Terrence Rafferty in the NYT notes the fiftieth anniversary of Vertigo, depending on where you sit a bottomless masterpiece or one of Hitchcock’s most arbitrary concoctions. Rafferty is in the first category and makes a case for its difficulties:

This movie isn’t constructed, as most thrillers are, to get us from point A to point B as swiftly and as efficiently as possible. “Vertigo” instead circles compulsively around a set of visual and verbal (and musical) motifs — spirals, towers, bouquets, the words “too late” — which keep bringing us back to the same places, turning us in relentlessly on ourselves. There’s a wonderful scene in which Scottie follows Madeleine through the dizzying streets of San Francisco to his own home. He looks puzzled, utterly disoriented, and the viewer knows exactly how he feels.

Rafferty also makes this sophisticated point:

Seeing “Vertigo” on DVD is maybe a shade less overwhelming, less deranging, than seeing it as its first audience did, but it has the compensating quality of seeming a more solitary and more intimate experience, and this is, always has been, a movie that makes you want to be alone with it.

I don’t agree, though; I think the film was made to create a mass hallucinatory effect, and Hitchcock was not, of course, making a movie for home viewing. I was working in San Francisco in the 1990s, when Harris and Katz’s restoration of the film had its world premiere at the magnificent and huge Castro Theater. (My former colleague Michael Sragow’s exhaustive history of the film’s creation and restoration is here.) The film played, night after sold-out night, and I don’t think anyone who was there will forget the exhilarating, disconcerting experience.

Speed Racer flops on its opening weekend, ekeing out barely $20 million on more than 3500 screens. Nikki Finke gleefully jumps on the corpse here. A more sober AP story is here; Box Office Mojo’s weekend list is here.

The world Finke lives in can be slightly unhinged; but it must be noted her Sunday box office analyses are earlier and more comprehensive than anything else I’m aware of. It’s 2 p.m. PDT right now, and even Box Office Mojo doesn’t have a full analysis up. (Finke’s is time-stamped at 2 a.m.)

Isn’t this the purview of the LAT? The AP wire on latimes.com I link to above is warm beer; Finke’s piece is smarter, based on better knowledge, and brings up a number of important tangential issues. (The paper will be particularly embarrassed if Finke is right and What Happens in Vegas ends up passing Speed Racer for second place once the final figures for the weekend are released Monday.) In what new-media universe does the LAT get outclassed on a basic housekeeping coverage of a hometown industry like this?

As for the Speed Racer debacle, it seems as if the Wachowskis hung themselves with a too-long movie based on a too-little-beloved bit of kitsch. The wonderment I found in the animation wasn’t shared by other critics made restless by the two-hour-plus running time, not to mention the families at whom the thing was directed. I’ve seen figures from $120 million to $160 million listed as the film’s production budget; throw in marketing costs and Fox is dependent on the kindness of a whole lot of overseas strangers to get out of the way of a potential category 5 flop.

Variety liked “Speed Racer.” Hitsville liked “Speed Racer.”

Nobody else did.

Joe Morgenstern in the WSJ:

This toxic admixture of computer-generated frenzy and live-action torpor succeeds in being, almost simultaneously, genuinely painful — the esthetic equivalent of needles in eyeballs — and weirdly benumbing, like eye candy laced with lidocaine. “The Matrix” gave us the trippy pleasure of bullet time, a super-slo-mo vision of the world. “Speed Racer” gives us the paradox of a drive time that’s super-fast and all but interminable.

Carina Chocano in the LAT:

It’s hard to imagine a movie better suited to the aesthetic tastes of an addled 8-year-old boy than “Speed Racer,” or one worse suited to his attention span.Unless, of course, he enjoys speechifying.For a movie about speed and forward momentum, “Speed Racer” provides very little of either, though it does explode into spurts of frenetic, confusing and hard-to-follow action — and that’s just on the racetracks.

M. Sragow in the Baltimore Sun:

Despite the warmth and humor of Goodman and Sarandon, the family-circle gags are groaners. Although the Wachowskis tap into the collective unconsciousness of roadside culture, what they deliver at best are expensive cheap thrills - bumper cars put on rollercoasters.
[…]
The only hope for this movie is that its vibrant hues will hypnotize youngsters the way Technicolor did their great-grandparents. The Wachowskis fail at creating “fun for the whole family.” In Speed Racer, their tricks are for kids.

A.O. Scott:

The childhood experience the Wachowskis evoke is not the easy delight of lolling in the den watching one cartoon after another, but rather the squirming tedium of sitting in the back seat on an endless family car trip, your cheek taking on the texture of the vinyl seat as some grown-up lectures you on the beauty of the passing scenery.

J. Hoberman:

“Production design” is a poor term to describe Owen Paterson’s avidly garish look. Gaudier than a Hindu-temple roof, louder than the Las Vegas night, Speed Racer is a cathedral of glitz. The movie projects a Candy Land topography of lava-lamp skies and Hello Kitty clouds—part Middle Earth, part mental breakdown—using a beyond-Bollywood color scheme wherein telephones are blood orange, jet planes electric fuchsia, and ultra-turquoise is the new black.

Call it Power Kitsch, Neo-Jetsonism, or Icon-D—this film could launch a movement.

Stephanie Zacharek in Salon:

Every once in a while I’m hit with a movie whose existence I find impossible to comprehend. Who is this movie for? Did anyone involved take the time to have an actual thought — even just one — before investing time, care and money into this thing? Andy and Larry Wachowski’s “Speed Racer” is so bereft of intelligence, style and excitement that I can’t figure out who in the world it’s supposed to appeal to: baby boomers nostalgic for the old Japanamation cartoon on which it’s based? Parents who want to cultivate ADD in their kids? The picture is bankrupt in terms of everything but color, and even then, its palette suggests not careful selection but no selection: There isn’t a single neon-jellybean or retro-flower-power color that isn’t represented in “Speed Racer” — if a color is bright, it’s in there. That’s not visual boldness; it’s cowardice — and that’s only the beginning of the picture’s problems.

Anthony Lane in the New Yorker:

A four-year-old will be reduced to a gibbering but highly gratified wreck; an eight-year-old will wander around wearing a look that was last seen on the face of Dante after he met Beatrice. But what about the rest of us? True, our eyeballs will slowly, though never completely, recover, but what of our souls? I reckon the M.P.A.A. should use the advent of “Speed Racer” to revive an old ratings symbol: a big Roman X, meaning “of no conceivable interest to anyone over the age of ten.”

