Xark!

Advertising as art

Nike just unveiled this amazing ad called "Leave Nothing," starring San Diego OLB Shawne Merriman and Rams RB Steven Jackson. It's a commercial, created to catch your eye and make you want to buy a particular brand of shoes.

But to the viewer, it's an evocative, emotional, technically brilliant short film -- an odd intersection of commerce and sport and technology and film history, all based around a relatively obscure cultural reference to the 1992 film The Last of the Mohicans.

The Nike spot was directed by Michael Mann, who produced The Last of the Mohicans, a remake starring Daniel Day Lewis. The film featured one of the great soundtracks of the 1990s, composed by Randy Edelman, and the most haunting of all the pieces is a reel called "The Kiss." If you remember the film, you know that Hawkeye (Lewis) and his Mohican brother and father spent a great deal of time running from here to there, saving people, and in one of the most memorable scenes of beautiful slow-motion violence ever filmed, Hawkeye runs through a chaotic battle scene, gracefully dispatching enemy after enemy in a race to save Madeliene Stowe.

"Leave Nothing" is, in essence, an homage to that scene, featuring the slow motion, the music, the spinning hits, the heavy breathing, the raw determination. It isn't football, just as Last of the Mohicans wasn't the French and Indian War, but in making the connection between the two, the spot plays with the meaning of American football to its fans and players: It's our replacement for combat, and its practitioners are acting upon some warrior gene in our cultural -- or physical -- DNA.

Remarkable. And a little frightening, how easily my emotions can be summoned and manipulated.

I Need Some Trivia Help

After searching and searching the resources available to me, I'm hoping people here on Xark! will be willing to let me pick their brains on something. It's a little bit of trivia that I'm having trouble verifying in any appreciable way. Here's what it is:

Was there a baseball game, broadcast in the last 15 years or so (needs to be modern television) where, as an experiment, the network provided no commentary and only let the sounds of the game play? Kind of a "night without sportscasters" thing? If it happened, does anyone know the details?

Thanks

John, I Hardly Knew You

As a person who takes his television personally—at times, intimately—it is with a very strange numbness that I received the news that HBO’s John from Cincinnati had been canceled.  The show was a bit like the odd little temporary girlfriend or boyfriend one gets in the course of a lifetime—you’re slightly amused by having the company at times, but you pretty quickly understand why s/he bores everyone else.  Nonetheless, without a good reason why, you can’t figure out how to break it off with her.  In this case, HBO’s thankfully done the work for us.  On my own, I wouldn’t have been able to stop watching.

For those who didn’t watch—and there were a lot of you—the narrative centered on the travails of a family of professional surfers in various states of disrepair and their interactions with the mysterious John, a good looking guy who seemed mildly retarded and yet had a number of mystical powers (sidebar: one of the show’s best lines was when a female character was considering sleeping with John and said she felt like she was hitting on the good looking special needs kid).  Here’s what the show had going for it:

What God Wants

After keeping up with all of our “appointment television” in the fall, my Bonnie and I are generally ready to take a break in the Spring and Summer.  However, as avid readers of EW, we generally try to pick up one or two shows that come with high recommendations, hoping to find something we like enough to watch each week.  In addition to our rather lengthy Sunday nights on HBO, we’ve picked up a few new shows—TNT’s Saving Grace—starring Holly Hunter and FX’s Glenn Close vehicle Damages.  The viewing of our first week with each show was positive enough to guarantee that we’ll be back again. 

Here, I’d like to focus on Saving Grace and some of the questions it raises about God, and what God wants.  The show is just barely on this side of schizophrenic—it almost feels like you’re watching two different shows, each starring the same characters. On the one hand, we have a fast paced and gritty narrative with Holly Hunter starring as a single, hard drinking, hard partying cop, who seems connected emotionally only to her nephew, whose mother died in the Oklahoma City bombing (Note: The show is set in Oklahoma City, and they’re doing some interesting work with the locale). Hunt is having an affair with her partner, a hard drinking married cop whose wife evidently kicks him out routinely.  The pacing and soundtrack are beautifully textured.  You move with the characters; you want to drink with them. And dance.  When Holly Hunter’s Grace takes a swig of Jack and chases it with a bottle of Bud, you want to be there--whether you drink or not.  Talk about effective product placement.

