A story in Sunday’s NYT makes the case for George Clooney, movie star AND actor. I agree 100 percent. As a withered crone, of course my hubba-hubba interest in him is, in a word, gross, so I lay that aside and concentrate, like the writer of this piece does, on how he does it. We saw “Up in the Air” over the weekend, and there were several points where I noticed what isn’t appealing about his physicality — he’s a little too thin, and has the big Hollywood head first pointed out by LAMary some time back. (As an Angeleno who has seen many in the flesh, she called actors “the lollipop people.”) There was an angle here and there where you could see his neck is getting crepey, although he retains the Clooney sparkle and will until he dies.

What I like about him is his (seeming) professional pluck, uncommon in a movie star capable of phoning it in until retirement. He comes across as not only a nice movie-star guy, but one who really is all about the work. He takes chances, stretches himself, is unafraid of both failure and unflattering camera angles that show his softening neck. He has the self-effacement and good sense not to whine about how hard it is to be him, at least in public. I know a few people who’ve had personal encounters with him and say he’s pretty much as advertised, and if it really is all bullshit and he’s just very good at snowing fangirls like me, then, well-snowed, sir.

Terrence Rafferty gets it right at the very beginning:

He’s the kind of actor who could float along forever on his genial presence alone, coast on charm. But he doesn’t. (Or doesn’t always.) That’s the mystery.

That is, indeed, the mystery. It’s hard to imagine another actor carrying “Up in the Air” as capably as he does, even when you look closely and see where he gets help. He plays a son of a bitch who happily fires people for a living, but gains our sympathy through the early introduction of an even bigger monster, a young underling who wants to fire people for a living via teleconference. He makes a pitch for the comparable dignity of doing such ugly work in person, and you almost forget that he’s the guy who makes his living through outsourced terminations in the first place. It’s the Don Corleone trick; he’s happy to make his living from violence, gambling, prostitution and protection, but not from drugs. He’s the best bad guy in the room.

I try not to read too much about movies I intend to see in theaters, but it was hard to miss the chatter about “Up in the Air,” particularly as it was partially shot here and touches the raw wound of job loss. I read beforehand about how Jason Reitman, the writer and director, had to make a tonal shift in his script as the story was, as we say in journalism, overtaken by events. But whatever he had to rewrite or rethink, he did it exceptionally well. It’s so sure-footed. I think one reason I liked this movie so much is, we don’t see enough stories onscreen about people’s work lives (unless they’re doctors or lawyers or police, that is). We certainly don’t see many about people who work in white-collar office jobs, and I found myself moved by shots that weren’t even particularly fussed over — the pans of offices already half-empty, the extra chairs pushed into a vacant cubicle, the phones piled up on the floor, the way everyone sees Clooney walk in and immediately cower in fear. I’ve been there; my office looked like that when I left, and one of the exciting new ad hoc committees for 2005 was supposed to be the rearrangement and removal of furniture so it didn’t look so tumbleweedy.

I also like Rafferty’s career assessment of Clooney, as he called out my two favorite performances — “Out of Sight” and “Michael Clayton,” and the best part of the latter film. It’s the final, two-minute shot of the Cloonester in the back of a cab:

He flags a taxi, slumps into the back seat and tells the cabbie to drive, and it’s only then that you understand how eloquent Mr. Clooney’s body language has been throughout the preceding two hours — how tensely he’s been holding himself, how warily he’s been sizing up his dangerous world. As he sits in the cab, just riding, the camera stays on him for two full minutes. He does nothing, apparently. His expression hardly changes. But you can feel the weight of what he’s been through in his blankness, his emptied-out eyes. You can’t stop looking at him. It’s a great, daring piece of acting. Only a movie star could get away with it.

(I disagree with that last sentence, by the way. Bob Hoskins, “The Long Good Friday,” end of discussion.)

OK, then. Movie Monday it is, I guess. We also caught an oldie I’d never seen before, “Bound,” on cable Friday night. More on that when I recover from how good it was.

Bloggage? Sure:

The Harry Reid story is leading the weekend news cycle as “Game Change,” the new book about the 2008 presidential campaign, gets circulating. But don’t miss this excerpt in New York magazine, about the meltdown of another handsome man, John Edwards, who fell for the oldest trap in the world.

Speaking of Reid, who still says “Negro,” anyway? Doesn’t he know the code word yet? “Articulate?”

This NYT Styles story was so stupid it made my brain hurt. Thank God for Terrence Rafferty.

I’m late getting to the big New Yorker profile of John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods and, it would seem, the model for Steve Martin’s character in “Baby Mama.” Note well:

His belief in the power of the individual is such that blame falls on individuals, too. In his view, it tends to be the fault of the unhealthy or fat person that he or she is unhealthy or fat. People just need to eat better. He told me, “If I could, I would wave a magic wand so that Americans ate better, because the diseases that are killing us—heart disease, cancer, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s—these diseases have a high correlation with diet. And that is something that most people do not understand.”