When Hitsville began compiling his celebrated “R. Kelly SexFacts™,” it was a work, not of star-besmirching, but press criticism.

It seemed a little odd that, in an age where child predators, to hear a lot of the media tell the story, lurk behind every corner, skulk near every school yard, and run like the wildebeest on the internets, so little attention was taken of a guy who, let’s face it, has pretty much been busted a half-dozen times or more molesting girls in their early teens.

Why this is so is a weird question. A big part is the institutionalized tyranny of the comely blonde co-ed in peril: Poor black girls, forgive the expression, get pissed on, figuratively and, in this case, literally.

Another part of it is that the rock press still has pretty lame standards, and the arts sections of even fairly respected dailies don’t have the sort of rigorous oversight that would include, say, reminding people that the guy their kids are going to see that night can be seen on the internet urinating into the mouth of a young girl … that police found pictures of him having sex with another girl on a digital camera at one of his homes … and that often at rock concerts stars have flunkies who go out in the crowd and invite women (or in this case, girls) to their boss’s liking back for the after-show party…. so on and so forth. .

The New York Times, for example, has not distinguished itself in its coverage of R. Kelly. Yesterday, the paper ran a dutiful short item on the fact that he goes on trial today on various counts of child pornography. The piece doesn’t mention what is said to be the most memorable part of the videotape at the center of the case: Indeed, if the Times has ever used a variant of the word “urinate” in writing about this story, Factiva can’t find it.

It’s distasteful, of course; it’s not like the news hasn’t seeped into popular culture, as Dave Chappelle’s devastating parody music video attests; and Kelly deserves the presumption of innocence. But when video evidence exists, when family members have identified both parties; and when a reasonable person might suppose (particularly when associates of Kelly’s have been quoted using the word’s “compulsion” and “sickness”) that the problem is ongoing (what do people think goes on after an R. Kelly concert?)… it might be worth simply sharing information with readers.

The Times as a rule hasn’t done that. It has found a lot of room to talk about Kelly in other contexts. Kelefa Sanneh, the paper’s recently departed pop critic, made it his specialty to downplay Kelly’s legal problems, making the argument that … he was talented and popular and had triumphed over the scandal:

Mr. Kelly, the legendarily freaky R&B star, long ago established himself as one of the greatest singer-songwriters of his generation. The sex scandal that threatened to derail his career in 2002 ended up doing the opposite: it made him more productive, more successful and, somehow—maybe because more people began paying attention to his excellent music—more respected than ever before.

Note that the particulars of the scandal wasn’t detailed—and that the implication left is that it was behind him.

Now, there is a backhanded way to intellectually justify such writing: That legal issues or indeed any personal behavior are irrelevant in assessing someone’s talent. That’s a position most people would be comfortable with in the post-Ezra Pound era.

But Sanneh’s argument—let’s call it the Freaky Defense—seems to go further; he seems to believe that when writing about pop stars, such issues are not only irrelevant, they don’t even deserve to be included in the discussion, that they don’t, in a journalistic context, exist—if, as I understand the argument, the star is appropriately “freaky.” As a matter of critical aesthetics, isn’t there something decadent about that? *

Last May, Sanneh, restating his thesis, wrote, “Five years ago a sex scandal threatened to dethrone him, but in the end it merely gave him more of what every star needs: attention and motivation.”

In both passages you can see the implication that Kelly’s problems were behind him; in neither case (or, indeed, ever) did Sanneh take the time to lay out the details of the charges, or the myriad other accusations leveled against Kelly, from other girls he engineered legal settlements with to other pieces of homemade child pornography found in Kelly’s homes.

And beyond passages like that, Sanneh’s admiration for Kelly cropped up everywhere: In a review of a Jamie Foxx show, Sanneh couldn’t help digressing into more praise for Kelly. Kelly, he told us, “excels at turning ridiculous boasts and promises (”You remind me of my jeep/I wanna ride it”) into glorious R&B songs. Of course, Mr. Kelly has two things that Mr. Foxx lacks: a gorgeous voice and a first-rate catalog of hits.”

Here again, what Sanneh chose to focus on was cheerful and admiring. Kelly also has (and Foxx presumably lacks) a collection of child pornography he’s taken himself, but Sanneh didn’t mention that.

Here’s Sanneh writing about some Kelly guest appearances on some new pop songs:

Hit-hungry singers and rappers beware: An R. Kelly guest appearance is a mixed blessing. Sure, he’s one of the all-time great R&B singer-songwriters, but the one thing he can’t do is play a small role. In ”I’m a Flirt” (Sony Urban), from the new Bow Wow album, Mr. Kelly issues a warning: ”Homie, don’t bring your girl to meet me.” As if to show why, he rides roughshod over his host; Bow Wow barely manages to squeak out a verse before Mr. Kelly takes over. And although Fat Joe assembled an impressive gang of guests for an exuberant remix of ”Make It Rain” (Terror Squad), Mr. Kelly’s verse outshines all the others (”I’m tryna keep it R&B/But these streets is a part of me,” he sings, ascending into falsetto); he gives the chorus a tuneful makeover too. If you want to survive an encounter with Mr. Kelly, maybe it’s best not to holler or shout but to whisper instead. That’s what Ciara does in ”Promise” (LaFace/Sony BMG), a slow and spacey R&B hit that recently got the R. Kelly treatment. She is often compared to Mr. Kelly’s onetime protege Aaliyah, who died in 2001, and indeed ”Promise (Remix)” sounds a bit like a reunion. As these two exchange words and verses, the breathy rising star does something truly surprising: She holds her own.

Again no mention is made of Kelly’s problems, and the Aaliyah reference is arresting; she was not just Kelly’s protege. She was a girl in her young teens press reports say Kelly carried on an affair with and finally married—at age fifteen. Her parents finally caught up with him and had the marriage annulled; Kelly tried to deny it but the marriage certificate was eventually found.

The NYT’s relentless cheerleading for Kelly hasn’t been limited to Sanneh.

When Kelly’s “Trapped in the Closet” video cycle was all the rage, the paper published a big chart mapping out all the “complex interpersonal relationships” of the series. The online version, which doesn’t include the chart, doesn’t mention the accusations against him.

