “Dancing With the Stars.”
Juan Williams at Fox News: a happy ending for him
Juan Williams on "Fox & Friends" on Thursday. Photo credit: Richard Drew/AP Photo
Congratulations to Juan Williams on his big payday at Fox News Channel.
Going from being fired by NPR to being embraced by Fox News — in a three-year deal valued at nearly $2 million — is stellar personal news. Williams will probably get a book out of it, too.
Williams’ saga is far different from that of many other journalists, who have lost their jobs in recent years or are just hanging on as the business goes through startling upheavals.
The Williams story has been cast as a left (NPR) vs. right (Fox News) story. “They [NRP] were uncomfortable with the idea that I was talking to the likes of Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity,” Williams told George Stephanopoulos this morning on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “I knew about their antagonism towards Fox. And I knew that they really didn’t like it, and as I said I have been there more than 10 years, and I have seen managers come and go and who dealt with this issue. This current crew was really getting vicious.”
For many other journalists, left vs. right isn’t an issue as they cover the police beat, city commission meetings, businesses, celebrities, local events or sundry other topics. Even so, those journalists serve a valuable function: They supply the material that gives TV’s talking heads the information they can gab about.
Some people may want to see the Juan Williams story as representative of journalism at large. NPR certainly acted stupidly in firing him for making a personal comment, on “The O’Reilly Factor,” about his fear when seeing “people who are dressed in Muslim garb” at airports. But NPR is hardly the first media company to act stupidly.
And Williams wasn’t just another journalist. He appeared on NPR and Fox News. And now he has hit a $2 mllion jackpot.
That puts him in the same league as ABC’s Christiane Amanpour ($2 million) and CNN’s Wolf Blitzer ($2 million), according to TV Guide.
It’s important to remember that when TV superstars weigh in on the state of journalism, they are doing so from a lucrative perch. Here are a few more salaries, according to TV Guide: MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann at $7 million a year, Bill O’Reilly at $10 million, ABC’s Diane Sawyer at $12 million, NBC’s Brian Williams at $12.5 million, CBS’ Katie Couric at $15 million and NBC’s Matt Lauer at $16 million.
That’s nice work if you can get it. Most journalists, however, can’t. They’re just lucky to have jobs, because the main story in journalism isn’t left or right. It’s the bottom line.
‘Criminal Minds,’ ‘Survivor’ give CBS the edge Wednesday
Julie Bowen and Ty Burrell star on ABC's "Modern Family." Photo credit: Eric McCandless/ABC
CBS had the most viewers Wednesday night with “Survivor,” “Criminal Minds” and “The Defenders” leading in preliminary ratings.
The prime-time averages were CBS with 12. 1 million, Fox with 8.3 for the National League Championship Series (a number that’s likely to grow), NBC with 7.5 million, Disney-owned ABC with 7.3 million and The CW with 2.3 million. CBS also won the 18-to-49 age group.
Here’s the CBS lineup: “Survivor” with 12 million, “Criminal Minds” with 14.3 million and “The Defenders” with 10 million.
NBC offered “Undercovers” (5.9 million), “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” (8.5 million) and “Law & Order: Los Angeles” (8.1 million).
ABC countered with “The Middle” (8.5 million), “Better With You” (7 million), “Modern Family” (11.9 million) “Cougar Town” (7.5 million) and “The Whole Truth” (4.6 million).
The CW aired “America’s Next Top Model” (3 million) and a rerun of “Hellcats” (1.6 million).
The top programs locally were “Survivor” with 150,400 viewers, “Criminal Minds” with 144,800, “Modern Family” with 144,800, “The Middle” with 144,200, “Cougar Town” with 123,300 and “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” with 116,100.
In Search of Remembrance: Jia Zhangke’s I Wish I Knew
By Ken Kwan Ming Hao
In his new film I Wish I Knew, a documentary on Shanghai, Jia Zhangke recreates once again, after a detour of sorts with Useless and 24 City, that wonderful tension between the biographical and the historical, the primal impetus of his art, that had made Platform, The World, and Still Life, his best films, so memorable. Jia is different from all other well-known mainland Chinese directors, be they of the 5th or 6th generation — his is a singular sensibility that is aware of but not chained to the social-political, which to him are meaningful only to the extent that they are constraints to be transcended and transformed. In an environment of habitual politicization and cognitive rigidity, the sensibility espoused in Jia’s films is liberating.
