Category Archives: Media & Entertainment

Cable news audience old and white

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How old is the cable news audience? According to a piece by Frank Rich in New York Magazine, real old. And real white.

With a median viewer age now at 68 according to Nielsen data through mid-January (compared with 60 for MSNBC and CNN, and 62 to 64 for the broadcast networks), Fox is in essence a retirement community.

Two percent of Mitt Romney’s voters were black. According to new Nielsen data, only 1.1 percent of Fox News’s prime-time viewership is (as opposed to 25 percent for MSNBC, 14 percent for CNN, and an average of roughly 12 percent for the three broadcast networks’ evening news programs)

MITT

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“Whatever side your on, see another side.” That’s the tag line for the Netflix documentary MITT, written and directed by Greg Whitely, and it’s a good one. I don’t do reviews but I’ll share a few impressions, in no particular order:

  • Some unresolved daddy stuff going on for Mitt
  • He didn’t really want to be president. He wanted to be elected president
  • There must have been times when the family and/or the campaign said, ‘Stop filming. Please leave the room.”
  • The decision to have no narration was a good one
  • Some of the shots looked like they were from a GoPro strapped to the family pooch. I liked that quality throughout the film
  • Mitt and Anne don’t know any poor people. Sure, they’ve met some in their public life, but they seem incapable of grasping what it would be like to be poor.
  • Karl Rove and Roger Ailes threw up 5 minutes into this film
  • No politician will ever again agree to this kind of access

True Detective

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“Think of the hubris it must take to yank a soul out of non-existence into this meat. To force a life into this thresher. My daughter spared me the sin of being a father.”

Whew. I mean… fuck.ing.whew. Just watched the second episode of True Detective (HBO). It’s too early to compare it to other series, we’ll have to see if it can sustain this level of intensity. I hope so? [Season 1. Season 2 sucked donkey balls]

I found myself thinking of other movie detective partners. Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman in Se7en. Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider in The French Connection. McNulty and Bunk in The Wire. But Matthew McConaughey brings something I haven’t seen in awhile. (Never?) Maybe it’s what Curtis said… the business with the cigarettes? I almost passed out a couple of times, holding my breath, waiting for him to exhale. I also heard echoes of Martin Sheen’s voice-overs from Apocalypse Now.

UPDATE: And how many cigarettes did McConaughey smoke? 40. Someone counted.

The Loudest Voice in the Room

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loudest-voiceThe Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News–and Divided a Country (Amazon)

I rarely read biographies. And I never watch Fox News. But the excerpts from this book really hooked me and the book did not disappoint. I literally had trouble putting the book down. It read like a novel.

The image I had of Roger Ailes — before reading this book — was very superficial. Pretty much the right wing boogyman lurking in the wings of Fox News. Author Gabriel Sherman shows us a complex, talented man who is deeply flawed.

Ailes is only seven years older than I so I witnessed some of the history he helped make, starting with The Mike Douglas Show (he produced); helping Richard Nixon and two Bush’s get elected; the creation of Fox News and its evolution as the propaganda arm of the modern Republican Party.

I won’t look at TV news or politics in quite the same way after readying the book. The author lifted the edge of the tent just enough to see what rubes we are.

It’s difficult to imagine the world won’t be/become a different place after Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes leave the playing field. Has anybody in the last 20 years had a greater impact on the news business (and, by extension, the world) than these guys?

The TV news business that Roger Ailes helped change seems to be changing again. Will the great instincts about television carry over to the world of Netflix and YouTube? Ailes is old and sick and will — hopefully — be on the sidelines.

The Roger Ailes we see in this book is not a happy guy. Rich, powerful, talented, influential… without a doubt. But not happy. I’d give a hundred dollars to know if Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch read this book.

August: Osage County

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I was expecting August: Osage County to be a chick flick. Steel Magnolias with dash of The Big Chill. I was not prepared for the venom that soaked almost every scene. The trailer — and much of the marketing — pitches this as a comedy. I found the humor grim and painful. If you want a happy ending, slip out and watch whatever’s showing in the next theater. You ain’t gonna get one with this movie and the bottom is a long way down.

“Good thing we can’t see the future. We’d never get out of bed.”

The main characters were women so I was surprised to learn that Tracy Letts (who adapted his stage play for the big screen) was a man. Not that men can’t write great women’s parts, but… just see the movie.

I found the profane dialogue powerful and real. Hard to believe Mr. Letts didn’t grow up listening to people who talked that way. This was not the first time Julia Roberts said “Eat the fuckin’ fish!”

Nothing I can say about Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts you haven’t heard or read, but every every actor brought their A game.

No need to rush out to the theater to see this one, it will be just as powerful on your TV. Might be fun to get everyone in the living room after Thanksgiving dinner and watch this as a family.

Chipotle FM

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I eat at Chipotle’s a couple of times a week. On Friday I realized I was bobbing my head in time with the song coming from the restaurant sound system. Didn’t recognize the song or the artist. Thinking back, it occurred to me the music there was always to my liking. So I asked Google “do all Chipotle’s restaurants play the same music?” and found the answer in a story at Businessweek (yes).

Chris Golub the founder and sole employee of Studio Orca which “creates customized playlists for restaurants tired of putting their dining atmosphere in the hands of Pandora or Sirius XM Radio. His job consists of researching music, discovering bands, and asking questions such as, “Would you rather hear folky banjo music or classic Motown as you eat your steak burrito bowl?”

“Golub runs Studio Orca out of his spacious apartment in a Brooklyn high-rise. There he spends 8 to 10 hours a day researching music for Chipotle, which lets him play anything he wants. “I’m looking for songs that make you want to dance around your kitchen in your socks and underwear before you’ve even had your second cup of coffee,” he says. “Not many songs can do that.” Golub listens to about 500 songs before he finds one that will work.”

“Chipotle’s 1,500 stores all play the same music. […] Four times a month he loads up his iPod with 15 to 20 new tracks and goes to a restaurant in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood to see how they sound in the store. Once a month he sends the updated list to Mood Media, formerly known as Muzak, which then streams the mix over the online service Rdio and into every Chipotle store.”