The paper also published a lengthy appreciation of the series, mentioning the legal case only in a parenthetical aside, pairing the information, incredibly, with the reassuring news that he has won awards: “Mr. Kelly, a Grammy-winning singer who is scheduled to go on trial on child pornography charges in Chicago on Sept. 17, declined an interview request.”

And recently, Devendra Barnhart, serving recently as a celebrity song touter, talked about Kelly this way: “His album makes me feel like I’m driving a turquoise Hummer over a rainbow made of distilled euphoria.”

The paper had never told readers what Kelly’s sex tape made people feel like. Here’s what Chicago Sun-Times reporter Jim DeRogatis, who wrote the original exposés on Kelly, said how the tape made him feel:

“[T]his is not Tommy Lee and Pam Anderson. It’s not fun and games. This girl has the disembodied look of a rape victim and he’s urinating in her mouth. It’s a sickening spectacle.”

* The issue reminds me, tangentially, of a dance critic I once had. She had done a review of a local dance performance, but as we got more and more entangled in the editing process it became apparent some issue was motivating her I couldn’t get a handle on. Some hours later, it came out: It was by a troupe that featured disabled people—dancers with crutches, braces and wheelchairs—and she was trying to review the show without mentioning it.

————–

Previously in Hitsville:

Tribune, Sun-Times protest closed hearings in R. Kelly case

Secret hearings in the R. Kelly case

The Godfather Who Shagged Me: The complete R. Kelly SexFacts™—Everything you ever wanted to know about the R. Kelly case

R. Kelly’s Publicist: He slept with my daughter!

The latest news from the NBC-Zune-Microsoft front is fascinating.

The story thus far is that NBC, which had a very popular slate of shows available at the iTunes Store, wanted to raise prices. Apple said no.

NBC, a media conglomerate that kicks it old style when it comes to feeling like it should be able to squeeze as much money as possible out of its customers, whined for a while and then finally picked up its Offices and Heroeses and went homeses.

Now it’s playing with the bully down the block. (Microsoft, if you follow my point.) Here’s where it gets interesting. In the old world, that would be the end of the story.

Twenty years ago, if an indie retailer had protested a jump in, say, CD prices, the big corporation would have pulled its product and gone over to Sam Goody’s or whatever, and the small retailer would be screwed.

That’s the media landscape Big Content knew and loved. The sitch today is different. Microsoft’s competition for the iPod is the Zune, which despite the company’s best efforts has a puny market share.

So—getting NBC, with its very hep and sophisticated lineup of shows, is a coup right? What does Microsoft care if the company wants to try to jack up the price on this or that?

Because apparently that wasn’t the whole deal. According to a story on the NYT’s Bits blog, Microsoft made a couple of arrangements with NBC:

Microsoft […] will accept NBC’s pricing scheme and will work with it to try to develop a copyright “cop” to be installed on its devices.

[…]

[…T]he copyright filtering system is still in development and its exact form has not been set.

Mr. Perrette said the plan is to create “filtering technology that allows for playback of legitimately purchased content versus non-legitimately purchased content.”

That’s corporatespeak for “Your Zune won’t be able to play pirated material. ” They are talking about a system that has become a Holy Grail for Big Content: Filters that would allow only legitimate—i.e., corporate approved—media to work on the players.

This is a sort of reverse DRM. A song with digital rights management attached will only play on certain players. This is a system where the player excludes everything but approved content.

It’s a fiendish plan, if it weren’t for the fact that no one in their right mind would buy a product like that.

(I’m a little surprised the companies only went half way. What they really need is a Zune that, when you try to play pirated material, automatically sends your personal information, complete with GPS coordinates, to the RIAA for automated legal action.)

After the item was posted, Microsoft began to spin the issue wildly. The writer never said the copyright cop had been incorporated into the Zune, just that that had been part of the deal with NBC, and quoted Microsoft thusly:

Adam Sohn, a spokesman for Microsoft, declined to discuss details of this effort other than to say that the software company is exploring anti-piracy measures with NBC. He said Microsoft, which suffers from its own piracy problems, is sympathetic to Hollywood’s concerns.

But after the piece was posted, the company complained, and the writer posted this update:

In the Zune Insider Blog, Cesar Menendez, a member of Microsoft’s Zune team, refers to this post, and the blog discussion it prompted. He writes:

We have no plans or commitments to implement any new type of content filtering in the Zune devices as part of our content distribution deal with NBC.

It’s worth noting that [NBC’s] Mr. Perrette told me that Microsoft committed to explore filtering; he didn’t say it committed to implementing those filters.

Here is what Mr. Sohn, the Microsoft spokesman, told me yesterday when I asked him about what Mr. Perrette said: “I don’t think they are wrong, but we are not going to characterize those discussions.” Later he added, “We have agreed to work with NBC across a range of topics, and protection of copyrighted material is certainly one of them.”

In other words, the original story was entirely correct.

It must be said that one explanation for all of this is that the unsophisticated folks from NBC came to the table with this proposal and Microsoft led them on (”Of course we can do that! Why, we’ve got a big ol’ team of people up in Redmond that are just wizards at this sort of thing!”), with no intention of actually doing it.

But it’s still a good example of how the transformative power of the digital convergence has made the old world of doing business more difficult; if nothing else, word of such comical dealings gets out. The irony is that NBC shows are going to be watched on computers and the internet no matter what the company does.

Moving from the iTunes Store to the Zune just means it will make less money. Sooner or later, presumably, one of the Six Sigma GE folks overseeing NBC Universal are going to notice the declining digital income figures and knock some heads together.

Microsoft, however, needs a lot more exclusives than The Office to compete with Apple, and the next company to come along dangling a deal won’t be as dumb as NBC.

That’s what a judge in Los Angeles has ruled, according to Cnet. The company is Torrent Spy. The story said the company earned the judge’s enmity by allegedly destroying evidence:

According to the court, TorrentSpy operators had intentionally modified or deleted directory headings naming copyrighted titles and forum posts that explained how to find specific copyrighted works; concealed IP addresses of users; and withheld the names and addresses of forum moderators. The company had previously been fined $30,000 for violations of discovery orders and were warned of severe sanctions if they continued to ignore the orders.

