Movie studios tease fans with Halloween DVDs

Summer has just begun, but, right on schedule, I’m getting my annual, premature bout of Halloween anticipation.

It’s not my fault. It’s simply that this is the time of year that movie studios announce release dates for the horror movies they plan to release on DVD in time for the Halloween season. Halloween is big business, and Americans spend more money celebrating it than on any other holiday except Christmas. Hollywood isn’t about to be left out of the cash bonanza.

In years past, I could count on MGM raiding its vaults and releasing at least half a dozen chillers from the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. Then Sony Pictures purchased a stake in MGM, and MGM’s “Midnite Movies” line went dormant.

Sony’s co-investors were not pleased. Not only did Sony fail to exploit MGM’s catalog of horror titles, Sony didn’t get anywhere with most of MGM’s movie library. So, the other investors took charge and sold the DVD rights to MGM’s films to Fox.

It’s taken a while, but that move is finally paying off for fans of vintage horror. Fox has more than a dozen releases planned for Sept. 11. The list includes MGM-owned films plus several of Fox’s own. Most retailers are already accepting pre-orders.

The bulk of Fox’s announced releases are two-disc double features:

• “The Beast with a Million Eyes” and “Phantom From 10,000 Leagues”
• “The Beast Within” and “The Bat People”
• “Blueprint for Murder” and “Man in the Attic”
• “Chosen Survivors” and “The Earth Dies Screaming”
• “Devils of Darkness” and “Witchcraft”
• “Gorilla at Large” and “Mystery at Monster Island”
• “The House on Skull Mountain” and “The Mephisto Waltz”
• “Konga” and “Yongary, Monster From the Deep”
• “Pharaoh’s Curse” and “Curse of the Faceless Man”
• “Return of Dracula” and “The Vampire”
• “Tales From the Crypt” and “Vault of Horror”

The best of the double features is “Tales from the Crypt”/“Vault of Horror.” Produced by Amicus Productions and released in 1972 and ’73, respectively, both films are anthologies based on EC Comics stories. Amicus specialized in horror anthologies, and these are two of the studio’s best.

Like all Amicus films of the period, both boast casts filled with well-known British character actors, including Joan Collins (“Dynasty”), Peter Cushing (“Star Wars”), Denholm Elliott (“Raiders of the Lost Ark”) and Tom Baker (“Doctor Who”).

Also on Sept. 11, Fox will release a three-movie set featuring the 1958 version of “The Fly” and it’s two sequels, “Return of the Fly” and “Curse of the Fly.” Horror icon Vincent Price takes a bow in the long-awaited DVD release of “The Witchfinder General” (aka “The Conqueror Worm”). And giant animals terrorize mankind in the 1976 schlockfest “Food of the Gods,” loosely based on an equally silly H.G. Wells story.

But I’ve saved the best for last: director Stuart Gordon’s second foray into the bloodcurdling tales of H.P. Lovecraft — “From Beyond.”

“From Beyond” reunites Gordon with “Re-Animator” stars Jeffery Combs (“Star Trek: Enterprise”) and Barbara Crampton (“The Young and the Restless”) for a tale of blood, guts and otherworldly monsters.

The “special edition” Fox/MGM DVD brings Gordon’s original version to America for the first time. The theatrical version released in 1986 omitted some gore and part of Crampton’s infamous “S&M” scene in order to get an R rating. The new disc restores the film to its intended glory.

That’s enough horror on DVD to frighten almost anyone, not the least of which is my bank account.

Fans take possession of their favorite fictional characters

Officially, George Lucas decides who gets to tell “Star Wars” stories and Paramount Pictures controls the “Star Trek” franchise. But fans of those and other fictional worlds have their own ideas.

Lots of them.

While big media companies can sometimes go overboard when enforcing their copyrights and trademarks, most have gotten the message that it isn’t wise to irritate their fans. So, they increasingly pretend not to notice when those fans play around with the companies’ intellectual property. As a result, fan-made films are popping up all over the Internet.

Only true “Star Wars” fans like filmmakers Matt Sloan and Aaron Yonda, for example, could turn Darth Vader into a comedian.

Well, technically it’s not Darth Vader. It’s Chad Vader, Darth Vader’s hapless brother. But they wear the same costume, and they both sound like James Earl Jones.

Chad Vader, however, isn’t a dark lord of the Sith. He’s the day-shift manager at a supermarket. He has an overbearing boss and an unrequited crush on one of his co-workers. But occasionally he does threaten the stock boys with his lightsaber, not that they’re all that impressed.

Chad is also the star of “Chad Vader: Day Shift Manager,” a popular series of short films online at Youtube.com and Sloan and Yonda’s Web site, BlameSociety.net.

Another comedic take on the “Star Wars” saga is the “Pink Five” series (www.PinkFive.com), which follows a clueless, fast-talking Valley Girl named Stacey, who is always one step behind the story’s heroes and refers to Han Solo has her “boyfriend,” although they’re keeping things quiet so “Princess Hairstyle doesn’t freak out.”

While he is usually overprotective of the “Star Wars” name, Lucas has embraced the community of amateur filmmakers that has grown up around “Star Wars.” He sponsors the annual Official Star Wars Fan Film Awards, and both “Chad Vader” and “Pink Five” are winners of the contest’s highest honor, the George Lucas Selects Award.

Fan fiction, stories fans write featuring their favorite fictional characters, has been a staple of the Internet almost since there was an Internet. You can find fan-written stories about almost anything, from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” to comic-book superheroes to 1980s cartoon characters. And that’s not counting the stories that mix and match characters from different works. I’m sure someone has written a story about Hannibal Lecter somehow ending up in Victorian London where he is chased by Sherlock Holmes.

And if no one has written that story, someone soon will now that I’ve given them the idea. I could Google it to be sure, but I don’t necessarily want to know.

Some of these stories are funny. Some are serious. And an awful lot are erotic — or pornographic, the difference usually being how well written they are. There is an entire sub-genre of “Star Trek” fan fiction in which Kirk and Spock are more than just friends. The now ubiquitous online term “slash,” used for erotic fan fiction, came from writers labeling their stories as, for example, “Kirk/Spock.”

Fan films are the inevitable next step up from fan fiction. Although, so far, there are no “slash” fan films I know of. If they exist, don’t tell me.

With the cost of digital video cameras and editing equipment going down, almost anyone can make a short film — even one heavy on special effects.

The results can be lame, but they can also be amazing. The best “Star Wars” fan film I’ve seen is “Troops,” a hilarious mash-up of “Star Wars” and the Fox TV show “Cops.” In this case, the “cops” are Imperial Stormtroopers. The suspects in this parody are definitely not presumed innocent.

Some Hollywood filmmakers have long admitted that their works really belong to their fans. Now, however, that’s actually true.

’80s nostalgia grips Hollywood, storms theaters

Either I’m imagining things, or Hollywood is in the grip of nostalgia for the decade of President Reagan and hair bands.

On July 3, “Transformers” opens in theaters across North America. This big-budget sci-fi/action movie from executive producer Steven Spielberg and director Michael Bay is one of this summer’s most anticipated films — and not because everyone suddenly thinks Bay has learned how to direct.

No, it’s because “Transformers” has a built-in audience of twentysomethings and thirtysomethings who grew up playing with Transformers toys, reading Transformers comic books and watching Transformers cartoons during the mid-1980s.

But the Transformers franchise is only the first ’80s pop-culture touchstone Hollywood has decided to resurrect in hopes of cashing in on Generation X nostalgia.

Warner Bros. has two projects in the pipeline. The first is a live-action movie based on “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe,” with Joel Silver (“Lethal Weapon,” “The Matrix”) producing. The second is a computer-animated revival of “Thundercats,” with a script (for now) by newcomer Paul Sopocy.

Silver is already producing another nostalgia piece, “Speed Racer,” based on the 1960s Japanese cartoon, and he’ll be the second producer to take a stab at a live-action “He-Man” movie. The first attempt, starring Dolph Lundgren, staggered into theaters in 1987 and stumbled out about a week later.