It matters less to him that our food system, for a dozen reasons, as Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, and many others have chronicled, has been rigged to deliver unhealthy food at artificially low cost to a misguided public. People have the power and the means to choose rice and beans over Big Macs, and when they fail to do so they bring ruin on themselves, and on everyone else. In his Wall Street Journal column, Mackey wrote of “the realization that every American adult is responsible for his or her own health. Unfortunately, many of our health-care problems are self-inflicted: two-thirds of Americans are now overweight, and one-third are obese.” Inarguable as this assertion may be, it struck a discordant note. People who may look to Whole Foods to agitate for changes in the food system, or who have been bankrupted by medical costs despite eating right, might wonder if it was quite the moment to be preaching personal responsibility.

Worth your time.

And another week begins. At least it was a pretty weekend. Enjoy it.

Well, we got our snow. The world is white — I’d guesstimate we topped out at three inches or so — and the neighborhood resounds with the blast of two-cycle engines. No, wait — the last one just stopped. That would be ours, and don’t give me any crap about it, Lance Mannion, because we have a long driveway and this ain’t Atlanta. So now the world is white and quiet, and our little part of it is safe for pedestrians. Winter is on. Temperatures remain low, and I’m hoping the snow is safe for a while. It’s been a while since I went out in my North Face and mirrored Ray-Ban aviators. Winter’s own bad-ass.

But today’s question concerns indoor activities: Do you buy movies on DVD? Why or why not?

I ask because I don’t. Or hardly ever, now that Kate is past childhood and the time-for-mom technique of parking her in front of a video. In Ann Arbor a few years ago I came across a tent sale for Border’s warehouse stock, a real Blondie-goes-to-Tudbury’s free-for-all, and they had unsold or cutout or made-obsolete-by-the-director’s-cut DVDs for sale for $5, the magic price point for me, and I think I bought three — “The Producers” (and if you wonder whether it was the original or the remake, you don’t know me at all), “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” and “Taxi Driver.” I have watched the first two once, and the third maybe three times, mainly for the featurettes. That’s the most DVDs I ever bought at a sitting, but I have maybe a handful more, mostly Criterion Collection classics, that I never or rarely watch.

I wonder because someone must buy DVDs, beyond Blockbuster stores. I see DVDs at garage sales. They’re never, ever, a movie anyone with half a brain would want to watch, even on cable. Being hoodwinked into spending $8 on a ticket before the reviews buried it, sure. And yet someone said, “Ellen DeGeneres in ‘Mr. Wrong’? Yeah, that’s worth $20.” Most movies are crap, and most do their briskest DVD sales in the first month. And the only DVDs I’d buy are things like “Rashomon,” 60 years young.

A few years back I did a story on the great American paperback book, and had a fascinating chat with the author of a coffee-table book devoted to the subject. The paperback, he said, is truly a democratic wonder, and pointed out that the standard price point of mass-market paperback has, over time, tracked amazingly close to that of an hour of work at minimum wage. Before paperbacks, Americans who weren’t wealthy enough to buy hardcover books — and there were millions of them — patronized lending libraries, which were not the same as public libraries, more like video stores for books. You paid a fee to check a book out for a few days, and brought it back. The paperback dime novel, printed on cheap paper and easy to stick in a lunch pail or back pocket for a few minutes’ break time, represented a revolution in bringing books to the masses.

Of course, the masses don’t always want to read the Harvard Classics, so then we got the glorious genre of pulp fiction, about which I will one day write at greater length. It so happens that in the last year I read collections of two of my favorite writers’ early work for the pulps (Elmore Leonard and John D. MacDonald), and boy was that interesting. Your English teacher tells you fiction is art, but there’s a special kind of art created by having to get a lot of exposition up top, before the reader has to turn the page. I’ve always admired fiction writers who could make their living entirely from writing and not teaching, and you get a glimpse of how it’s done — by pleasing the reader. Those who can do it and make it fun to read are well and truly artists, if you ask me.

I guess buying John D. MacDonald’s pulp collection would qualify as buying the DVD. (Although I didn’t. It was a gift.)

I am no longer making sense. I’m distracted. I’ve been thinking about a story I’d like to pitch, which really interests me. Now to find a functioning publication that might pay me for it. That’s the challenge.

So, what do you have cued up for the weekend, besides getting out your shiny aviator shades?

One bit of bloggage: I see John Goodman has been added to the cast of “Treme,” by our fave David Simon, now shooting in New Orleans. Goodman will play a “college professor,” I read. Let’s hope his character is named Ashley Morris.

That is all.