The fine was based on a $30,000 fine for each of more than 3500 movies or TV shows torrented.

The company’s response:

TorrentSpy’s attorney, Ira Rothken, called that ruling “draconian in nature and unfair.” He said he did not believe any data was intentionally destroyed, and that some actions were taken to protect the privacy of TorrentSpy users.

Rothken also said at the time that TorrentSpy would appeal any decision on damages.

Such rulings are pointless; there are a dozen other torrent search sites coordinating the transfer of untold gigabytes of music and movies every hour, most of them based outside the U.S. The case is another petulant move by Big Content, in this case the MPAA, to take as many small fry down down with it as possible.

… or his lawyer?

From yesterday’s AP precede story on R. Kelly’s child-porn trial, set to begin Friday:

The 41-year-old Kelly, whose first name is Robert, faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted. But Kelly — one of urban music’s biggest stars, and a consistent hitmaker despite his legal woes — is glad the wait is over, his spokesman said.

“Every waking moment, he’s always had this hanging over his head,” spokesman Allan Mayer said. “He’s confident that when all the evidence comes out he’ll be shown not to be guilty of any crime.”

Kelly, of course, has done everything to delay the trial he could over the last six years. And, indeed, even as the AP story was hitting the wires, his lawyer was trying to gum up the works again. The AP sent out this story a few hours ago:

CHICAGO - Defense attorneys for R. Kelly have asked a judge to postpone the R&B singer’s trial on child pornography charges.

That motion is being kept secret, so it’s unclear why the request was made. But it comes as publicity surrounding the case heats up and some media speculate about who might testify.

A few weeks back the judge, Vincent Gaughn, noted that he had held some 113 sessions in the case to that point.

Variety likes it:

True to its origins as a ‘60s Japanese animated kiddie favorite, “Speed Racer” blasts into cultural prominence four decades later as an ultra-cartoony actioner defined by its Day-Glo colors, resistance to any laws of physics, and notions of good and evil that go no further than having the hero drive a white car. Aimed squarely at family audiences, the Wachowski Brothers’ return behind the camera for the first time since “The Matrix” trilogy is a blur of video action painting and very loud sounds notable solely for its technical wizardry. Otherwise, it’s pure cotton candy — entirely non-nutritious but too sweet and pretty for young people to resist. General audiences worldwide look to make this Warner Bros. release a substantial hit in all formats, from Imax to eventual homeview sales, with extra coin assured from moppets who require repeat viewings.

The film is indeed a technical marvel, and I think Variety actually doesn’t quite give it enough credit: The car-racing sequences are dizzying, elating, constantly evolving and surprising; that aspect humanizes and transforms the animation and, combined with the psychedelia that infuses virtually every scene, makes for a nearly mind-altering movie experience.

Perhaps it’s the (fried) synapses talking, but I found the climatic race of this very long movie pleasurable in an almost Ben-Hur-ian way.

The big question was how subversive the film would be; the directors, the Wachowski brothers, are known for the Matrix series, but before that did a brutal and sex-driven modern noir, Bound. The Matrix is passé now, of course, but from the films’ interesting racial casting on down the brothers demonstrated both a disruptive vision and a commitment to risk-taking. And then there’s Larry/Laurenca Wachowski’s transvestitism ….

And so for Speed Racer, they … concocted a subtext-less family film. Staged as a hilarious, deadpan homage to the clunky blocking of the original Japanese animated series from the 1960s, the live-action parts of the film amble along, hitting the marks of the very familiar tale of the talented young star who can go all the way if just given the chance. (The film’s story is so retro that it doesn’t even nod to a Rocky-style “going the distance is all that matters” theme, and our hero, the titular Speed Racer, barely registers as rebellious and hotheaded.) The point of the film is the digital animation, which as it amazes throws down a gauntlet as well.

Indeed, the entire film serves as a withering riposte to Pixar’s Cars, and it is perhaps on the filmic level that the subversiveness emerges. After seeing Speed Racer it’s hard to take John Lassiter’s little auto toon seriously. I don’t have a copy of Ben-Hur around but I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the bravura finale here was deliberately based on its rhythms and beats. And damned if at one point, as Speed prepares to meet his destiny and revs his engine, the sound doesn’t drop out—in an eerie homage to James Taylor’s silent, existential sprint into celluloid heat at the end of Two-Lane Blacktop.

BUILT TO SPILL
“You Were Right”
from Keep It Like a Secret

“You Were Right” is one of those songs: half jokey, half-not-jokey; absurdist, serious; nonsensical, profound; about nothing … about everything. It could only have come out of the 1990s.

If you haven’t heard it, it begins with a crashing, soaring, repeated chorus: “You were wrong/When you said /Everything’s going to be all right.”

The vocals cry out with pain; the song, it seems, will be a tragedy and an elegy.

Except, then the verses come, quieter, confiding, intimate:

You were right when you said
All that glitters isn’t gold
You were right when you said
All we are is dust in the wind
You were right when you said
We are all just bricks in the wall.

Oh, you say, I get it. And that’s about it, though as the song goes on the group get funnier, quoting Dylan, Seger, the Stones, and, in a burst of imagination, Hendrix. (“You were right when you said/Manic depression’s a frustrating mess.”)

The question about the song is just who or what is being made fun of. At face value, the song is probably trying to say that homilies (”Everything’s gonna be all right”) don’t help us, but that on some level even the hoariest stadium rock cliché contains truth. Which I think I agree with.

On the the hand, the guys in Built to Spill are probably being arch. They know John Cougar Mellencamp has nothing to say, and that Hendrix, often, didn’t either. And in the end, after all, a hard rain hasn’t yet fallen. You can’t help noticing most of the lines are from dorky classic rock acts, the last line of the verses is a total kiss-off: “You were right when you said/That this is the end.”

… which in turn is a joke, because it’s not the end, really; the song concludes with the repeated mocking refrain, “Do you ever think about that?”, which seems to be another  swipe at credulous music fans.

On the other hand, it is true that all that glitters isn’t gold, and it could be the band is trying to make it clear that wisdom comes from unexpected places. On the other hand, the “all that glitters isn’t gold” line is probably just an acid “Stairway to Heaven” reference. On the other hand, the woman in the song is sure that all that glitters is gold.

On the other hand, you can’t buy a stairway to heaven, either.

————

Last week’s “Song About Rock.”