Why the upcoming “Thundercats” movie rates only animation instead of live action is a mystery to me. There are at least as many aging “Thundercats” fans as there are “He-Man” fans. I guess it’ll save the actors from suffering through the hours of makeup needed to transform them into cat people. But it’ll also deprive me of seeing a suitable actress, say, Rebecca Romijn, made up as a cat person.

I’d pay good money to see that, and so would a lot of other guys my age, whether or not they’ll admit to thinking Cheetara was hot in the ’80s “Thundercats” cartoon series.

Don’t look so shocked. Teenage boys know sexually attractive cartoon characters when they see them. And according to at least one female friend of mine who had a thing for He-Man, girls are no different. Now that I think about it, maybe that’s one reason why Hollywood is pitching revamped versions of ’80s children’s shows to people who are now adults.

Speaking of sexy cartoon characters, my favorite, the Baroness, is set to appear in a live-action movie based on yet another 1980s property, “G.I. Joe.” Paramount has picked up the rights to the toy/cartoon/comic-book franchise about an elite, top-secret military unit and its fight against Cobra, the ruthless terrorist organization determined to rule the world.

Of course, since the Baroness is a member of Cobra, this is one instance when I’m on the side of the terrorists. Sorry, but I can’t resist a woman in leather.

Assuming there are no delays, however, the “G.I. Joe” movie may not be out until at least 2010, the date currently listed online at the Internet Movie Database.

Even then, it may be called something other than “G.I. Joe,” at least overseas. According to one early report, the film’s producer doesn’t think foreign audiences will flock to a movie named “G.I. Joe.” Apparently this has something to do with President Bush having ruined America’s reputation abroad, where U.S. action movies typically make a hefty portion of their earnings.

Funny. Back in the ’80s, foreign audiences had no trouble with the “Rambo” movies. I guess some things really do change.

Good TV knows when to call it quits

Sometimes a great performance is all about knowing when to leave the stage.

With that in mind, I was actually pleased to read last week that one of my favorite TV series will end after its next season.

The producers of “Battlestar Galactica” announced last week that the show’s fourth season will be its last. In a statement on the Sci-Fi Channel’s Web site, producers Ronald Moore and David Eick said, “The show was always meant to have a beginning, a middle and, finally, an end. Over the course of the last year, the story and characters have been moving strongly toward that end, and we’re decided to listen to those internal voices and conclude the show on our own terms.”

As much as I’ll miss “Battlestar Galactica,” I agree that it’s time for the final act. Given the third season’s cliffhanger, I doubt Moore and Eick could squeeze out a fifth season.

The producers of ABC’s “Lost” had the same idea, and they plan to end “Lost” following its sixth season. Unfortunately, that means “Lost” has three seasons left before the curtain drops, which is probably too long to drag out the story. But at least the next three seasons will be only 16 episodes each, rather than the standard 22 to 26 of U.S. network television.

The idea that TV shows should have thought-out beginnings, middles and endings — like movies or novels — is relatively new, at least in the U.S. But some have tried it before, with mixed results. Producer/creator J. Michael Straczynski conceived his sci-fi series “Babylon 5” as a five-year-long “novel” for television. But the constant treat of cancellation led to Straczynski rushing to wrap things up during the fourth season. Then, when the fifth season received the go-ahead, he was forced to pad about half of it with filler. A couple of ill-conceived spin-offs didn’t help, either.

Obviously, not every TV show lends itself to the beginning-middle-end format. Episodic shows (police and legal dramas, soap operas and comedies) can go on forever. Each episode is either a self-contained story or a jumble of overlapping plots so that when one plays out there are always half a dozen others to follow.

Episodic television is great so long as the show’s creators can keep things interesting. After seven seasons, I’m still hooked on the original “CSI.” And with a few unavoidable ups and downs, the original “Doctor Who” sped along for 26 seasons, until a shortsighted BBC bureaucrat killed it just as it was on a creative upswing. Now a revived “Doctor Who,” currently at three seasons and counting, has picked up where the original left off.

But how many shows overstay their welcome, phoning it in well past their prime? While some networks strangle new shows in their cribs (I’m looking at you, Fox), NBC seems intent on keeping its flagging franchises on life support. Remember when “ER” was must-see TV? Yeah, me neither.

NBC is also taking heroic measures with its three “Law & Order” series, the youngest of which just wrapped up its sixth year. The network is loaning out “Law & Order: Criminal Intent” to its corporate cousin, USA. Meanwhile, the original “Law & Order” is about to enter its 18th season of “ripped from the headlines” plots.

As someone who used to be addicted to “Law & Order” marathons on TNT, I can now say I just don’t care anymore.

Not every TV show should follow the beginning-middle-end path “Battlestar Galactica” and “Lost” are paving. But certainly they all can learn from the example of knowing when it’s time to stop.

Remake the bad movies instead of good ones

A tender scene from "Manos: The Hands of Fate."

The summer movie season has begun, leading off with the usual crop of sequels, including the third installments of “Spider-Man,” “Shrek” and “Pirates of the Caribbean.”

But strangely, this season seems short on remakes. I know Hollywood hasn’t given up recycling, but maybe the studios are running out material.

Fortunately, I’m here to help. My advice: Instead of remaking good movies, try remaking bad ones.

“Night of the Lepus”: Ranchers in the Southwest face a threat worse than cattle rustlers when mutant rabbits the size of Volkswagens attack their isolated desert town.

How can anyone not love a movie about giant, killer bunny rabbits?

Released in 1972, “Night of the Lepus” was shot on the cheap. The “giant” bunnies were real rabbits, filmed on model sets, and men in rabbit suits. But now, through the wonders of technology, we can do all of the special effects by computer. Hollywood can now produce the vicious, bloodthirsty bunnies people crave.

The original co-starred the late DeForrest Kelley, the acerbic Dr. McCoy from “Star Trek,” so the remake should feature Robert Picardo, the acerbic Emergency Medical Hologram from “Star Trek: Voyager.” He needs the work.

“Santa Claus Conquers the Martians”: Martians kidnap Santa Claus because there is no one on Mars to give presents to the little Martian children. (Maybe that’s what Elton John meant when he said, “Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise a kid.”)

Again, this is a perfect opportunity for modern special effects wizardry. Instead of the original film’s Martians, who were just guys wearing green leotards and crash helmets with retractable antennae, the remake could have computer-generated Martians with bulbous heads and slimy tentacles. Instead of kidnapping Santa in order to get toys for their children, the Martians would be after Santa’s toymaking super-technology, with the intention of converting it to the manufacture of weapons for an invasion of Earth.

Of course, the Martians won’t count on one thing: In my remake, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who isn’t going to be California’s governator forever, plays Santa. What better vehicle for him to get back into movies than a family-friendly action flick with lots of explosions and dead extraterrestrials?

I can see the movie poster now: a cigar-chomping Schwarzenegger in a Santa suit and holding a bazooka. The tagline will be, “He knows if you’ve been bad.”

“Manos: The Hands of Fate”: Probably the worst film ever made, “Manos” is beloved only by fans of “Mystery Science Theater 3000” and masochists. No surprise, it was written and directed by a fertilizer salesman from El Paso, Texas.

The original involves a family stranded at a remote house with an evil cult leader called The Master; his bowlegged minion, Torgo; and his harem of lingerie-clad wives. The wives mostly just argue with each other and have a pillow fight that doesn’t involve pillows.

My version will be a shot-for-shot remake, so Gus Van Sant, who directed the 1998 remake of “Psycho,” can direct. We’ll use the original script, which has prize dialogue like “Dead? No, madam. Not dead the way you know it. He is with us always. Not dead the way you know it. He is with us always.”

The only difference is, my version will be a ballet and will have a minimalist classical score by Philip Glass and the Kronos Quartet. That will turn the “pillow fight” scene into pure cinematic gold, and my “Manos” will be the hit of arthouse theaters nationwide.

Actually, no. All of these remakes would be terrible. But at least no one could accuse Hollywood of trampling on the memory of good films.

Superheroes leap from page to small and big screens

The hit series “Heroes” concluded its first season this week. And with a second season and a spin-off miniseries already on NBC’s fall schedule, it’s clear superheroes have gone mainstream.

Certainly, at least, superheroes are no longer confined to comic books, which is good news for them.