All This, And Nothing More

Like the song, the watercooler debate about The Sopranos finale seems to be going on, and on, and on.... And not everyone appears to be happy -- either with the show's ending or the degree of debate itself. While HBO is encouraging active discussion, Wikipedia has suspended general editing on their Soprano's page (wonder why!). Everyone I've talked with seems to have a strong opinion about both the meaning of the fade-to-black ending and an even stronger opinion about whether or not it was a "good" ending. Judging by people's apparent investment in these questions alone, I think one would have to call the show's finale a success. Or not.

She's Done It Again!

Forget Michael Jordan.  Muhammad Ali doesn't even come close.  With the June 2007 issue of O magazine, Oprah Winfrey has appeared on the cover a record 102 times!!! That's right, and all 102 have been consecutive appearances.  We at Xark! recognize an accomplishment when we see it and would like to extend our congratulations to Oprah on a job well done.  Congratulations, Oprah. May the streak continue!!

Heroes: Anyone Else Under-Impressed?

My husband and I have religiously watched Heroes since it premiered.  We liked the characters and we loved how it kept us guessing while still forwarding the plot.  We spent a good half hour on average after every episode betting on the futures of various characters, and while we turned out to be wrong much of the time, the explanation always made sense.  We could trust that anything that didn't fit right would eventually be explained in a future episode, and for most of the season that assumption was well supported.

What happened?

(many many spoilers ahead)

It's do-able, but it ain't gonna be purdy

Here's the centerpiece rant from Ray McKinnon's 2001 short The Accountant:

It's brilliant, actually. One world, one culture, one corporation, whatever you call it.

First they take way the little man's ability to produce his own food, by devising a system by which he has easy access to credit on easy terms. Once they get him hooked, then they change the rules. Suddenly they want their money and they want it yesterday.

So the farmer works harder, plants more crops, adds more hogs. But then like magic the price drops -- supply and demand, they say. He's offered a hundred an acre for what cost him two hundred to grow! The greater his yield the further he goes into debt with them banking corporations 'til he's drowned by it.

That's when a farming corporation comes in and takes this fella's land, leaving him with no choice but to go into town to work for some manufacturing corporation. Or retail.

But they aint' done with him. 'Cause see boy, this farmer still has his culture, and that scares 'em. His roots, based in independence, even rebelliousness, his country-ness, if you will.

So what do they do about that? Well that's where them multimedia corporations step in. They begin to bombard their new company man with caricatures and stereotypes of hisself. Gomer Pyle, Dukes of Hazzard, Beverly Hillbillies, Hee-Haw, so on and so forth until finally he can't trust his own reality. He don't know what it is. He starts acting country instead of being country! One day he'll be like Scottsman who puts on his kilt once a year to celebrate his Scottishness!

Until finally this man, this farmer, who once worked on the land and with the land, can be controlled. So he won't question his purpose in making rivets, or sitting in front of a computer screen from 9 to 5 five days a week for 40 years until he gets downsized and dies.

Or worse. Takes his severance pay and retires to Branson, Missouri.

And here's the last line:

If a man builds a machine and that machine conspires with another machine built by another man, are those men conspiring?

This 38-minute film can be had at BuyIndies.com.

FOX News: "We're not making this up!"

Fox & Friends apparently spent Tuesday morning covering a parody news story as a real news story. Says that guy who sits on the left side of the couch, "We're not making this up!... We're not being duped. I looked this up on a couple of Web sites up there."

And later in the day, Lou Dobbs picked up that erroneous "ham sandwich" fact from the Fox program, too (it was introduced in the Associated Content parody. The original incident involved a ham steak). Dobbs may not get his marching orders directly from Roger Ailes, but he's got his populist outrage down pat: "Mr. Superintendent, may I say, you're out of your cotton-pickin' mind."

Somebody. Shoot. Me..

Battlestar Galactica Season Three wrap-up

Since Daniel asked so nicely, and because Battlestar Galactica conveniently ended its third season this weekend (and won't be airing season four until sometime in 2008!), here's how the universe stands as of the end of season three.  Tremendously huge spoilers follow.