I don’t know if any of you had a chance to read J.C.’s rant yesterday, on his blog, about the public self-scourging news executives are given to these days. In particular, this passage set him off:

Tom Rosenstiel and others pointed out [that] those journalists and news organizations that don’t drop the pose of lecturer and learn how to genuinely engage the audience will be lost.

The pose of lecturer!? Perhaps you’re confusing that with, uh, reporting the news.

We’ve all known one of those people who’s inclined to be apologetic — takes all the blame, defers all credit to others, calls herself no great beauty, calls himself only half-bright. And sooner or later, we all discover there’s a very fine line between self-effacement and cringing, just as there’s one between bold confidence and Donald Trump. I think John found it in the news executives who fret over “lecture-based journalism.” I can’t remember where I first heard that expression, of “old” reporting as a lecture and “new” reporting as a conversation, but it was a few years ago, and I think it was from none other than Jimmy Lileks, who only took a few more years to allow comments on his own blog. Heh. Indeed.

But that’s not important. The idea is that somehow journalists aren’t really journalists until they engage readers in “the conversation” and stop “lecturing.” Well, OK. I mean, I get it. But I think, in getting it, too many editors and publishers are forgetting about professionalism.

I swear, I don’t think for even a minute that I’m a screenwriter, but of late I’ve been in a screenwriting state of mind, and have rediscovered John August’s fine, fine screenwriting blog. Yesterday he had an item about a startup company called Scripped, prompted by an interview with one of its founders, who seemed to be saying that the problem with screenwriting today is that the people who do it make too much money, and the way to fix this “problem” is to make free screenwriting software available to all, and open it up to real-time “collaboration” with other users who fancy themselves the next Richard LaGravenese. Sunil Rajaraman says:

Two problems are solved with web-based screenwriting software. The first is collaboration. Many of the scripts of the films we see in movie theaters have undergone dozens of rewrites before they make it to the screen. For example, for the original of Good Will Hunting, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck put the screenplay together with more anecdotal stories about South Boston and friends they grew up with. Characters were eliminated from the screenplay and it underwent a very detailed rewriting process. Who knows how many writers had their hands on that screenplay before it was made — and it eventually won an Oscar. Collaboration is made easier with web-based software…. That goes for people collaborating across different locations. Let’s say you are working with writers in China or India and you are here in the U.S. Scripped makes it easier to share drafts, track real-time changes and so forth.

The second problem online software solves is access to writers. If you give the software away for free — it is very cheap to provide the software — you can attract all sorts of talent that would have otherwise not been interested in screenwriting. All of a sudden, they are looking for free screenwriting software on Google. A plethora of options are available. By creating access to more writers, the software becomes a mechanism to aggregate talent.

I don’t know much about screenwriting. I took two university classes, wrote one feature-length screenplay for one class and rewrote it for the other. I’ve written four short scripts for which no one will ever give me an Oscar. I’m at work on another feature-length piece, which faces the usual overwhelming odds of even being read, much less produced. I’ve never earned a dime from it. It’s strictly a hobby that I do to give me and my friends something to goof around with. But if everything I know can be carried in a very small basket, I must know more than Sunil Rajamaran, who apparently raised venture capital based on the idea that the cost of screenwriting software is somehow a major discouragement to people who might otherwise be inclined to try it. I paid $49 for my copy of Final Draft, the industry-standard software. Granted, that was at steep university discount, with further markdowns for a coming new version, but even today, full retail is only $200. Apple’s word processor, Pages, contains a screenplay template and, as August points out, you can write a script on anything from MS Word to a typewriter.

What’s more, August further points out, the “Good Will Hunting” story is untrue, and even if it were, what’s the revelation? That many people get their hands on a script under consideration? You don’t say. Writing is rewriting? Stop the presses. It’s not uncommon for a script headed for production to be rewritten a dozen times or more. I learned this from reading the New Yorker, not as a secret handed down by the faculty mandarins at the University of Michigan. Sometimes a rewrite improves a script; other times it ruins it. My rewrite professor liked to pass out early drafts of “The Truman Show,” when the story was set in New York City and Truman was a greasy creep who jerked off in public. By the time the cameras rolled, it was set in Seaside, Florida, and starred Jim Carrey as a sunny charmer. Hooray for Hollywood.

But this idea, that collaborating with other Scripped users in China or India is the key to your successful career, touches on something else I found through August’s site, and wraps up with what the news executives are saying, too — the difference between professional and amateur. August posts the text of a lecture he gave three years ago on the subject. It’s long, but it’s worth reading, because he makes a powerful distinction between the two, to wit:

When we say “professional,” I think what we’re really talking about is “professionalism,” which is this whole bundle of expectations about how a person is supposed to act.