These days, mostly only 25- to 35-year-old males of the sort satirized on “The Simpsons” read comics. And Comic Book Guys are a dwindling demographic; although you might be fooled into thinking otherwise if you spent enough time surfing the Internet. I think every CBG on the planet spent the past two weeks online blasting the latest “Spider-Man” sequel as the “worst ‘Spider-Man’ ever!”

OK, the reviews for “Spider-Man 3” aren’t great. Currently, the positive reviews add up to a barely “fresh” 61 percent at RottenTomatoes.com. But the movie’s record-breaking opening-weekend gross of $151 million shows the demand is there, at least until word of mouth gets out.

Of course, “Spider-Man 3” may simply have been bitten by the “third-movie curse.” That’s the curse that makes filmmakers do silly things like cast Richard Pryor as Superman’s nemesis, put nipples on Batman’s costume and give Halle Berry more lines to misread in “X-Men: The Last Stand.”

With any luck, the second “Fantastic Four” movie, “Rise of the Silver Surfer,” will also follow historical trends and be better than the original. It opens June 15.

Meanwhile, NBC isn’t content with just one superhero franchise. The network is reviving a 1970s favorite, “The Bionic Woman,” co-produced by David Eick, one of the producers of another ’70s revival, “Battlestar Galactica.” If anyone knows how to turn disco-era cheese into quality TV, it’s Eick.

Hollywood has gotten the message. The public loves superheroes, whether they’re the traditional costumed characters like Spider-Man or the newfangled plainclothes heroes of “Heroes.” But not even NBC’s off-the-rack series totally abandons its four-color roots. Comic books play a key role in the story and even influence the fonts used in the show’s credits and captions.

All this has happened, however, as superhero comics have become more insular, catering to a slowly shrinking audience that revels in convoluted stories that require readers to buy half a dozen titles just to keep track of what is going on. Marvel and DC Comics have virtually given up on attracting new readers. They leave that to publishers that import Japanese comics, which are the only real growth sector in comics publishing.

Fortunately, Hollywood hasn’t picked up that habit. If you watch “Heroes,” you don’t have to watch three other shows to follow the plot. Even NBC’s upcoming “Heroes” spin-off is more viewer friendly than that. “Heroes: Origins” will be six self-contained episodes not directly linked to the original series’ story. But viewers will vote on which of the spin-off’s characters they want to join the cast of “Heroes” when it enters its third season.

Yes, that means a third season of “Heroes” is already all but guaranteed.

They’ve left their comic-book roots behind, but superheroes are making themselves comfortable in prime time. Like horror and sci-fi and all of the other genres that once flourished in comics, superheroes are moving on. It just took them a little longer.

Still feeling the Force after all these years

Thirty years ago next week, one movie changed everything.

In 1977, we knew it as “Star Wars.” That was before two sequels and three prequels made it necessary to identify it by its full title, “Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope.”

In theaters across America, audiences sat spellbound. And somewhere between the words “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...” and the final scene, in which our triumphant heroes turn to face a cheering audience both on and off the screen, George Lucas shaped an entire generation.

Life without “Star Wars”? You might as well try imaging a world where the Roman Empire never fell or the American Revolution never took place.

Along with “Jaws” two years earlier, “Star Wars” gave birth to the summer blockbuster. The companies Lucas founded to bring his vision to the screen went on to work on other films ranging from “Jurassic Park” to the Harry Potter series. Without “Star Wars” to lead the way, no studio would ever have backed the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.

While some people blame “Star Wars” for ushering in an era of filmmaking in which story and character development take a back seat to special effects, it’s more likely that all of those effects-heavy, crowd-pleasing movies saved the moviegoing experience from extinction. Most people don’t mind watching modestly budgeted dramas and comedies at home. But they want to see big-budget action and fantasy movies on the big screen. It’s the blockbusters that keep the theaters open.

But how “Star Wars” changed the movie business is nothing compared to how it changed people.

I remember sitting in awe, watching the film’s opening shot of an Imperial Star Destroyer filling the screen, the weight of it seemingly coming down on the old Gateway Twin “rocking chair” theater. That was the first of the five times I saw “Star Wars” that year. From there, it was on to planets filled with bizarre aliens, brave heroes and, of course, menacing villains like Darth Vader, who was the coolest bad guy ever — at least until I learned he was a whiny little punk with a bad haircut.

Yes, the prequels were disappointing, to say the least. But those of us who were there at the beginning remember a simpler, happier time. There was, as yet, no Jar Jar Binks, and Han Solo still shot first. And because we remember, we can forgive a lot.

For children fresh out of kindergarten, “Star Wars” was a jumping off point for the imagination. With our action figures and toy lightsabers, we could make up our own adventures and visit our own strange, new worlds. If Lucas could show us a desert planet with two suns, we could go to a water planet where it always rained. (Like Lucas, we only imagined planets with one climate.)

Sure, creating your own “Star Wars” stories was more a game for boys than for girls, but you could usually find one girl willing to play Princess Leia, especially if she got to boss everyone around like in the movies. This was pre-“Return of the Jedi,” and you didn’t have to talk her into wearing a metal bikini.

Some of us never outgrew Lucas’ space opera and its ability to set our imaginations running wild. At starwars.atomfilms.com, fans are marking the anniversary by submitting their own “Star Wars”-themed short films. Some are serious tales set in the “Star Wars” universe. Others are comedies, like “Chad Vader,” which follows Darth Vader’s hapless brother through life as a grocery-store clerk. And there’re doing it all with Lucas’ blessing.

Say what you will about Lucas, he’s always encouraged his fans to play in his sandbox. After all, he is still an independent filmmaker, too, although he’s a very, very, very, very rich one.

Three decades after “Star Wars” premiered, the Force is still with us. That’s not bad for a little movie that almost no one gave a chance.

Saturday-morning sci-fi series was crossroads of ’70s

The season 1 cast of "Jason of Star Command."

It was 1978, and Saturday mornings still meant something, especially to a 7-year-old like me.

Before Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon, you got your cartoon fix once a week. Every Saturday began with the ritual consumption of sugar-frosted cereal and snowy TV reception.

But in the year following the release of “Star Wars,” the best show on Saturday mornings wasn’t a cartoon. It was a live-action sci-fi/adventure show called “Jason of Star Command.”

Rarely seen since its initial broadcast, “Jason of Star Command” returns this week on DVD. The three-disc set from BCI Eclipse includes the entire series, plus a documentary featuring two of the series’ stars, members of the special effects team and producer Lou Scheimer.

Scheimer, along with his late partner Norm Prescott, was head of Filmation Associates, one of the ’70s most successful animation studios, responsible for “Fat Albert” and “The Archie Show,” as well as live-action shows like “Shazam!” and “Isis.”

The most expensive Saturday-morning children’s show ever produced, “Jason of Star Command” originated as one segment of “Tarzan and the Super 7” before getting its own half-hour slot the following year.

Set in the far future, the series follows a “soldier of fortune” — that’s Jason, played by Craig Littler — who works for a top-secret agency, Star Command, which roams the spaceways on an asteroid decked out to resemble a futuristic city.

During the first season, the late James Doohan, better known as Scotty on the original “Star Trek,” played Jason’s commanding officer. Doohan left after one year to co-star in “Star Trek: The Motion Picture,” which revived the Trek franchise.

“Jason” was an instant hit with me and my elementary-school classmates. If our playground role-playing didn’t involve pretending to be Han Solo or Luke Skywalker, it involved “Jason of Star Command.”

The show relied on cliffhanger stories reminiscent of “Flash Gordon” movie serials and boasted special effects that took advantage, on a smaller scale, of the advances George Lucas and his effects team made with “Star Wars.” As a result, the spaceship models looked as good as or better than anything that had appeared on TV previously.

But every space opera needs a memorable villain. “Star Wars” has Darth Vader, “Flash Gordon” has Ming the Merciless, and “Jason” has Dragos, a scenery-chewing baddie with a long cape, menacing laugh and laser-shooting eyepiece.

Dragos was played by Sid Haig, who had spent most of the decade appearing alongside Pam Grier in B-grade exploitation films like “The Big Doll House,” “The Big Bird Cage” and “Foxy Brown.”

As Haig says in the documentary, Saturday morning TV is the last place he thought he’d end up. But playing Dragos paid the bills, and Haig has nothing but respect and affection for the team that put “Jason” on the air.