The complete “Songs About Rock.”

Up until recently, Microsoft’s Zune was reduced to promoting a Joy Division-themed music player, wrong on so many levels. Now here’s an AP story saying that NBC is going into business with Microsoft, and will allow its shows to be sold for use on the player. This is part of an announcment, due today, that other shows, from “South Park” to “Battlestar Galactica,” will be available for Zuneage as well.

Microsoft ventured into downloadable video sales for Zunes last October when it released its second-generation players and software, but the content was limited to music videos.

Starting Tuesday, Microsoft will sell episodes of TV shows including Comedy Central’s “South Park” and Sci-Fi Channel’s “Battlestar Galactica” for $1.99 each.

In a small victory over Apple, Microsoft said the Zune Marketplace will also carry NBC shows including “The Office” and “Heroes.” NBC Universal has said it pulled its shows from iTunes over Apple’s unwillingness to set different prices for TV shows.

The announcement is significant because Apple and NBC had a spat over pricing last year, resulting in NBC’s pulling its shows from the iTunes Store. It was a dumb move, because NBC shows tend to be a cut or two above normal network fare, and dovetail nicely with the Apple demographic.

In previous posts, we’ve seen how words like “flexibility” has been used in the coverage of this spat. Apple has a flat pricing plan—$1.99 for TV shows—and NBC wanted “flexibility,” we were told. What it really wanted was to “charge more money.” The AP:

Microsoft spokesman Jason Reindorp said flexible pricing is within the scope of its agreement with NBC, but that there are no concrete plans.

Why doesn’t the story say the truth, which is “Microsoft will let NBC charge more than Apple for its shows on the Zune?”

————–

Previously:

The NBC vs. Apple war continues
“Flexibility” raises its ugly head again
When prices get “attractive”
Apple vs. NBC: The pissing match continues

A group of media outlets took their complaints about secrecy in the R. Kelly sex case to the Illinois Supreme Court yesterday, and the court, late last evening, said it didn’t care. From the Chicago Tribune:

The Illinois Supreme Court Monday refused to intervene in a media fight to access transcripts of secret hearings and other sealed documents in the R. Kelly child pornography case.

The Chicago Tribune, Sun-Times, Associated Press and Chicago Public Radio station WBEZ last week filed an emergency petition that would force Cook County Judge Vincent Gaughan to release transcripts of four sealed proceedings held in April. The motion also asked the court to release several sealed court documents and lift the gag order on parties involved in the upcoming trial.

No reason was given for the denial.

Hitsville is of course in favor of media access to trials, but it’s hard to get worked up over this, not least because, besides the Chicago Sun-Times, most media outlets have been studiously ignoring the charges against Kelly for years. Also, if some silly press access matter ends up ends up creating another delay in this six-year-old case, he will scream.

The paper said the judge in the case, Vincent Gaughn, will rehear the motions on Thursday, the day before jury selection is scheduled to begin.

Trib story here.

Sun-Times story here.

Note that the ST first reported that the secret hearings and gag order were prompted at least in part by the issue of whether the judge would allow testimony of a woman who says that Kelly had sex with her when she was under-aged…with another under-aged girl. The Trib now says the same thing, citing “sources familiar with the case,” but doesn’t credit the ST for reporting it originally.

Previously in Hitsville:

Tribune, Sun-Times protest closed hearings in R. Kelly case

Secret hearings in the R. Kelly case

The Godfather Who Shagged Me: The complete R. Kelly SexFacts™—Everything you ever wanted to know about the R. Kelly case

R. Kelly’s Publicist: He slept with my daughter!

If you have to review a bad album, but you’re not the type of critic who actually tells readers that an album sucks, it’s convenient when you have some publicity talking-points at hand to vouchsafe to readers, which is what this writer spends most of the first three grafs of a six-graf review doing:

Verifiable news about “Momofuku” first surfaced on Mr. Costello’s Web site, elviscostello.com, the day of the album’s release on vinyl two weeks ago. (It comes out on CD this week.) The album started, Mr. Costello wrote in his post, when he contributed vocals to Jenny Lewis’s next record, which also included Davey Faragher, Mr. Costello’s regular bass player.

Mr. Costello then brought his drummer, Pete Thomas, into the picture and made his own record in a week, finishing the job less than three months ago. It involved a few other helpers, including Ms. Lewis, the singer-songwriter Johnathan Rice (Ms. Lewis’s boyfriend) and Mr. Thomas’s daughter Tennessee Thomas (also a drummer). Steve Nieve, another member of the Imposters, joined them on keyboards.

How … scintillating a tale! Still, there’s another three grafs to go. What to do? First, scramble around for something, anything, that can be quoted, lyricswise. Odds are they will be cringeworthy, but hey—it’s Elvis Costello, and if you say they display some of his “wit” and “ill-humor,” folks might just buy it, even if you realize they are actually rather lame. (“You can say anything you want to in your fetching cloak of anonymity/Are you feeling out of breath now, in your desperate pursuit of infamy?”)

Then, with the flop sweat about to hit, you reach for comparison to some earlier glories: “The Vox organ suffusing American Gangster Time,’ and its drum rhythm, recalls ‘Radio Radio,’ from Mr. Costello’s 1978 album ‘This Year’s Model’; the ‘In the Midnight Hour’ bass line in ‘Go Away’ sounds like something from ‘Get Happy!!’ from 1980.”

You don’t say the songs are as good as those classics, but the references make everyone involved feel good.

OK, we’re to the end now, but we’re worried about one last thing. Can we encode, somehow, obliquely, backhandedly, the fact that this isn’t a very good album?

How about a gnomic little aperçu that will float by most folks’ heads? How about:

It’s effortfully tossed off; it’s a middling record battling against his built-in high standards.

… And we finish with a reference to those “high Elvis Costello standards.” Those who pay attention know that those standards now consist largely of doing commercials for Lexus and putting out about 19 bad albums in a row, with nary a significant song among them. Hitsville hasn’t heard the new album, but would bet lunch that if there were a significant song on the new album, there would have been more in the review about that, and a little less about Jenny Lewis’s boyfriend’s drummer’s daughter.