Exactly. It’s not about whether you get paid. It’s about whether to take your work seriously enough to hold yourself to a certain set of standards. He points out the key difference between people who care enough to give a crap and those who don’t, in this passage:

When would you choose to be an amateur? Well, probably the moments in which you obviously suck, either because you don’t know what you’re doing, or you’re just not very good at it. Or at least in the moments when people are criticizing you. You’d say, “Hey, what do you expect? I’m only an amateur.”

You’re basically saying, “Don’t judge me.”

And here’s where this indirect proof falls apart: People will always judge you. You can’t control that. You can’t control what scale they’re going to judge you on, or which criteria are most important.

Exactly. For years, journalists who have been following the top “citizen journalists” have noted this difference. Say one screws up, gets pinned to the wall on a mistake or undisclosed conflict or whatever. Sooner or later, they try to wriggle out by throwing up their hands and saying, “Hey, I don’t get paid for this. I’m just a blogger.” They essentially undercut their own status, while at the same time asserting their right to be both outsiders and insiders. Read my reporting, but don’t hold it to your bullshit MSM standards, because I’m an amateur. They can assert whatever they want. But a professional shouldn’t do that. (I say this fully aware that I’ve done it myself.)

So I guess I’d join with J.C. in telling the news executives of the world to stop worrying so much about changing the lecture to a conversation, and just do your damn jobs. Take pride in them. Man up. Listen to feedback, consider it carefully, but stop cowering under it.

I’ve gone on way, way too long on this. This piece could use a rewrite, I see now. But I have to take a shower and get some work done. If you’ve come this far, how about a punchline?

Don’t judge me. I’m an amateur.

The film challenge came right on time, and was pretty simple: The end of the world. Free-choice genre, no prop or dialogue, only a story about the end of the world. You can see why this would make a Detroit crew feel they were halfway there:

Yes, it’s our old friend the Packard plant. But how can you not use it? If you needed a vast, already-dressed set suitable for the end of the world, duh. So we went there for a few shots.

Our main character is a teenage girl reduced to scavenging the ruined, depopulated city. She lives in a hovel. Our art department constructed one in the basement of another building, a former printing plant converted to lofts and performance spaces. Fortunately, the basement retains that “Silence of the Lambs” feel. I went down there as they were building her pallet:

God, these people are good. (The art department.) It was simultaneously post-apocalyptic and human. That light over the pallet felt precisely like weak winter sun coming through a skylight. It’s such a pleasure to work with people who are good at what they do. Like our makeup guy, Dan Phillips:

Dan used to be an autoworker. Took the buyout, went to makeup school, and is now working pretty often on the many productions going on here. He has some good stories. That’s Robert Young III, in his cameo role as Vacant Lot Corpse, showing off Dan’s handiwork. Photo by Connie Mangilin, another producer.

The film? Haven’t seen the final cut yet. I’ll keep you posted. This is the point in the process where I get crabby and it’s best that I keep my distance. Otherwise I might be striding around the office like a tyrant, channeling my inner newspaper cuss. One of our news editors in Fort Wayne would, when the desk fell behind, call out in his rich southern accent, “People! We ain’t puttin’ up a shuttle here!” I don’t think that would be helpful.

I’m not helping out much here, either. I commend to you today some words by our own J.C. Burns, who has beheld one too many grovels by broken-down, dispirited news executives, and has something to say to both the executives and the bored-bored-bored news consumers they allegedly serve.

I’m off to encounter Busy Monday.

Never ask an idle question on a blog, unless you want it answered. In this case I did, and I’m grateful to my old pal Vince for checking with his own pal Eddie, a native speaker of…I think Mandarin Chinese, although it could be Cantonese, and it may be both. (He’s a smart guy.) Anyway, I asked yesterday if anyone knew the meaning of the Chinese character in the “Red Dawn” remake, seen all over town these days.

And guess what, Eddie does: “It’s the date when the Communist Party told the Chinese people, regardless of their party affiliation, to stand up and fight against Japanese invasion” in 1935. (If you’d like to read Chairman Mao’s statement in its entirety, it’s the second footnote here, and let me warn you, Chairman Mao did not write in bumper stickers.)

So: Inside joke to those savvy enough to understand, key to some plot point, or just something the graphic designer liked? Whatever, thanks Vince, and thanks Eddie.

On edit: Vince writes: Eddie speaks Mandarin. (and Taiwanese, English & Japanese.) But reading the text has no regard for Mandarin vs Cantonese. The symbols are the same.

Noted.

I had an errand downtown Saturday, but alas, the block I was trying to reach was closed off. Parked police cars with lights flashing sat at either end, and in between were what appeared to be either soldiers or the baddest-ass SWAT unit in the tri-state area. Bomb scare? I thought, but only for a few seconds. Because lo, we are in Michigan, and Michigan is Hollywood’s sugar daddy (for the time being).

At first I thought it was more “Red Dawn,” which is seemingly everywhere these days. The “police station” is still wearing its wardrobe:

The red star with the whatever-it-is Chinese character is a logo throughout the film. If anyone speaks the language, I’d be interested in knowing what it means. Probably “tax incentives.”