Jia’s best films are insistently about the articulation of “space” amid seemingly insurmountable constraints. In these films, Jia strives to engender a state of serene dynamism in which the sublime is possible. The space that Jia aims for is interior, although the exterior is also incorporated in the articulation, reflecting a central element of Chinese aesthetics. The overwhelming politics in Platform, the naked material greed in The World, and the blatant hubris in Still Life are not simply scorned and despised; instead they are “dissipated” in the expanse of unencumbered imaginative flights. The flowing rhythm of the scene in The World in which the lady boss and the main male character contemporaneously step into a little slow dancing; the compact tension of the scene in Platform in which the protagonist unhesitatingly closes the door of the beat-up taxi van taking away his girlfriend for good; and the elegant fluidity of the scene in Still Life in which a teenage girl dreamily roller skates on a rooftop with the Yangtze River in the background are just a few examples of transcendence and transformation in Jia’s films.
The subject of his latest film is a city, Shanghai, of branded images, a stubborn case of monosemy (having a rigidly defined nature). Yet the Shanghai Jia represents on screen is polysemic (having multiple meanings that reflect different assumptions and perspectives) and nuanced, not monosemic and clichéd. It is a Shanghai seen from the vantage point of remembrance, not because of nostalgia but for perspective. Nabokov said in one of his novels, Ada, that “reality is always a form of memory, even at the moment of its perception.” Through the commentaries and recollections of a number of individuals whose lives have been profoundly shaped by Shanghai, Jia gives the city the depth and breadth it deserves.
As the English title of the film, I Wish I Knew, implies, Jia’s Shanghai is elusive and mercurial, yet tangible, symbolized by the angst-ridden flâneur character played by Zhao Tao. By opting for the fluidity of remembrance, Jia not only connects present-day Shanghai with its past but also makes the city a much more dynamic trope for aesthetic articulation. There is a segment in I Wish I Knew on the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni’s trip to China in 1972 at the height of the Cultural Revolution to make the film Chung Kuo — Cina. The Shanghai part of his filming was coordinated by a young cultural cadre of the city. In Jia’s film we see the cadre, now a much older man, in a traditional tea house near the Yu Yuan Garden recounting, with rich details and reflexive introspection, his interaction with the Italian director, as well as the relentless political struggle sessions that entailed at the same tea house. These struggle sessions resulted from the Chinese government’s “disappointment” and displeasure with Antonioni’s depiction of China — even though he had been invited by the Chinese government, Premier Zhou Enlai specifically, to make the documentary. Chung Kuo was shown for the first time in China only in 2004. In his filmic recounting of the event, Jia’s articulation is mainly on the interplay between the biographical (the cadre’s personal experiences), the political (the Cultural Revolution), and the spatial (the tea house), seamlessly switching between the present and the past. What Jia has wrought here is a filmic manifestation of the aesthetics of Chinese calligraphy, where a fluid fusion of form and movement, reflective of the self, is of the essence. This is filmmaking at its most arresting, documentary or otherwise.
Beside Antonioni’s Chung Kuo — Cina, Jia incorporates numerous other films about Shanghai into I Wish I Knew.
For example, the singer/actress Pan Dihua appears in the documentary recounting her memories of Shanghai (her hometown) as well as in an excerpt from the Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai’s Days of Being Wild (1990) playing an aging Shanghai socialite who has settled in Hong Kong. With the resemblance of Pan’s real life story to that of the character she plays in Wong’s film and her ruminations on Shanghai and Hong Kong, Jia creates a sumptuous tableau of temps perdu. The interweaving of the factual and the fictional makes for a multi-layered articulation — not only of remembrance, but also remembrance mediated, offering rich palettes of texture, tone, and affect.
Another film quoted by Jia is Fei Mu’s Spring in a Small Town (1948), one of the best Chinese films ever made. The film is epochal in its fusion of the personal and the historical, as well as the East and the West. The repressed emotional and sexual impulses of the main characters and the dying but irresistibly languid and romantic small town in a nation about to undergo unprecedentedly momentous change are all articulated in a language that is part literati poetry of Tang Dynasty and part Freudian unconscious. The female lead, played by Wei Wei (now residing in Hong Kong) recounts how Fei told her to help the then-inexperienced male lead feel more comfortable in his role by convincing him that she was really (off-screen) in love with him. It worked, but with unintended consequences — the young man was so smitten that he would not stop his pursuit even after the film shoot ended, resulting in her emigrating to Hong Kong just to be free of him. In telling this story, Jia intercuts between video of the actress remembering and sepia-toned black and white footage excerpted from Fei’s movie, fusing reality and artifice into something that falls magically in between.