Haig is best known today, however, as Captain Spaulding, the clown-faced killer in Rob Zombie’s “House of 1,000 Corpses” and “The Devil’s Rejects.” And he isn’t the only unlikely actor to appear in “Jason.” In the second season, Jason’s partner was portrayed by the late Tamara Dobson, better known for her title role in the 1973 blaxploitation classic “Cleopatra Jones.”

“Jason” is a strange crossroads of ’70s culture. And unlike a lot of children’s shows that haven’t aged well, “Jason” retains its ability to entertain children while appealing to the nostalgic streak of Generation Xers.

TV violence latest excuse for FCC power grab

Under the guise of protecting children, the Federal Communications Commission wants to treat everyone like children, adults included. And this time, it has an ulterior motive.

Last week, the FCC issued a report in which it asks Congress for the authority to regulate TV violence in the same way it regulates sexual content.

The report dances around the main issue, which is the supposedly harmful impact of TV violence on children. As The New York Times reports, the FCC found that “research on whether violent programming had caused children to act more aggressively was inconclusive.”

That is the best the FCC’s pro-censorship chairman, Kevin J. Martin, could come up with.

So, the FCC latched onto one study that claims violent entertainment is associated with increased short-term aggression in children.

The qualifier “short term” is crucial.

A short-term increase in aggressiveness is not the sort of thing that leads children to shoot their classmates. It’s a normal reaction, given that our brains are wired to deal with flight-or-fight situations, even fictional ones. Once the “threat” is over, our normal brain processes resume.

But even if TV violence were the problem Martin makes it out to be, that wouldn’t make the FCC’s report any less insulting.

Prodded by the Telecommunications Act of 1996, broadcast and cable channels began rating their programs using a system similar to the movie industry’s. Since 2000, the FCC has required all TV sets to include “V-Chip” technology, allowing parents to block programs based on those ratings. This, however, isn’t enough for the FCC.

The agency cites a study claiming that nine out of 10 parents don’t use the V-Chip and less than half use the industry’s ratings system. The technology and ratings are available, but parents don’t care.

The FCC concludes that parents cannot be trusted to protect their children from TV violence. But not to worry; the FCC will be a better parent than you are.

I have a different theory. I think most parents aren’t really worried about TV violence, even if they tell pollsters they are. Parents lie to pollsters because people like Dr. Phil McGraw say they should be worried about TV violence, or else they’re bad parents.

And why aren’t parents really worried? Because they grew up with violent TV, too, and they turned out OK, right?

But the FCC’s desire to regulate TV violence has little to do with TV violence.

One of Martin’s pet causes is forcing cable companies to offer channels on an à la carte basis. Consumers would pay only for the channels they want. Regulating TV violence is a means to an end, by which Martin can say à la carte cable would give parents greater control over what their children see.

It may seem pro-consumer to force cable companies to offer their customers only the channels they want to pay for, but it’s a bad deal.

The beauty of cable TV is that it supports channels that target small, niche audiences. Many of those channels would disappear under an à la carte system. Even if you think your cable TV company gives you a lot of worthless channels, chances are you watch at least one channel most of your neighbors think is worthless, too.

Besides, it’s doubtful that à la carte cable would save customers much money. The price of cable per channel would go up, and consumers would get far fewer choices for their dollars.

Whenever the FCC proposes more regulation, it’s up to no good. But between trying to regulate content and kill niche channels, it’s up to twice the usual mischief.

Culture Shock 04.26.07: Virginia Tech tragedy is latest excuse to attack popular culture

After any tragedy like the one last week at Virginia Tech, you can be sure two things will happen.

People who don't like guns in private hands will agitate for tougher gun-control laws. And people who think popular culture is a cesspool of decadence and violence will attempt an end run around the First Amendment.

I don't have much to add to the gun debate, but I have something to say about the idea that books, TV, movies and music breed mass murderers.

They don't.

Within days of Cho Seung-Hui's April 16 rampage on the Virginia Tech campus, during which he killed 33 people including himself, reporters and armchair psychologists were searching for telltale clues in Cho's class schedule and written assignments, as well as in the rambling, videotaped manifesto he sent to NBC News.

Cho took pictures of himself posing threateningly with a hammer. News reports and Web sites like the Drudge Report quickly drew comparisons to the award-winning South Korean film "Oldboy," in which a man who has been held prisoner for 15 years seeks revenge on his tormentors. One of the film's best-known scenes features the hero wielding a hammer against an army of attackers.

Soon after, reports surfaced that Cho had taken a class called "Contemporary Horror." He presumably read Joyce Carol Oates' "The Female of the Species: Tales of Mystery and Suspense"; "Men, Women, and Chainsaws," a study of gender issues in horror films; and "The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre." He then sold those and other books on an eBay-affiliated Web site.

Without a doubt, Cho was interested in horror and the macabre, otherwise he wouldn't have taken the class. But a lot of people are interested in dark fiction, and few of them ever kill anyone. Like Cho, I read "The Best of H.P. Lovecraft" for a college class, which also included a book by Stephen King. To the best of my knowledge, I've never killed anyone, and King's books have topped bestseller lists for decades without triggering an apocalypse.

Then there are Cho's own stories, which his professors describe as "disturbing." They may be, but based on what I've read of them online, the best words to describe them are juvenile and amateurish.

Cho was a failure before he became a killer, and that is a more likely explanation for his actions than his reading and viewing habits are. There are few things more dangerous than a person whose mental calculus tells him he has nothing to lose.

Popular culture took a similar beating after the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado. Families of some of the victims sued several computer and video game companies, claiming that violent video games had led to Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold's rampage. That lawsuit, like many before it, was thrown out of court.

Some studies claim there is a link between media violence and real-world violence.

One such study by University of Michigan psychologist L. Rowell Huesmann claims there is a connection between violent acts and violent TV viewing. But even Huesmann cannot answer the obvious question: Does media violence cause real violence, or are naturally violent people drawn to violent media?

He simply asserts that his explanation is "more plausible."

But people aren't blank slates. They make decisions based on innate personality characteristics and a lifetime of experiences so varied that it is impossible to trace causal links.

Looking to the culture to explain random incidents of violence is good for only one thing — shifting blame away from where it belongs.

Culture Shock 04.19.07: Vonnegut, Bob Clark leave enduring legacies

Writer Kurt Vonnegut and filmmaker Bob Clark are two men whose names you'd never expect to see together in a single sentence.

And you wouldn't see them together now had Vonnegut and Clark not died within days of each other.

Vonnegut died April 11 from brain injuries he suffered in a fall weeks earlier. Clark, along with his son, died April 4 when his car collided with a sport utility vehicle driven by an alleged drunk driver.

In books like "Slaughterhouse-Five" and "Breakfast of Champions," Vonnegut voiced the disaffection both of his own generation, which fought in World War II, and of the Vietnam era. You know "Slaughterhouse-Five" is important because it is both required reading for students and frequently banned from public schools.

Clark's importance is less obvious. As a director, he'll never rank among the top tier. But his films are easily among the most culturally significant of the past 30 years.

I was still in high school when I read every one of Vonnegut's books the local library had. They included "Breakfast of Champions" and several of his lesser efforts. I didn't get to the undisputed classics like "Slaughterhouse-Five" and "The Sirens of Titan" until later.

His short, declarative sentences and black humor are tailor-made for cynical teens. It's only when you're older that you can appreciate the underlying humanism of Vonnegut's works. He's mad at the world because he wants it to be better, even if he really doesn't have much hope for that.

My favorite of his short stories is "Harrison Bergeron," reprinted in "Welcome to the Monkey House." It begins, "The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal."

The story is as strong an indictment of the implications of socialism as you'll ever read. And Vonnegut was an admitted socialist. Which probably explains why he was so bitter.

Vonnegut was a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany, when the Allies firebombed the city, an event central to "Slaughterhouse-Five" and to Vonnegut's whole worldview. He faced his own mortality long before it faced him.