Ah, but this is the conquered America of Barack Hussein Quisling Bow-down Obama, so this police station is well-fortified against the people it protects and serves. Street level:

And just in case you wanted to know what city our fair one is standing in for, the front door:

I tried to take a shot of the set that was working Saturday, but alas, the iPhone has no telephoto function. And I don’t think it was “Red Dawn.” The Guardian building is where they’ve been shooting this Wesley Snipes actioner, “Game of Death.” Imdb synopsis:

After a botched assassination attempt on a Diplomat, everyone from the Diplomat and his bodyguards to the group of assassins behind the attempt ends up at the same hospital where they fight it out.

Someone I know is working on this production. She calls it, “‘Die Hard’ in a hospital,” which is either the ten-thousandth or ten-thousand-and-first “Die Hard”-in-a-(fill in the blank) thumbnail. Did the people who made “Die Hard” v.1 know what they were doing? Maybe. I still stop to watch it, and all of its sequels, when I surf past them on cable, if only for a few minutes. Wouldn’t be the movie it was without Bruce Willis, of course, but he was well-served by the various British straight men they threw up against him, particularly Jeremy Irons. When Alan Rickman quotes Plutarch to the Japanese industrialist before busting a cap in his ass, well, that’s a moment that sticks with you, too.

But the genius of it was to simply ask the question everybody with half a brain asks when suffering through most action movies: Wouldn’t it hurt to pound someone in the skull with your bare fist like that? Bruce Willis stops from time to time to say “ouch” — that’s the ground broken by “Die Hard.” So simple. So successful.

That’s about the end of the verisimilitude*, however, and “Die Hard” was the beginning of action-movie loot hyperinflation. The first installment was about the theft of $600 million in bearer bonds, whatever those are. (Bearer bonds were very big in ’80s/’90s action movies, and that link explains why — they’re popular for money laundering — but I think their popularity is also tied to the alliteration of their name, as everyone from Alan Rickman to 50 Cent can sound cool saying “bearer bonds.”) By the third “Die Hard,” Jeremy Irons was plotting to steal all the money in the world, or at least all the gold held by the Federal Reserve in lower Manhattan; he had to carry it away in a convoy of dump trucks. This raises so many questions in the mind of even a half-bright moviegoer — how does one launder a dump truck full of gold? (Bearer bonds!) Hell, how does one even get it out of North America? — you could even forget that this is a summer movie and you’re not supposed to think about it.

But it was too difficult to top, and by the last “Die Hard” I don’t even remember what the bad guys were after, only that Bruce brought down a helicopter with a fire hydrant, and it was awesome.

* My personal quibble with action-movie reality: The noise factor. People are always firing machine guns or having explosions happen five feet away, and no one ever stops to say, “I can’t hear you! My ears are ringing from that explosion!” I spent one measly hour on a firing range Friday, wearing foam earplugs and earmuff protection, and every round above .38 caliber still made me just about jump out of my skin.

Oh, well. Monday bloggage? Sure.

Lots of blogs are reading “Going Rogue” so you don’t have to, but few are striking the perfect tone that Lawyers, Guns and Money is. They’re up to Chapter 4 now, but it’s all on the main page, still, so just scroll down and work your way up. I was interested to read this note about Chapter 3, which calls out the She-Who/Lynn Vincent casualness with her chapter epigraphs:

So far as bungled epigraphs go, the third chapter is arguably the winner so far, attributing this nugget of wisdom to the renowned former UCLA basketball coach John Wooden:

Our land is everything to us…. I will tell you one of the things we remember on our land. We remember than our grandfathers paid for it — with their lives.

Now, if that’s not the sort of thing you’d expect a hall of fame basketball coach to say, that’s because, of course, he didn’t. Students of American Indian history might recognize that passage as belonging instead to John Wooden Legs, the post-WWII Northern Cheyenne tribal leader who — though a contemporary of John Wooden’s — was not the same guy.

Yes, yes — it’s absurd to expect much from Sarah Palin, but imagine if these sorts of gaffes had appeared in books by Hillary Clinton or Obama himself.

Exactly. Confusing John Wooden, the basketball coach, with John Wooden Legs, the Indian? That’s funny.

Ah, Monday. Police rounds, Russian lesson, followed by abs/glutes class in the evening. My life is sometimes indistinguishable from Paris Hilton’s.

Which reminds me of a story I forgot to blog, about a team of teenage burglars in Hollywood, who broke into various stars’ homes when they knew they’d be out partying. Among the victims was Paris Hilton, hit on multiple occasions, aided by this killer detail: She keeps her house key under the mat. No kidding.

Later!