Here are the hedlines of todays “Arizona Living” section of the Arizona Republic, the metro daily of Phoenix:

“Wooden Memories”
“Test your hearing”
“Free burrito for teachers”
“Post office food drive”
“Fight Crohn’s and colitis”
“Mom and Estában”
“Healthful salsa non-guilty pleasure”
“Great gifts for teachers”

I’m not going to bore you with what the stories and blurbs were about, other than to note that the big lede spread feature was the first one, “Wooden Memories” (titled differently online), which was about how some people really like holding on to those wood-shop projects they made in high school and which may have been, from that majestic hedline on down, possibly the most boring story ever written. (I can’t say, because I couldn’t read the whole thing.)

The page is a clear example of a key part of what’s wrong with newspapers. Arrogance is part of it, of course; the people putting the paper out every day just don’t give a rat’s ass about the folks who are buying it. And they don’t go out of their way to tell them anything interesting or useful.

But the real problem is the flip side of that: Timidity. It’s clear that everyone involved long ago had any bit of originality or innovation beaten out of them. They know that they can’t go wrong producing and designing the page to appeal to some imaginary doddering grandmother, so they scour the day’s press releases and then sit around and brainstorm to zero in on the bloodless, the trivial, and the utterly mundane.*

In this context, their attention to detail in this quest is indefatigable. Inside there’s a story about the “Guru of Grand Canyon hikers,” which is as clichéd as you’d imagine, and, most impressively, a short filler AP item (”Jump-start day sweetly, swiftly”) about how the Tootsie Roll company has a new product: “Maxxed Energy Pops, a cleverly packed energy drink in the form of a lollipop.” It’s almost hard to believe that life forms above the level of a somewhat dense tree sloth took part in the selection, editing, hed-writing and publishing of that piece of prose.

I love newspapers (I get three a day, not counting Variety), but it’s hard to love an organization that is working that hard to make itself irrelevant. And Phoenix, by the way, is now the fifth-largest city in the country; it’s odd how the sun-belt cities that now make up fully half of the top ten biggest cities in the country have not yet managed to distinguish themselves journalistically. I assume the Houston (fourth) Chronicle is a not-insignificant operation, but you don’t hear much about the papers in San Diego (sixth), San Antonio (seventh), and Dallas (eighth).

*In all fairness, incompetence plays a part as well, on the part of the top editors, who don’t make the section editors put out an interesting product; to the section editors, who are of course deserve the biggest blame; and the reporters who write the crap. In the case of the wooden shop projects, if someone put a gun to your head and said do some journalism on this subject, you would of course run a few photos of an inelegant but beloved footstool or two, add a quote or two from their defiant owners, and then refer people to the web, where you could run a photo gallery and invite readers to send in their own pictures. The relative benefits to that approach are obvious, but of course when the alternative is running a story that no one in the sentient universe would read (indeed, a story that virtually screams, “Why are you paying money to have this crummy newspaper delivered to your home?”), the same could be said about hitting yourself on the head with a hammer.

The Chicago Tribune has a long overview of  the R. Kelly case, which is supposed to get underway on Friday. The article focuses on what it says is the key difficulty for the prosecution: Convicting a guy for having sex with a girl on tape when the girl police have identified as being on the tape denies it.

The girl whom authorities identified as the teen in the raunchy sex tape denied her involvement to a grand jury in 2002, and her stance has not wavered in the years since his indictment, according to court records. Court documents also suggest she may testify on Kelly’s behalf during the trial, a move that may further complicate an already difficult prosecution.

For jurors to give the charges serious consideration, experts say prosecutors must portray the alleged victim, now 23, as a liar. While not a common courtroom maneuver, the prosecution will try to counter her claims with the testimony of the woman’s friends and relatives—including one woman who is set to publicly say that she had a three-way sexual encounter with the R&B superstar and the alleged victim.

“That’s a tough river to have to cross for the prosecution,” said Ronald Smith, a John Marshall Law School professor. “But it’s not impossible.”

Rich people always have the advantage in cases like this; the second crime here is the way Kelly has been able to delay facing the charges in court for six years. But keep reading and it appears the prosecution does have some assets:

[P]rosecutors still face the daunting task of convicting without the alleged victim’s cooperation. Though both she and her parents have denied under oath that she is the girl in the tape, about four dozen witnesses called before the grand jury—including her aunt—identified her, Kelly or both.

Many of those same people are expected to testify at the criminal trial, though the judge has placed the witness list under seal and made it unavailable for public viewing. During a pretrial hearing in 2005, however, a childhood friend identified the alleged victim in the video and estimated the tape was made in the summer before high school, judging from her longtime pal’s hairstyle. “But it could have been a little before,” Simha Jamison said.

Sting holds an annual concert in NYC to raise money for his Rainforest Foundation. The Post story, an oddly industrious outing for the tab, says that a too-small percentage of the donations it raises goes to rainforest programs.

The 2006 concert—which drew Lenny Kravitz, Sheryl Crow and Will Ferrell to the landmark stage—raised $2,156,989, according to the latest available IRS tax filing.

Yet only $887,374 of the money raised, 41 percent, was divided among the charity’s eight programs that support native-land claims and forest preservation in Latin America and Africa—a paltry percentage, according to agencies that monitor nonprofits.

A well-run charity, they said, typically spends 75 percent of revenues on programs.

“This one would fall to the bottom of the bucket,” said Sandra Miniutti, a spokeswoman for Charity Navigator.

The paper couldn’t get Sting or anyone at his charity to respond. It’s kind of nasty:

Sting and [wife Trudy] Styler could not be reached for comment, and representatives for their two charities did not return repeated phone calls and e-mails.

When a Post reporter visited the downtown office last week, a receptionist said the entire staff was out attending a film festival.

This part is interesting as well:

There is also a potential problem with the foundation’s reporting of the value of its concert tickets. The charity sold the tickets for between $100 and $600 but estimated the fair market value at a mere $45 per ticket. This allowed buyers to write off most of the ticket price as a donation.

Such a show at Carnegie Hall would typically sell for a lot more; $100 might actually be lower than the ticket’s fair market value.

Iron Man’s big opening is getting the usual treatment from the press, which largely accepts the studio PR line to give the film two hyperbolic “records”: Take a deep breath and pick either “the second highest non-sequel opening of all time” or “tenth highest opening weekend of all time.”