When he died, my friends filled their online journals and blogs with Vonnegut quotes, most dealing with death. Several quoted from "Slaughterhouse-Five." In it, a race of extraterrestrials, the Tralfamadorians, can see in four dimensions — the fourth being time. Since they can see any moment in a person's life, they view death as no big deal. There are always moments when the person is still alive. As the Tralfamadorians say of death, "So it goes."

"Galapagos," a novel often cited as Vonnegut's worst (or least good), has one amusing conceit. A few pages before any character dies, an asterisk appears beside his or her name.

Put the two books together, and we're always alive, but with asterisks floating beside us. Like all true Americans, Vonnegut was full of contradictions.

And so was Clark.

He started out directing low-budget horror films. His 1974 movie "Black Christmas" became the model for slasher films, predating John Carpenter's more famous film, "Halloween," by four years. And like most good horror films, Hollywood has remade it.

Clark then directed 1982's "Porky's" and its sequel, "Porky's II: The Next Day," thus inventing the modern teen sex comedy. "Porky's" lineage leads directly to the "American Pie" franchise.

But Clark's defining moment came in 1983, when he directed "A Christmas Story."

Based in the stories of Jean Shepherd, "A Christmas Story" is now a holiday classic, aired 24 hours straight on Christmas Day, a role formerly reserved for "It's a Wonderful Life."

From there, Clark's career descended to "Rhinestone" and "Baby Geniuses," but he'd already made his mark on the culture.

"Black Christmas," "Porky's" and "A Christmas Story" make for one improbable resume. But those films form a legacy that will keep Clark with us for years to come.

Culture Shock 04.12.07: Reliving the era of exploitation

It was a golden age, when anything seemed possible.

Throughout the 1970s, teenagers swarmed to rural drive-ins to make out beneath a flickering glow of horror and exploitation. New York City's 42nd Street was a den of iniquity, where seedy "grindhouse" theaters screened everything from kung-fu films and soft-focus porn to blaxploitation and revenge yarns like "They Call Her One Eye."

Zombies, madmen, criminals, cannibals, prisons full of violent women with lesbian tendencies, Nazis and hormonally charged teens mingled on the silver screen in an orgy of celluloid sin.

Then it ended. Multiplexes drove the drive-ins into the ditch, and former New York City mayor and current presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani turned 42nd Street into a sanitized tourist trap — a Disneyland without the lines.

But nostalgia for the grindhouse era is in full bloom, and not because of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's aptly titled double bill "Grindhouse." It opened last week to positive reviews but disappointing profits, in part because of its three-hour-plus running time, and in part because no one in the South or Midwest knows what a grindhouse is.

Grindhouse. n. an often shabby movie theater having continuous showings especially of pornographic or violent films.

Those of us in rural America grew up with drive-ins, not grindhouses. But the movies were the same.

Boutique DVD labels are raiding the vaults of long-gone movie distributors in search of exploitation films no one has seen since the first generation of mom-and-pop video stores liquidated their worn VHS stock.

Synapse Films has found a niche selling DVD compilations of exploitation movie trailers. To date, there are three volumes of "42nd Street Forever." The first two cover a cross-section of trash cinema, while the third, adults-only disc focuses exclusively on movies with lots of heavy breathing, if you know what I mean.

Books like Jacques Boyreau's "Trash: The Graphic Genius of Xploitation Movie Posters" celebrate the lurid, pop-art posters that once lured people into theaters showing "Blood Feast" and "The Centerfold Girls."

But not everyone is celebrating. Slate.com's Grady Hendrix writes, "The affection people have today for exploitation movies is misplaced, because these movies stink."

There's no accounting for taste, but I'll take "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!" over "Titanic." And who can deny that a truly bad movie is more entertaining than a merely mediocre one?

Hendrix makes one point that is almost true: "Exploitation movies are as dead as disco today because every movie is an exploitation movie."

Yes, recently we've seen a revival of exploitation, including "Hostel" and Rob Zombie's "House of 1,000 Corpses" and "The Devil's Rejects." But these gory, mainstream throwbacks are tame compared to, say, "Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS." Even low-rent, direct-to-DVD films don't go there.

Modern filmmakers can get away with only so much. If it's Nazisploitation you want, you'll have to settle for Zombie's fake trailer for the nonexistent movie "Werewolf Women of the SS," sandwiched between the two features of "Grindhouse."

The most extreme '70s exploitation films are morally challenging. They make audiences complicit in the onscreen acts. A viewer who walks out of "I Spit on Your Grave" unshaken has missed the point.

At the other end of the spectrum, exploitation movies, however bad, are just plain fun. And they're fun in ways their modern, direct-to-DVD descendents are not. Maybe it's because they were shot on film rather than on videotape, and maybe it's because their actresses didn't have silicone enhancement. But there is an authenticity to '70s exploitation that '00s exploitation can't match.

Culture Shock 04.05.07: You know, I learned something today

Books with titles like "Monty Python and Philosophy" and "The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy" fill bookstore shelves.

For some academics, it's symbolic of a commercial culture that trivializes important subjects. But for others, it reflects how popular culture translates big ideas into a language the average person — who has never so much as cracked open a copy of Aristotle or Wittgenstein — can understand.

You can find pop-philosophy books dealing with everything from "Star Trek," "Harry Potter" and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" to "The Simpsons," "The Sopranos" and the films of Woody Allen.

Chicago-based Open Court Publishing dominates the market with its Popular Culture and Philosophy series. Open Court is a mainstream philosophy publisher. The company's editorial director, David Ramsay Steele, is author of the heady tome "From Marx to Mises: Post-Capitalist Society and the Challenge of Economic Calculation." (I've read it, and it's serious stuff.)

But as the company's chief executive officer told a Forbes Small Business reporter in 2004, Open Court stumbled onto a financial bonanza in 2001 with its first pop-culture volume, "Seinfeld and Philosophy." It sold 7,000 copies its first year, which doesn't sound like much but is a respectable figure for a philosophy book.

Success breeds imitation, which is why there are two books titled "South Park and Philosophy," one from Open Court and one subtitled "You Know, I Learned Something Today" from Blackwell Publishing, which has its own philosophy/pop-culture imprint.

No pop-culture subject is immune from serious philosophical scrutiny. Superhero tales are, for the most part, morality plays dressed in capes, and "Superheroes and Philosophy" spends a lot of pages examining the ethical and political implications of vigilante justice. The book's best chapter is former Auburn University professor Aeon J. Skoble's essay on the graphic novels "Watchmen" and "The Dark Knight Returns."

Of course, some works of popular culture are explicitly philosophical, like "The Matrix" and its sequels.

The sequels get bogged down in self-importance, but the original manages to touch on several major philosophical controversies without forgetting to entertain. "The Matrix and Philosophy" examines many of them, my favorite being the question of whether living in a virtual-reality simulation is a rational alternative to life in the real world.

That problem has stumped freshmen philosophy students since it appeared in late Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick's 1974 book "Anarchy, State and Utopia," arguably the 20th century's most influential work of political philosophy.

Nozick calls his thought experiment "the experience machine." He asks that we imagine ourselves as disembodied brains connected to a machine that can give us any experience we want. As he sketches his argument, he shows that such experiences, however pleasurable, are inferior to life in the real world because there are things like truth that are more important than mere pleasure.

But I know of at least one philosophy professor who, year in and year out, has freshmen classes who overwhelmingly say they'd prefer to spend their entire lives hooked up to Nozick's experience machine. That alone tells me we need philosophy books aimed at a popular audience. Otherwise we'll have a generation of college students who welcome their robot overlords!

Culture Shock 03.29.07: Wii breaks the mold for video game consoles

After years of being an also-ran, Nintendo is riding high again with its new Wii video game console, which has become the must-have system by breaking all the rules.

Gamers can be fiercely partisan when it comes to their favorite game systems, so I'll start by saying I don't have a Mario Kart in this race. I haven't owned a console game system since the Atari 2600, and the last PC game I bought was Diablo II. My idea of a killer application is Pitfall.

I know. I'm showing my age.

Currently, sales of Nintendo's Wii have outpaced by about 2-to-1 those of Sony's new PlayStation 3. In January, Wii sales also surpassed sales of Microsoft's Xbox 360.

How did Wii become the No. 1 game system?

It wasn't by beating PS3 and Xbox at their own game. Rather, it was by starting a whole new game. Wii hit the "reset" button in the console wars.