Someone at the gym sent me one of the parody videos for the Shake Weight. No links here, as they’re about as difficult to find as Vi@gra spam, and I don’t want to be responsible for offending any of you. But it raises the question of what, exactly, the Shake Weight peddlers thought they were doing when they made a piece of exercise equipment that practically begs for parody, whose very own infomercials feature shirtless men exulting, “30 seconds into it, I was already covered in sweat.”

I guess what I’m asking is, is it possible to stake a business plan on an item that will be entirely sold as a dirty joke gift at bachelor/ette parties?

(She said, in a country that made fortunes for the inventors of the Pet Rock and Love Sheep.)

Now that we’ve kicked things off with our customary how-low-can-we-gooooo salvo, I just want to say that those of you who accuse liberals of being obsessed with Sarah Palin may have a point. On the other hand, take a look at this. I’ve been laughing over that picture since I first saw it a version of it on Facebook last night. It’s the reason I think political satire is impossible; how on earth do you compete with reality? Especially when reality gives you quotes like this:

City resident Mark Little said he’s so genuinely tantalized with Palin and her book that he said “it will be the first book I’ve ever read.”

Elsewhere in the same story:

“She’s got the common people’s touch, and we love her. She doesn’t sound like a highfalutin politician. She wants to save us from ourselves and she wants to give us the opportunities to be free.”

Somewhere. H.L. Mencken in smiling. No, he’s peeing his pants laughing.

And so we have arrived at Friday. Guess what I’m doing again in three weeks? Making another 48-hour challenge film! Oy vey. We’ve been invited to participate in the 48 Hour Shootout, for winners of the city competitions. Top prize: $1,000 and screening at the, no shit, Cannes Film Festival. Odds of beating the polished competitors from Los Angeles, New York and other dream cities? Pretty damn slim, but what the hell, we’re in. The rules are slightly different for this one: Everyone gets the same genre/subject and prop. Last year’s was “found money,” and the prop was a bag/suitcase/duffel containing $500,000 in prop dollars (or local equivalent currency, as this is an international competition). Nicely metaphoric for film hobbyists, I’d say. I only saw one of last year’s entries. It was about a guy who takes in a stray dog. The first day he takes it for a walk, and it finds a $10 bill. And so on.

So I’ll miss a weekend of Christmas shopping. So what?

And now it’s the last weekday of my husband’s vacation, and we are celebrating: First we’re going shooting, and then to the DIA to see the Avedon exhibition. Just try to put us in your demographic slot, Liberal Media! We are square pegs!

And I’m outta here. Have a great weekend.

There are two kinds of entertainment for children. There’s the kind that is unapologetically for children. “Barney & Friends” is a perfect example. Smiling, happy, clap- and sing-along, broad as a barn — this is why kids love it and adults hate it.

There’s another kind that pitches at two levels, to adults and children. This is both commonsensical — how often are we told as young parents that if we must allow our kids to watch TV, we must always, always watch it with them — and sort of icky. For one thing, it’s very difficult to make a TV show, stage production or film that will engage both audiences equally. “Sesame Street” tries it, mostly with the guest shots of live people, and of course “Put Down the Duckie” is the swing jazz standard Louis Armstrong didn’t live to cover. The hideous “Rugrats” did it constantly, never well and frequently horribly. (I never knew what was more offensive, that Phil and Lil’s mother was a lesbian with a husband/beard, or that this is what the producers thought those crazy women’s libbers were all about.) “Teletubbies” supposedly had a big following among stoner/ravers, who found its gentle pace and trippy alterna-world a fun place to goof around in when coming down from a long evening of dance and Ecstasy.

The medium that comes closest is literature, and maybe this is why it’s noblest of all. Language is language, and just because it’s simple doesn’t mean it’s simplistic. Certain children’s books become classics because parents enjoy them as much as their children do, and look forward to rereading them when the roles are switched. Which might be why “Where the Wild Things Are,” the movie, worked so well for me, and might not. This really isn’t a children’s movie; Kate, at nearly 13, is about the bottom end of the demographic. It might be that Maurice Sendak didn’t even write a children’s book. Or it might be that one thing movies do that books can’t is add an element of kinetic imagination, and this is just one adult’s version of it. Whatever it is, it worked pretty well.

I can’t really improve on the pros here. Joe Morganstern loved it and Roger Ebert loved it a little less, but I have to side with Morganstern, who notes that where it breaks loose is where director Spike Jonze and writer Dave Eggers take the biggest risks. There’s no scene with owls on the beach in the book, but there is in the movie, and it works. The wild things have a lot more dialogue in the movie than in the book, but here you will get the sense, as you don’t in the book, that they really are based on Sendak-the-boy’s cheek-pinching adult relatives. (Catherine O’Hara, national treasure, plays one, and you don’t need to know much more than that.)