As I have written in the past, this is true only if you are doing your calculations in the “Inflated Play Money™” beloved by studio publicists, those who have a need to suck up to them, and the dumb. Here’s the AP version, as posted on the NYT web site:

”Iron Man” was the 10th biggest opening of all time and the fourth biggest for a superhero movie. Among nonsequels, it came in behind only the first ”Spider-Man,” which premiered with $114.8 million.

If you take the rise of ticket prices into account, Iron Man probably comes in 15th overall, not tenth. And Spider-Man earned the equivalent of about $135M today. In both cases the distinction is slightly less than billed.

The sobering details later in the story, in between the talk about the movie biz getting the “shot in the arm” it needs, is that ticket sales are still off six percent from last year; indeed, Spidey 3 opened a year ago (with $150M), so even the biggest opening of 2008 thus far represents a thirteen percent drop from the same weekend in 2007.

Even Variety’s version of events was slightly off:

Paramount and Marvel Studios’ summer tentpole “Iron Man” mined enough in its box office debut to join the pantheon of all-time highest openers, grossing an estimated $104.2 million domestically and $96.8 million internationally for a worldwide cume of $201 million in its first five days.

Hollywood couldn’t wish for a better way to start summer 2008 than with the launch of a new film franchise, considering the lack of titan sequels that gave the film biz its best summer on record last year at the domestic B.O. –a blessing and a curse, since comparisons will be tough.

Emphases added. In the first graf, I don’t know if there’s an official pantheonic cutoff number, but if there is I bet it’s smaller than 15. In the second, you have to read carefully first to figure out that the writer is trying to say that there won’t be as many sequels to drum up box office this year as last. (This is true, technically, since virtually every movie released last summer was a sequel of some sort, where this summer only about every other week will see a big-budget film based either on a previous movie or TV show.)

But the stark truth is that the “record” everyone was talking about last summer, was, in non-“Inflated Play Money™” terms, not a record at all. With the rise in ticket prices taken into account, the box office was a wash from the year before, and overall attendance was down nearly 10 percent from 2002.

R. Kelly, who has photographed himself having sex with under-aged girls, videotaped himself having sex with under-aged girls, married an under-aged girl, and been accused by about a half-dozen other under-aged girls of having sex with them, is supposed to go on trial beginning this Friday on child-sex charges stemming from that pesky videotape.

The latest news from Chicago—which the Chicago Sun-Times touts as an exclusive this a.m.—is complicated. The paper reports that a woman will testify in the case that she had sex with Kelly …

a) …when she was underage
b) …with another girl, who was both underage and…
c) …the mysterious woman at the center of the case, who appeared in the original tape that got Kelly in all the trouble.

I say mysterious because, while the girl (now woman) has not been heard from publicly, she has been named in the Chicago papers and been identified by relatives. But it has also been reported that she denies that it is she on the tape. From the S-T:

[…T]he prosecution’s new witness could undermine that defense, since she will identify the girl, sources with knowledge of the matter told the Chicago Sun-Times. In addition, the witness is expected to say the girl was underage at the time of their encounter.

“She was involved in a threesome with [the girl] and R. Kelly,” one source said.

Prosecutors and defense lawyers declined to comment, citing a gag order in the case.

One hates to make light of a case like this, which seems to involve a sexual predator who in the end may be revealed to have damaged many lives. But one has to note that there can’t have been many child sex cases whose prosecution can bring forth a witness with quite so up-close-and-personal an, ah, experience in the case.

And for those keeping score, with or without Hitsville’s own exclusive R. Kelly Sexfacts™, note that this brings to two the number of Kelly’s alleged threeways with under-aged girls.*

For him, it’s just all stuff to tell the grandkids about.

The story says the woman’s testimony was one of the matters the judge in the case deemed worthy of closing the court to discuss. He ultimately ruled in favor of the prosecution and will allow the testimony, the paper said, citing unnamed sources. Local news organizations in Chicago are suing to open the hearings and unseal the transcripts of the discussions.

* Indeed, the original Chicago Sun-Times story exposing Kelly’s alleged predilections (a year before the videotape came out) featured at its centerpiece two named women who said that Kelly had had sex with them at the same time when they were under-age.

———

Previously in Hitsville:

Tribune, Sun-Times protest closed hearings in R. Kelly case

Secret hearings in the R. Kelly case

The Godfather Who Shagged Me: The complete R. Kelly SexFacts™
Everything you ever wanted to know about the R. Kelly case

R. Kelly’s Publicist: He slept with my daughter!

You have to read down a ways in this Radar post by Charles Kaiser, but there’s something very sad he gets to. It’s about blog postings by NBC anchor Brian Williams. Now, Williams apparently does not have the Katie Couric problem, which is not writing her own material.

(She got in trouble after one of her ghostwriters was found to have plagiarized columnist Jeffrey Zazlow.)

(There are so many things wrong with that previous sentence it makes one’s head spin.)

Anyway, Willams’s blog is indubitably personal, right down to the shifting fonts. He begins by meandering on about soft news coverage of the NYT. His evidence? Stories in the Styles section. (Confidential to B.W.: News stories are in the section that has the words “The New York Times” in big letters at the top of the page. The Styles section is about … styles ‘n’ stuff. )

Then comes a paean to a Peggy Noonan column that is an attack on Barack Obama’s patriotism. Here’s what Noonan wrote:

Main thought. Hillary Clinton is not Barack Obama’s problem. America is Mr. Obama’s problem. He has been tagged as a snooty lefty, as the glamorous, ambivalent candidate from Men’s Vogue, the candidate who loves America because of the great progress it has made in terms of racial fairness. Fine, good. But has he ever gotten misty-eyed over . . . the Wright Brothers and what kind of country allowed them to go off on their own and change everything? How about D-Day, or George Washington, or Henry Ford, or the losers and brigands who flocked to Sutter’s Mill, who pushed their way west because there was gold in them thar hills? There’s gold in that history.

[…]

Mr. Obama? What does he think about all that history? Which is another way of saying: What does he think of America? That’s why people talk about the flag pin absent from the lapel. They wonder if it means something. Not that the presence of the pin proves love of country – any cynic can wear a pin, and many cynics do. But what about Obama and America? Who would have taught him to love it, and what did he learn was loveable, and what does he think about it all?

Another challenge. Snooty lefties get angry when you ask them to talk about these things. They get resentful. Who are you to question my patriotism? But no one is questioning his patriotism, they’re questioning its content, its fullness.