Before Wii came along, Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft were locked in an arms race. Each new game system was faster, more powerful and more versatile than the one that came before it. But after PS2 and the first version of Xbox trounced Nintendo's GameCube, Nintendo had to find a new strategy or risk going the way of Sega, which abandoned the console business after its Dreamcast failed to catch on.

That would have been a sad end for Nintendo's game console division, which had reinvigorated the home video game market in the mid- and late 1980s, after the early '80s Atari boom went bust.

But with Wii, Nintendo has changed the playing field. Wii forces players to get off their sofas and truly interact with the games. When you play Wii bowling or tennis, you're literally going through the motions of playing the game in real life. This has the added advantage of making game play simple enough for even the least tech-savvy player.

So, I wasn't really surprised to read a Reuters story last week about a retirement community where residents organized their own Wii bowling tournament.

When 80-year-olds are playing video games, something strange is going on. After all, these are people who didn't even play Pac-Man when they were young.

Wii making players more active participants in the game experience is a natural evolution. And we can see where it's heading — toward the sci-fi dream of virtual reality, in which players don't merely play a game, they're part of it.

Don't expect Sony and Microsoft to sit back while Nintendo gobbles up market share. They'll develop responses to Wii just like they came up with bigger and better consoles to compete with the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Super NES back in the 1990s.

Imagine a game with the intuitive, immersive game play of the Wii combined with the cutting edge graphics of the PS3. And if you can't imagine it, someone at Sony probably already has.

And when someone comes up with a role-playing or fighting game that plays like one of the sports games for Wii, Nintendo may find itself back on the defensive.

In the breakneck world of technological innovation, video game companies are the ones that can least afford to rest on their last big breakthrough.

Culture Shock 03.22.07: Commie zombies haunt the world

When Karl Marx told the workers of the world to unite because they had nothing to lose but their chains, I don't think he had zombies in mind.

But given the fall of the Soviet Union and the fact that the world's only practicing Marxists run Venezuela, Cuba and the workers' paradise of North Korea, it's clear that prediction wasn't Marx's strength.

To get back to the issue at hand, however, what do zombies have to do with the man who co-authored "The Communist Manifesto"?

Answer: everything.

Marxist class analysis, in one form or another, has been part of zombie movies since there was such a thing as zombie movies. It's evident as early as the low-budget 1932 shocker "White Zombie," starring Bela Lugosi as one of the most memorably named characters in cinema, "Murder" Legendre, who uses zombies as workers in his mill.

According to Marx, class struggle is history's defining characteristic.

In the 1800s, with capitalism on the rise, Marx saw the upper class, the bourgeoisie (owners of capital and businesses), as being in conflict with the wage-earning masses, or proletariat. Eventually, as Marxist dogma would have it, the proletariat would rise up to overthrow the bourgeoisie.

Marx died in 1883, and 124 years later, the only communist revolutions that have occurred have taken place in poor countries with little or no capitalist class at all. But that Marx has been proven wrong doesn't mean his ideas have died. Like zombies, they keep shambling along.

Which again brings us back to zombie movies.

In zombie movies, we are the bourgeoisie and the zombies, which have nothing but numbers on their side, are the proletariat.

When people think of zombie movies, they usually think of George Romero's black-and-white classic "Night of the Living Dead," released in 1968. But before Romero began his franchise, Hammer Films, the British studio behind the Christopher Lee "Dracula" series, unleashed "The Plague of the Zombies."

"Plague" takes the political undercurrent of "White Zombie" a step further while dispensing with the Lugosi film's damsel-in-distress plot. In "Plague" British mine workers, a symbol of labor if ever there was one, turn into zombies and create havoc for the upper classes.

By the time Romero got around to his fourth "Dead" film, "Land of the Dead," in 2005, the political message had graduated from subtext to the whole point of the exercise. Dennis Hopper plays the upper-class ruler of an upscale residential development where the idle rich live in relative splendor amid the ruins of zombie-infested America. It all comes crashing down when the zombies break in and eat the rich.

Other zombie films are variations on the theme. Romero's "Dawn of the Dead" takes place in a shopping mall and casts the zombies as mindless consumers. His subsequent "Day of the Dead" and director Danny Boyle's "28 Days Later" pit zombies against the military, standing in for the military-industrial complex.

Of course, none of these films paints a flattering picture of the proletariat, which is portrayed as mindless zombies. But in "Land of the Dead," Romero tried to make his zombies smarter and more sympathetic, with mixed results.

The irony of most zombie films is that their political slant favors subhuman monsters that feed on the brains of the living. Filmmakers compensate by making most of their living characters so nasty or stupid they deserve to be eaten.

If Ayn Rand had written zombie movies instead of 1,000-page novels, she would have had an easier time of it — heroic capitalists vs. mindless zombie hordes hungering for the brains of the creative class.

That script writes itself: Capitalists of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your brains.

Culture Shock 03.15.07: Captain America is just resting

Captain America is dead. Long live Captain America!

There is a temptation to view Cap's demise as a kind of metaphor. Is it the death of patriotism? The death of the American dream? The death of the nation's innocence in a post-9/11 world?

Oh, sure, I could join in the chorus of commentators searching for meaning in the demise of a fictional character. But how could I sleep at night?

For those of you just coming in, Captain America died last week in issue No. 25 of either the fifth or sixth volume — depending on how you count them — of his self-titled comic book. He was shot while being escorted into a federal courthouse to be arraigned on charges of some sort.

Wait a minute. Captain America under arrest? How can this be?

It was the fallout from Marvel Comics' most recent "nothing will ever be the same again" miniseries, "Civil War," in which, instead of fighting villains, superheroes fought each other over the issue of whether they should have to register with the government.

Of course, when superheroes fight, things, like entire cities, get broken. And when Cap's side — the anti-registration heroes — lost, Captain America was hauled in to stand trial.

The bottom line is that Cap's death was simply the dramatic payoff to a months-long story line of interest to only the most obsessive fans of superhero comics. Ultimately, it is meaningless, except as a way for Marvel Comics to grab some headlines and sell a few more books. "Captain America" No. 25 is already sold out at most retailers and going for about $25 on eBay. A second printing is due in stores later this month.

If all of this seems familiar, it's because we've been through it before.

Superman died in 1993. He got better. But not before his death became big news and DC Comics milked it for a year, during which four pretenders to the Man of Steel's legacy reigned.

Expect pretty much the same for Captain America.

He'll be back within a year or two, if not sooner. In the meantime, someone else will put on Cap's red, white and blue costume to fight the forces of evil.

A good candidate for Cap's fill in is his former sidekick, Bucky, who, for reasons too complicated to relate here, now goes by the name Winter Soldier. And that would be ironic, seeing as how Bucky himself came back from the dead just two years ago, after having been officially dead since either 1964 (our time) or 1945 (comic-book time).

For most superheroes, death isn't much of a problem. Off the top of my head, I can think of lots of heroes who have died and come back: Green Lantern (Hal Jordan), Green Arrow, Wonder Man, Wonder Woman, Robin (Jason Todd), Nick Fury, Mr. Fantastic and Hawkman, just for starters. It's not much of an exaggeration to note that every member of the X-Men has died and come back at least twice. Thor is still dead but is scheduled for resurrection later this year.

You only really have to worry if you're a C-list hero. DC Comics has declared open season on its lesser-known characters. Within the past couple of years, Firestorm, Blue Beetle and The Question, have met untimely ends. But DC has replaced all of them with new characters using the same names.

So, don't shed any tears for Cap. He's beaten the Red Skull, and he'll beat death, too.

Old superheroes never die. They don't even fade away.

Culture Shock 03.08.07: Documentary takes on the hypocritical film ratings

The system used to rate the content of movies isn't all it appears to be. And that's a problem both for parents and filmmakers.

The Motion Picture Association of America's ratings system has been in place for about four decades. It has been modified twice, first with the introduction of the PG-13 rating, and later with the substitution of the NC-17 rating for X, which had come to be associated exclusively with hardcore pornography, as opposed to tamer "adult" films like "Showgirls."

But those small tweaks can't make up for the fact that the MPAA's system is broken and should be scrapped entirely.