“Where the Wild Things Are” is a dream story, and as in dreams, all the characters are some version of Max, the boy in the wolf suit at the center of the story, and all the action is a refraction of what’s going on in his life. Max is an angry boy, remember; he’s all id, or mostly id, or at least he has id issues. (Whatever.) James Gandolfini’s wild thing is his closest doppelganger, and he has all of Max’s issues. (“He’s not sleeping in our pile!” will resonate with any single parent who’s ever grappled with the problem of the new boyfriend or girlfriend.)

I wondered how Jonze would handle the farewell, when Max makes his way back home, back from anger, back from Idville, back to civilization (place and process). I was dreading a long, drawn-out “Wizard of Oz” piece, with speeches. It didn’t go that way at all. I don’t want to ruin it for you, but: It’s perfect.

OK, then. This is not Review Week here at NN.C, only me with a bad cold, sleeping late, feeling like crap. No bloggage, because I’ve fallen so terribly behind on everything. But, as yesterday, a few supplemental pieces for extra credit:

Ernest and Bertram, the last word on Sesame Street’s central question:

One of Jim at Sweet Juniper’s occasional series on terrifying children’s books, in this case Judith Vigna’s classic “I Wish Daddy Didn’t Drink So Much.”

Back to bed for me.

Someone is remaking “Red Dawn.” I know, I know: why? It’s perfect the way it is. What could ever top this mid-’80s Cold War paranoid fantasy? What’s the new story, now that the Evil Empire has been defanged and we still have the memory of those indelible performances — Patrick Swayze, at 32, playing a high-school boy; Ron O’Neal as an alternate-reality Che Guevara; and who can forget Harry Dean Stanton behind the wire at the drive-in/re-education camp, hollering “Avenge me, son!”

I can’t answer those questions. All I can say is, thank God Michigan is giving out these fat tax incentives, so the “Red Dawn” crew can come to Detroit and blow shit up:

(If you’re impatient, drag the playhead to the 40-second mark.) I don’t know what other American city would let you get away with that. Fortunately, we have a lot of empty buildings to spare.

On the downside, sometimes a post-apocalyptic wasteland behaves like one.

A little Googling tells me the updated story involves a military invasion of the U.S. by the Chinese. There’s a blog, too, with some great deets. A military convoy was photographed rolling down one of the downtown freeway legs on Sunday, something you likely haven’t seen in Fort Wayne lately.

I’d like to see the Chinese try to take this city. Of course, first they’d have to want to. I envision a scene like Tiananmen Square, only in reverse.

OK, enough small talk. Count me among one of the 1 million subscribers who will miss Gourmet magazine. It hurts even more because I’m a latecomer; I only started subscribing it a year ago. Before then, I thought it wasn’t my cup of expensive tea, but I was stupid not to trust that anything Ruth Reichl put her hands on would be worth my time. Far from being a snooty festival of luxury, it’s a well-written tribute to food and food culture, and the recipes are wonderful.

Kim Severson, another food writer I’d follow anywhere, takes a look at the death of Gourmet in the NYT today, and I think she gets to the heart of it right here:

Although it was easy to paint Gourmet as the food magazine for the elite, it was a chronicler of a nation’s food history, from its early fascination with the French culinary canon to its discovery of Mediterranean and Asian flavors to its recent focus on the source of food and the politics surrounding it.

In the decade since Ruth Reichl took over as editor, she underlined everything from the exploitation of tomato pickers in Florida to dishes like chicken and dumplings that could be on the stove, simmering, in 15 minutes.

That’s what I’ll miss about it, anyway. It really chaps my ass that Gourmet had to fold so that Vogue and Anna Wintour could live to fight another day.

Finally, I took Kate to see “Whip It” over the weekend, another shot-in-Detroit movie that seemed worth our time, and it was, although I’ve now come to see the PG-13 rating as the enemy of parents everywhere. It’s funny — after we came home and Kate went to bed, Alan and I watched the R-rated “Adventureland” on cable, and the latter, while more explicit in its F-bombs and so on, took much of the same material (young-adult sexuality, in part) and treated it with more respect and less snickering than the PG-13 “Whip It.” It’s not that one was exploitive and the other one not, it’s just that “Whip It” had several scenes and dialogue exchanges that seemed tacked on to avoid a straight PG and make the film edgier, somehow. All I know is, I feel more protected by lead actresses who refuse to take their bras off on camera than the MPAA ratings board.

Other than that, however, it was a pretty good little movie, exploring female empowerment through roller derby. I know Jeff Borden’s a big fan, and I had a twinge, remembering our departed Ashley Morris, whose wife Hana was a New Orleans roller girl. (Ashley chose her stage name, and crowned his wife, a native of the Czech Republic, “Soviet Bloc.”) Ellen Page, Drew Barrymore and Kristen Wiig do most of their own skating, and those girls certainly tear it up. I almost — not quite, but almost — forgave the cheesy product placement Barrymore snuck in there. Did you know a roller girl can never wear too much Lash Blast? Now you know.

