Hollywood—particularly during Oscar season—functions on the assumption that no trauma has entered the national consciousness until it's been undergone by a flaxen-haired gamine with major box-office draw.Dana Stevens, Slate
From Slate:
A study suggests "Baby Einstein" and other baby videos are bad for kids. Findings: 1) "32% of the babies were shown the videos, and 17% of those were shown them for more than an hour a day." 2) "For every hour per day spent watching baby DVDs and videos, infants understood an average of six to eight fewer words than infants who did not watch them." Theories: 1) By spending time with "DVDs and TV instead of with people," the babies lose interaction with humans who "instinctively adjust their speech, eye gaze and social signals to support language acquisition." 2) Baby DVDs are worse than educational TV shows, because the DVDs "have little dialogue, short scenes, disconnected pictures and … linguistically indescribable images." Researcher's conclusion: Your kid is better off watching American Idol with you than watching Baby Einstein alone. Human Nature's view: You knew Baby Einstein had to be poison when President Bush extolled it.
Of all the reviews I read, Slate's Dana Stevens best conveyed and illuminated the transgressive pleasures of "Grindhouse."
We've all experienced some degree of Tarantino fatigue since ["Pulp Fiction"], whether with the director himself (who sometimes seems to be using the screen as a place to play out his own airless adolescent fantasies) or with the endless imitations spawned by his particular brand of fast-talking, genre-savvy splatter (this year's dreadful "Smokin' Aces" is one latter-day example).
But Death Proof is a reminder of what there was to like about Tarantino in the first place: his uncanny ear for dialogue that's at once naturalistic and deliriously wordy, his kinetic action sequences, and his voracious love for cinema in all its incarnations, especially the sleazy ones. With its lean 90-minute running time and a near-complete absence of CGI, "Death Proof" feels like an experiment in austerity after more than a decade in which Tarantino had free run of the special-effects candy store. And it works fabulously, much to the surprise of this generally Tarantino-weary writer.
Timothy Noah responds to Baby Einstein Founder Julie Aigner-Clark, who wrote to object to his critique of President Bush's shout-out to her at the State of the Union. Her non-denial denial attempts to change the subject by bragging about her charitable contributions and attempting to distance herself from "Baby DaVinci," which she says was produced after she left the company.
He points out that she appears on Baby Einstein's website and on its behalf, including at the SotU itself, and has not attempted to distance herself from any of its products. And that the name itself is deceptive, suggesting there is an educational component not supported by any research.
But you didn't market these videos under the brand name Baby Hypnotize or Baby Chloroform. You marketed them under the name Baby Einstein. That's deceptive...And in what sense can a video really "teach" an infant anything? What evidence do you have that anything is being learned, other than an early attachment to the TV screen?
You may have been raised a Democrat, but you are now being used by Republicans. Don't mistake the president's mentioning you in his speech as anything other than condescension—a condescension of which Democrats are equally capable. If President Bush cared at all about the issue of child development, then someone on his staff would have taken the five minutes necessary to discover that prominent medical professionals consider the business you founded to be a scam. (For that matter, if President Bush cared at all about the issue of early child development, then he wouldn't have let Head Start funding lie flat during the past five years. But that's another story.) The White House's choosing to spotlight your accomplishment was surely meant to demonstrate its commitment to children, to families, and to all those other womanly good feelings it fears that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D., Calif., taps into with female voters. But in failing to perform even rudimentary research on what it is Baby Einstein actually does, the White House ended up demonstrating the precise opposite.
I'm in "Ask Amy" today!
ASK AMY
Thursday, January 25, 2007; C04
Dear Amy:
My husband and I made a New Year's resolution to give up television. We were going to try it for only a week, but I wanted to write and tell your readers what a revelation this experiment has been for me. I expected to gain more time in my life, but I never expected to feel completely different.
The first few days were hard. To determine the effects, I decided not to listen to the radio and to spend the day in silence. I was off work that week. In addition to gaining hours of time, I am finding myself mellower than I ever would have imagined. I was always multi-tasking, and the TV was generally on as background noise.
It seems that even the sheer volume of sound kept me agitated. Now I'm feeling relaxed all of the time! My Type A personality is morphing into something very different. I'm even driving completely differently.
Even though we agreed that we could now put the TV back on, neither of us wants to go back to it. We are getting our news from the newspaper. I'm wondering if there are other readers who have tried this?
Very Mellow
Your choice to give up television shouldn't seem like such a radical concept, and yet it is. A recent Nielsen study shows that the average American household has the television on for more than eight hours each day.
I shared your letter with Nell Minow, who as the "Movie Mom" reviews films for Yahoo and who often writes about the effects of media on family life.
Minow and I love your New Year's resolution. "People have no idea about how much they can reduce the 'frenzy factor' in the home by simply turning off the TV. I'm convinced that this media overload contributes to attention issues for children and adults," she says. She suggests that, like you, people occasionally go "cold turkey" by eliminating all screen time for one week each month, or a day each week, to reconnect with life without media noise.
People can make a significant change in their lives by simply not using the television as visual wallpaper.
There's a lot to be said for making people laugh. Did you know that that's all some people have? It isn't much, but it's better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan.I am delighted that the inimitable films of Preston Sturges are now available on DVD, many of them for the first time. My favorites, The Lady Eve
and Sullivan's Travels
, already have beautiful Criterion Collection editions. But this new set includes "Christmas in July" (a store clerk thinks his coffee slogan has won a big contest and begins spending the prize money), "The Great McGinty" (a bum becomes a politician), and "Hail the Conquering Hero" (a mild-mannered soldier is mistaken for a war hero). And then there's "The Miracle of Morgan's Creek," a movie that has possibly the most outlandish plot in movie history and a fabulously dry performance by Diana Lynn. I like Slate's new re-mixes of political ads is kind of like a cross between Mystery Science 3000 and Pop-up Videos. I like this one with Tom Reynold's "apology" for his involvement in the Foley situation.
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