Documentary filmmaker Kirby Dick set out to learn just how the MPAA rates films. The result was his 2006 movie, "This Film Is Not Yet Rated," recently released on DVD. The title refers to the standard disclaimer used on ads for films awaiting an MPAA rating.

Dick learned that the MPAA's supposedly impartial ratings system is anything but. But he had to hire a private investigator to do it.

The board that rates films for the MPAA is kept top secret, supposedly to shield its members from outside pressure. It is supposed to be made up of parents with small children.

Dick's investigator learned, however, that several of the board's members didn't have school-aged children. Others had ties to major movie studios. And, on top of that, two representatives of major religious groups served in "advisory" capacities.

In interviews with filmmakers, Dick found that independent films are held to a higher standard than are major studio releases. "This Film Is Not Yet Rated" was itself slapped with the dreaded NC-17, even though its content seems to merit only an R. (Dick released the final cut of the film without an MPAA rating.)

Then, of course, there is the longstanding criticism, which Dick notes, that the MPAA has a double standard for violence. Extreme violence earns a film a PG-13 or R. But too much sex can get a film an R or NC-17. Which are you really more concerned about your children viewing?

"This Film Is Not Yet Rated" leaves little doubt that the MPAA's ratings system benefits its member studios at the expense of independent films. Which is just what it was really intended to do. That's no surprise when you consider that the father of the ratings system, former MPAA President Jack Valenti, was a political hack in the Johnson administration. He had made a career out of crushing enemies, real and imagined.

Of course, Valenti sold it to the public as a tool for parents and a way to ward off any kind of government-run ratings system. Big corporations have a history of using the threat of government action to scare their smaller competitors into going along with things that end up benefiting only the big corporations.

One lawyer interviewed in Dick's film, however, says he'd prefer a government-run ratings system because he has no doubt it would be found unconstitutional. I think he is far too optimistic about the Supreme Court's ability to read the U.S. Constitution, but I can see his point.

Dick's film is strongest when it stays on message. A digression about "media consolidation" is simply factually incorrect. And in a discussion included on the DVD as a bonus feature, Dick downplays the MPAA's waning influence. Clearly, however, as more people view movies at home rather than in theaters, ratings are less of an issue. Unrated versions of films are widely available, even at retailers that claim to avoid racy entertainment.

Quibbles aside, "This Film Is Not Yet Rated" is a powerful indictment of the MPAA's self-serving, hypocritical approach to rating films.

Culture Shock 03.01.07: Loving celebrities is in our genes

It's a common complaint: People are too interested in trivial celebrity gossip and pay too little attention to real news. And the mass media fosters this "culture of celebrity" by pandering to it, while coverage of important issues suffers.

Instead of reporting on the war in Iraq and the state of the economy, the argument goes, cable news channels offer hours of coverage of the Anna Nicole Smith legal battles, Britney Spears' shaved head and Madonna's latest trip to Africa in search of some unsuspecting child to adopt.

In the stuffy neoconservative magazine The Weekly Standard, Joseph Epstein writes "Without celebrities, whole sections of the New York Times and the Washington Post would have to close down."

The assumption, usually unspoken, is that the culture of celebrity is something new, something forced on us by "crass consumerism" and media saturation. All I needed, however, was a quick Google search to find some genuine, capitalism-hating Marxists making the point forthrightly.

A blogger at RadicalLeft.net writes disparagingly of Andy Warhol's pop art. Warhol, you see, had the gall to turn celebrity and pop culture into an art form. The same blogger also slams Oprah Winfrey: "... Oprah, whose fetishizing of celebrity and high-end consumer goods is legend, has fed that compulsive consumerism as much as anyone in modern media."

There is no doubt that capitalism produces more — better, faster and less expensively. That is why the capitalist West was growing rich while people in the former Soviet Union were standing in lines for hours to buy toilet paper. Capitalism and the mass media make celebrity gossip, and even the rare instance of real celebrity news, convenient and inexpensive for anyone who wants it.

But they don't create the demand for it.

People have been obsessed with celebrities going virtually as far back as our written records take us. Archaeologists have found graffiti about famous gladiators of the day scrawled on ancient Roman ruins. And ancient Greek athletes had cult-like followings.

Our collective interest in the lives of celebrities has been with us all along because, like most human behavior, it has its roots in our genes.

Celebrities, after all, are not like the rest of us. Some are bigger, stronger and faster. Others are prettier. Others still are just stranger. They stand out.

In prehistoric times, those were the sorts of qualities that helped get you a mate, enabling you to pass on your genes to the next generation. And genes are all about being passed on.

To get an idea how this works in practice, it helps to think about birds. In many bird species, males have brightly colored plumage. This makes them easier prey for predators, but the females love it. Attractive feathers are so useful when it comes to finding a mate that the advantage outweighs the disadvantage of possibly being eaten. Male peacocks in particular have elaborate tails that require a lot of extra calories to maintain. This would be an evolutionary minus if not for the fact that those otherwise useless tails drive the ladies wild.

Paris Hilton is the human equivalent of a peacock. She is mostly useless, but she has wealth, looks (to a degree) and fashion sense that signal "successful mate" to the primitive parts of male brains. Her night-vision sex tape probably didn't hurt, either.

Still don't believe celebrity culture comes from your genes? Well, not even the Marxists are immune. They're the ones buying T-shirts emblazoned with the image of communist guerrilla and ruthless killer Che Guevara. Che is now the celebrity icon for people who claim to hate celebrity icons. Regardless of politics, we all have some celebrity who arouses our interest. After all, we're only human.

Culture Shock 02.22.07: Big media is watching your iPod

If you think you really own the songs you purchase and download from digital retailers like iTunes, think again.

The same goes for movies and episodes of your favorite television shows.

When you buy a compact disc or DVD, you can take it with you wherever you go, let friends borrow it and play it on any CD or DVD player. But you can't necessarily do that with the digital music and movies you buy online. The reason for that is something called Digital Rights Management.

DRM encoding embedded into songs you buy from iTunes, for example, prevents you from playing the songs on anything other than Apple's iPod or iTunes computer software.

When you buy a CD or DVD, a store clerk doesn't follow you home to see that you use it properly. But, in effect, that's what happens when you purchase digital media online. DRM is like Big Brother, always looking over your shoulder to make sure you don't use the product — for which you paid good money — in some way that the big music publishers and movie studios don't like.

DRM restrictions on TV shows are even worse. With some playback devices, downloaded episodes are automatically deleted or rendered unplayable after a few days whether you've watched them or not.

Not that DRM actually works, mind you. Hackers are always finding ways around it, in spite of legislation that makes doing so illegal. And even the most unsophisticated computer user can burn iTunes songs onto a CD and then copy them right back onto his computer as plain old MP3 files free of DRM. But DRM is an inconvenience, and it is an insult to consumers, who are treated like criminals.

The U.S. Congress, prodded by the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America, passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998, criminalizing the production and distribution of technology designed to circumvent DRM. As science-fiction author and blogger Cory Doctorow has written, the main effect of the law hasn't been to protect copyrighted material but to stifle new media technologies.

"DRM isn't protection from piracy. DRM is protection from competition," Doctorow has written. He likens it the MPAA's initial opposition to VCRs — before, of course, the movie industry started making more money from home video than in theaters.

If the entertainment industry had gotten its way, VCRs would have been illegal. Now, it is getting its way, and digital technology is suffering for it.

But the battle lines against DRM are finally being drawn, spurred, in part, by an anti-DRM broadside from an unlikely source — Apple founder Steve Jobs.

Earlier this month, Jobs wrote an open letter encouraging the largest music publishers to abandon DRM.

"Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM ... ?" Jobs wrote. "The simplest answer is because DRMs have never worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy."

Jobs may have an ulterior motive. European regulators want to force Apple to license its DRM technology to other companies, which would lead to consumers being able to play iTunes music on players other than Apple's market-leading iPod. For Jobs, mutual disarmament is a far better prospect that the unilateral disarmament Europe could force upon him.

But whatever his motivation, Jobs has reopened a debate that the big media empires had hoped to end in 1998. Consumers have little more to lose and their consumer sovereignty to regain.