After two nights, I think I’m finally caught up on my rest for the next few days. Sorry to be getting here late again, but ah well. Now to the giant pile of copy I’ve been putting off editing. Next time you see me, I’ll be cross-eyed and ink-stained. Have a good rest of the day.

One thing you have to admit about the American pop-culture barrel: It really has no bottom. You think the Jackass/Bruno/Borat oeuvre was the last word in vulgarity? You have yet to meet Tucker Max. You think the long, sordid story of Michael Jackson’s corpse ended when his moldering bones were finally planted in Forest Lawn? You would be wrong.

I watched the trailer for “This Is It,” which is apparently a Michael Jackson concert movie, only there was no concert, so it’s been repackaged as a “rare, behind-the-scenes look” at the rehearsals, at least whatever sort of rehearsals could be held while Jackson was medicated into temporary uprightness. (I just Googled the phrase “rare, behind-the-scenes look.” Results: 133,000. Not so rare, I guess.) You have to marvel, really, at the unmitigated gall of the Jackson family and the cast of human cattle egrets who follow their herd, eating the blood-engorged ticks on LaToya’s back. The film will be in theaters for two weeks only; tickets will go on sale a month in advance. I suppose this will build buzz among the people included in the opening phrases that appear onscreen — the “billions reached” by his music (an uncomfortable echo of McDonald’s there, eh?), the “world inspired” by his “dreams,” etc.

Let me just pause for a moment and consider the brief flash shots of people driven to near-hysteria by the presence of their idol. A few years back, one of my colleagues won one of those Rotary Club scholarships to spend a few months overseas, being a Rotary ambassador. He went to Chile, where he distinguished himself as an ambassador of pop music; his first duty upon returning was to make mix tapes from his vast record collection and send them to South America, where his new friends were absolutely starved to hear anything other than whatever crap was carried on local radio. ABBA had played a series of shows in Santiago while he was there, and it was an event that nearly brought the city to a standstill. When I hear people talk about Michael Jackson and what his music meant to them, all I can figure is, they must have recently moved here from Chile.

As a cynic, I’ve been cheered to see the reaction to the mountain of evidence in the case, which is pretty much exactly as I predicted when the corpse was still warm: Jackson died of a drug overdose, and was an abuser at a level you could only call baroque; the most ossified Detroit junkie must stand mute in the shade of a man who had a private physician turn his bedroom into an operating theater every night, literally anesthetizing him into unconsciousness. And was I right about the other thing I predicted? Ahem:

“He was just careful about what he ate; he just tried to be healthy,” said Kevin McLin, a friend of the family and Jackson’s former publicist. “He ate turkey burgers, Chinese food, a lot of vegetables. He always tried to eat healthy stuff. … He tried to stay away from red meat.”

So what is the official reaction to this news? Charging Jackson’s doctor with homicide. He killed our hero, that bad man! All the patient wanted was a good night’s sleep, even if it had to be aided by the drug they use to keep you quiet while a surgeon is sawing your sternum in two, and what did the quack doctor do? Gave him too much, depriving the world of his music and inspiring dreams! And we know he was a wonderful, wonderful person, on the brink of a comeback, because his daughter said so at the funeral, right after Auntie Janet made sure she was speaking directly into the microphone.

During the crack wars, when the homicide rate in places like Fort Wayne was climbing through the roof, the editors at my newspaper would send a reporter to chat with the family of the murder victim, even when it was clear the victim was a sleazebag banger with a target on his back. The grieving mother always provided the same narrative: Sure, her boy had been bad, but he was turning his life around. The recent birth of his latest child had changed his heart, and he was planning to get his G.E.D., enroll in college and perhaps found a software empire, or maybe enter the ministry and help others. How tragic he was taken from us when his potential was so, so great.

It’s good to see the narrative hasn’t changed. It’s also good to see there were enough fragments of rehearsal footage, and millions of suckers, for the Jackson family. They have a lot of egrets to feed.

OK, then. I’m working extra hours this week, extra late hours, which have left me sleep-deprived and even crankier than normal. Not so much bloggage, but what I have is pretty good:

The Detroit City Council is rattling its saber about a strip-club crackdown. In a normal city, this would bring out the church people to say, hear hear. In Detroit, it brings out the strippers to say back the fuck off of my livelihood. (And, to be sure, a few church people.) Click through to note the fine booty on the woman speaking at the podium, and for this quote:

“I take care of my family,” said Omni Jenkins, 21, a dancer at a local club. “By cutting us off and making up all these rules, it’s going to cause crime rates to go up. It affects not only the entertainment community, but Detroit as a whole.”

Even lame-duck Martha Reeves gets off a good one. You can find it on your own. I gotta hit the shower. And the coffee pot.