Says Williams: “Peggy is doing the work of her career and must be considered an early favorite for next cycle’s Pulitzer for commentary.” Actually, she’s doing the work of the Republican ight-wing attack machine, trying to stir up the yahoos by branding Obama as the Other.

Kaiser has a killer point to make: Why hasn’t Williams, if he’s looking for news in the NYTimes, done a story on his news show about the Times’ huge investigation into how the Pentagon has been secretly training former military men to go out and repeat administration-approved talking points on the war in the guise of objective military analysts for the networks? Kaiser:

NBC, CBS, and ABC have all ignored the story, presumably because it makes all of them look terrible. But after Williams’ blog readers pounced, the anchor finally offered a defense for the use of these retired talking heads—an account that many of his NBC colleagues considered wholly inadequate. Williams explained that he was close friends with two of the “heavily decorated U.S. Army four-star generals”—Wayne Downing and Barry McCaffrey—that they had made plenty of criticisms of the war and, therefore, there was no problem. Then he added: “I can only account for the men I know best,” but he was sure that “[a]t no time did our analysts, on my watch or to my knowledge, attempt to push a rosy Pentagon agenda before our viewers.” That is implausible.

In any case, the anchor’s explanation ignored the main point of the Times piece: that virtually all of these generals, including McCaffrey, worked for or consulted with military contractors, and the big advantage of participating in the Pentagon’s propaganda program was the number of inside tips they got about new war contracts that were becoming available in Iraq.

Why anyone bothers making a smart superhero movie is an interesting question. The many millions who troop dutifully to see Spider-man or Transformers know what they want, and get it, and it has little to do with smart movie-making. International audiences, who get a big say, don’t want or need clever scripts.

The new Iron Man fetishes the original Marvel comics in a precise and, to my memory, unique way. The Spider-man movies, with their unrelieved freneticism and crayon-drawn scripts, bludgeon audiences with their plots; Alfred Molina stands in a chamber and gets eight steel arms welded to his torso and onlookers barely find it unusual.

In Iron Man, most of the movie is devoted to explaining the process by which our hero, played by Robert Downey Jr., creates his steely persona. It is a formula (Spidey had to learn to web-sling, too), but within that context the movie’s deep interest in this process bespeaks a love of the subject and a respect for audiences generally absent in the typical super-hero foolishness.

Jon Favreau, who directed, steps up dazzlingly in a massive undertaking whose technical trappings are both nuanced and assured. The Swingers writer and star-turned-director, whose weight had ballooned along with his filmography (most recently Elf), has a small role here, showing off a svelter physique. He refuses to make Iron Man frenetic and made sure it was written by adults—smart and funny ones—who understand story arcs and understand their lead actor. Again, it’s all formula, right down to the Iron Man-on-Iron Man climax, but it is so handsomely done, so lovingly and amusingly presented, that that you fall into the same mindset, and wind up enjoying yourself immensely.

Bestriding the film is a satisfying and mischievous performance by Robert Downey Jr., whose ragged psyche and roguish countenance illuminate the character every which way but loose, and that too, come to think of it. The very idea of Tobey McGuire as Spider-Man is preposterous; where Superman’s Clark Kent persona was a masterpiece of misdirection, McGuire’s Peter Parker has simply no sign of a superhero’s soul, and neither the actor nor the director, Sam Raimi, try to give him one. Downey, by contrast, has the natural arrogance of the breed and the monomaniacal glare as well; and Iron Man’s methodical pace gives him the time to re-create himself persuasively, making the film’s last line reverberate.

The supporting cast—Jeff Bridges, Gwyneth Paltrow and Terrence Howard, in descending order of how much they are given to do—is so high-level none manages to get steamrolled by Downey, who plainly has something to prove and is, delightedly, given a script packed with self-referential lines. (“I should be dead right now” etc. etc. etc.) Again, as the makers of The Hulk found, a few years back, there’s not a huge upside in making a superhero movie for adults; I don’t know why the Fav & Co. did, but the result is a lot of fun.

Wouldn’t a Microsoft/Yahoo melding in the end be good for Google? As things stand now, Yahoo is a valid alternative to Google at least partially based on the company’s hip origins and faintly Google-like approach to customer service. Yahoo is overcommercialized, of course, and is somewhat annoying to use, but it does have the most fun IM program. [BUZZ!] And, of course, it isn’t Microsoft.

Once Yahoo is Microsoft, however, Google will have one major competitor—and an easy-to-dislike one. So why is Google helping Yahoo out in its squirming maneuverings to stay out of Redmond’s clutches?

The latest NY Times story on the negotiations is here; WSJ’s ($) is here. Basically, two Microsoft -imposed deadlines—one last weekend, and another Wednesday—have passed, leading to Hamlet references in the press, like this WSJ blog item:

The Microsoft-Yahoo saga is taking on a Shakespearean feel—to buy, or not to buy.

Microsoft’s board met Wednesday […] and failed to come to a decision. The big question weighing on what Microsoft’s next move will be is how badly does its CEO Steve Ballmer want Yahoo.

As of this writing, Ballmer’s options seemed to be either launching a full-on hostile takeover bid, which would alienate some Yahoo staffers whose goodwill the company would surely need in a takeover, or undertaking a longer-range plan to try to suborn the company from within by nominating and electing new boardmembers.

This far, in response, Yahoo has been dutifully noting that it was not opposed to a sale to Microsoft, though at a significant premium over the $29 a share price now on the table. In the meantime, it has been trying to work with AOL and Google to come up with some sort of alternative arrangement.

Yahoo is a public company and has to live life as a public company, and if Microsoft can convince Yahoo’s stockholders to sell, well, it gets to buy it. But on an entirely extra-economic level it’s worth noting how surpassingly lame an operation Microsoft is at this point. It tried to start its own search engine—and failed. It tried to go up against the iPod—and failed. Through the brute-force moves of bundling its services with most computers sold in the U.S. it managed to make MSN and MSN Messenger factors, but neither has a raison d’etre. The company’s solution? Buy the competition.
That would leave Google; couldn’t the company then just watch, as the customer experience of Microsoft’s online services heightened the contradictions, so to speak? Or is the potential amassed advertising power combined with its inherent advantage as the producer of Windows too much to contemplate even for Google?