Culture Shock 02.15.07: Death is Anna Nicole Smith's greatest legacy

Even with her death, the saga of Anna Nicole Smith marches on — part tragedy, part comedy and all soap opera.

Alive, Smith was fodder for the tabloids. Dead, she has graduated to the front pages of respectable newspapers. Alive, she was the star of a short-lived "reality" series on the E! cable channel. Dead, she is the subject of endless speculation and analysis on CNN and Fox News Channel. She's given Larry King and Geraldo Rivera material that will last weeks, if not months.

The legal proceedings surrounding the paternity of Smith's baby daughter and the millions left in limbo after the death of her 90-year-old husband, J. Howard Marshall, will probably keep Court TV hosts breathless for years.

Full disclosure: Marshall owned a minority stake in Koch Industries of Wichita, Kan., the largest privately owned company in the U.S. In 1993, Koch financed my summer internship in Washington, D.C. As far as I know, however, I am not the father of Smith's child.

But I am available for interviews.

It's easy to make too much of the similarities between Smith and her idol, Marilyn Monroe. Both were bleach-blond bombshells who suffered from low self-esteem. Both died tragically young, and as a result, both will be remembered in their primes. Both were poor girls from rural America who went to Hollywood, changed their names and made it big. Both "married up" — Monroe to a baseball legend and, later, a respected playwright, Smith to a billionaire old enough to be her grandfather. Also, both apparently struggled with drug abuse. But Monroe did so during an era when powerful movie executives could keep most of the sordid details quiet. Smith did it on live television.

But Monroe was a legitimate movie star, although she never really gained what she most wanted — respect as a legitimate actress. Smith's career high points were the achievements that made her a name in the first place — becoming Playboy's Playmate of the Year and her stint as a Guess Jeans model.

Smith's acting career, such as it was, consisted of bit parts and a pair of lead roles in two straight-to-cable action flicks where the plot served only to move her from one nude scene to the next. Trust me, "To the Limit" and "Skyscraper" aren't exactly inspired cinema even by Cinemax After Dark standards.

Unlike Monroe, whose death only added to her legend, Smith will be defined by her death and its aftermath.

Almost lost in all this is the fact that Smith, in her prime, was a welcome change from the rail-thin models who appear on most high-class fashion magazine covers — literal poster children for eating disorders. For a brief time, before she lapsed into self-parody, she made the most of the talents she had. Unfortunately, that obviously wasn't enough.

For Smith, it's a sad ending for a woman who wanted to be the next Marilyn Monroe and who achieved just enough fame for her failure to reach iconic status, at least in life, to be especially painful. Perhaps too painful for her to endure.

Culture Shock 02.08.07: 'Aqua Teen Hunger Force' attacks; Boston not amused

There is no avoiding the conclusion that the city of Boston has gone insane.

Last week, emergency teams there shut down major highways and rail traffic in response to "suspicious devices" found throughout the city. For a time, Boston was paralyzed — with fear.

As it turned out, the "devices" were advertisements, part of a marketing campaign for "Aqua Teen Hunger Force," a popular animated series airing on Adult Swim, Cartoon Network's late-night program schedule. The small, magnetic, flashing signs depicted Ignignokt, a character on the show.

For the uninitiated, Ignignokt is a Mooninite — a rude, two-dimensional creature from the moon, where he and the other Mooninites spank nerds with moon rocks.

A Boston Globe editorial the next day equated the promotional stunt with "terrorism hoaxes," as if Turner Broadcasting, Cartoon Network's parent company, were responsible for the overreaction of law enforcement and other officials. The editorial admitted that "public safety personnel might have overreacted," but mostly it lambasted Turner Broadcasting, claiming that "anyone over 8 or 9 should be able to understand the dangers of staging such a stunt in the post-Sept. 11 world."

What the editorial did not say is that any public safety official over the age of 8 or 9 should be able to tell the difference between an explosive device and a small, battery-powered sign resembling a Lite-Brite.

Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick chimed in with "It's a hoax — and it's not funny."

A "hoax"? Get real. Turner was out to promote a TV show, not cause a panic.

Interestingly, similar signs had been on display for two to three weeks in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Portland, Ore., and Austin, Texas, without triggering any states of emergency.

Clearly, only Boston is sensitive to the Mooninite menace.

The indignation coming out of Beantown is expected, if not justified. All over the Internet, Boston's officials are laughingstocks, and rightly so.

But one part of this is no laughing matter.

Within hours of Boston's bout of temporary insanity, police there had arrested two men in connection with the ads.

Sean Stevens, 28, and Peter Berdovsky, 27, the two who placed the signs around town, were working for Interference Inc., the company contracted by Turner Broadcasting to carry out the ad campaign. Stevens and Berdovsky pleaded not guilty to charges of "placing hoax devices" and disorderly conduct. They face up to five years in prison.

Presiding Judge Paul K. Leary noted, however, that a person must intend to create panic to be charged with placing hoax devices, the Globe reported.

Instructed not to speak to reporters, and probably sensing the weakness of the state's case, Stevens and Berdovsky gave an irreverent press conference last week, during which they refused to answer any questions not about 1970s hairstyles.

It was their absurdist response to an absurd situation.

By Monday, Turner and Interference had apologized and agreed to pay $2 million to make the whole thing go away. Half will cover the cost of the resources that city, state and other agencies wasted. The other half is "goodwill funds," which the involved agencies can waste on their next panic attack.

Of course, it's hard to put a dollar amount on Boston's other losses. How much are a city's pride and sanity worth?

Culture Shock 02.01.07: 'Psychic' Sylvia Browne blows big prediction

Shawn Hornbeck's parents received the best possible news when their son was found alive more than four years after his abduction.

For self-proclaimed psychic Sylvia Browne, however, the news was not so good.

In February 2003 on "The Montel Williams Show," Browne told the Hornbecks that their son was dead. She described his killer and even said where his body could be found.

Oops.

Yes, as it turned out, Shawn Hornbeck wasn't dead, his abductor looked nothing like the man Browne described, and Shawn's body, obviously, wasn't buried anywhere. That's three strikes right there.

Of course, Browne's standard disclaimer is that she isn't perfect and only God is right 100 percent of the time. But you would at least expect a person with true psychic powers to be able to predict the future with greater accuracy than you'd get by pure chance.

For years, James Randi, a professional magician and debunker of paranormal claims, has offered a $1 million prize to anyone who can demonstrate psychic abilities under scientific, controlled circumstances. So far, he's had no takers. Browne once agreed to take Randi's test but later backed out, he says.

Browne's response is to attack the scientific method. In a message posted on her official Web site, Browne writes, "The very nature of (Randi's) work is negative; i.e. one that tries to disprove the very nature of spirituality. Can God be 'proven' by scientific methods?"

But in her book "Prophecy: What the Future Holds for You," Browne claims an accuracy rate of near 90 percent. So, why the fuss about someone else testing her rate?

Perhaps it's because others who have kept track of Browne's public predictions give her far from a passing score. You'd be better off flipping a coin. Maybe that quarter in your pocket is psychic?

Give credit to CNN's Anderson Cooper for being willing to take on Browne, and for apparently forcing the issue with his colleague Larry King, who too often has given Browne an unchallenged platform for her predictions.

Of course, the Hornbeck case isn't Browne's first high-profile miss. In 1999 on "Montel," she told the grandmother of Opal Jo Jennings that her granddaughter had been abducted by a white slavery ring and taken to Japan. Opal's remains eventually were found not far from where she disappeared, and an autopsy determined she had been killed soon after her abduction.

Browne, of course, is just one of many self-proclaimed psychics claiming the ability to see the future and talk to the spirits of the dead. But there is no evidence any of them, from John Edward to James Van Praagh, is doing anything more than cold readings, an old carnival trick any halfway competent magician can perform.

The trick is to throw out pieces of information and slowly draw more information from the person being "read," allowing the cold reader to make educated guesses based on the information he has learned.

With practice, you can learn cold reading, too. But being a good cold reader doesn't mean you have paranormal powers. In fact, it probably means you don't.

Only Browne knows if she really believes she is psychic. But if she does, she shouldn't object to having her abilities submitted to a scientific test. Hopefully, there won't have to be another Hornbeck case before TV personalities like Montel Williams decide to stop giving people like Browne a free ride.