Flowers of Shanghai (1998), a film adaptation by the Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien of the novel The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai by Eileen Chang, is yet another film that Jia employs to construct his Shanghai. Hou is a master of muted yet consuming affect, which is indelibly demonstrated in the excerpt picked by Jia showing Tony Leung irrepressibly, though laconically, melancholic in the company of boisterous companions. In Hou’s film (and Hou himself, who appears in the documentary), Jia finds a voice, probably the most comfortable for him, to articulate his affective contemplation of Shanghai. This muted intensity is brought home in the chapter on the well-known playwright Yao Ke. One of his children, Wei Ran, is shown on screen sitting in a very unassuming chair on the empty stage of the splendid and historical Shanghai Lan Xin Theater. It is a highly dramatic setting and he is telling the almost melodramatic real-life story — featuring desperation, obsession, betrayal, suicide, and more — of his parents, yet the tone, including that of the raconteur, is matter-of-fact, though the impact is quite the contrary. One gets a very tactile feel of the people, times, and places being recounted, and somehow one also feels that without Shanghai all these dramas and melodramas would not have been.
The wealthy of Shanghai, present as well as past, are also portrayed in a matter-of-fact manner, but their identification with the city is unmistakable. A now elderly lady, Zhang Xinyi, a descendent of the powerful Qing Dynasty official Zeng Guofan, reminisces about her husband’s courtship of her, succinctly recounting the Shanghai-tinged lineage, etiquette, and material accoutrements of her youth as if everything happened only yesterday. The son from a pre-liberation wealthy family recollects wistfully the clubbing life of his parents at such famous night spots as Paradise on Earth, and sings, full of pathos, a 1930s American pop song first heard on the imported family gramophone, with near perfect intonation of both melody and words. Even China’s first bond-trading millionaire, a member of the nouveau riche of Shanghai today, describes his path to riches in a way that portrays Shanghai itself as his partner.
Probably the most viscerally powerful chapter of the film is the one that tells the story of the martyred revolutionary hero Wang Xiaohe. We hear the story from Wang’s daughter, who was still unborn when he was killed in Shanghai and was only able to learn about her father’s heroism from other people’s accounts and written sources such as newspapers. Yet, we see her bring her father’s last days to life with words of etched sharpness. Hackneyed hagiography this is not. She describes her emotions when she was first shown newspaper photos of her father minutes before he had been executed, head held high smiling. Transfixed, one looks at those grainy photos on screen.
Ken Kwan Ming Hao, a sociologist by training, is a faculty research scholar at Columbia University. He is also in charge of programs at the Center for United States-China Arts Exchange at the university, which conducts cultural and natural preservation projects in China since 1978. His writing on film has appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times.
George Soros gives $1 million to Media Matters to monitor Fox News
Glenn Beck on the set of his Fox News Channel show. Photo credit: Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times
George Soros had never donated to Media Matters. Until today.
The international financier and liberal activist gave $1 million to the media watchdog group. Media Matters has been especially critical of Fox News Channel and Glenn Beck.
In a statement, Soros praised Media Matters and blasted Fox News. Said Soros: “Despite repeated assertions to the contrary by various Fox News commentators, I have not to date been a funder of Media Matters. However, in view of recent evidence suggesting that the incendiary rhetoric of Fox News hosts may incite violence, I have now decided to support the organization. Media Matters is one of the few groups that attempts to hold Fox News accountable for the false and misleading information they so often broadcast. I am supporting Media Matters in an effort to more widely publicize the challenge Fox News poses to civil and informed discourse in our democracy.”
David Brock of Media Matters said in a statement: “From the moment in early 2009 that Roger Ailes enlisted Glenn Beck to the Fox News Channel’s new agenda — a battle to overturn the 2008 election results that Ailes likened to the ‘The Alamo’ — Fox has transformed itself into a 24-7 GOP attack machine, dividing Americans through fear-mongering and falsehoods and undermining the legitimacy of our government for partisan political ends. Worse still, in recent months, Fox has allowed Glenn Beck’s show to become a out-of-control vehicle for the potential incitement of domestic terrorism. No American should be quiet about these developments — the degradation of our media and the reckless endangerment of innocent lives. George Soros, a philanthropist of the highest integrity, unfortunately knows firsthand what it’s like to be grotesquely caricatured and flatly lied about on Fox. Media Matters is grateful that he has decided to lend his voice and support our goal of greater journalistic accuracy and accountability. We are especially pleased that in this moment of hidden right-wing billionaire money corrupting our democracy, Mr. Soros, upon deciding to support our efforts, quickly and transparently has made that support public.”