Month: April 2010
The movie “Cast Away” and a “What if….?”
It’s been a long while, but I’ve got me a What-If…
One of my favorite movies is Cast Away. an early Aughts tale of an executive who survives a jetliner crash and has to live on a desert island for four years. Some people hate the movie because of its FedEx advertisement nature — FedEx is everywhere in this film and it gets to the point where the product placement is unbearable. Even though it’s not true product-placement as-so-much brand name use on props. It gives a little more reality than if Chuck Noland had been an employee of the oft-used-in-film Pacific Courier shipping company.
At any rate, I enjoy the film. the emotional stuff and the open “where do I go from here?” end to the film.
I got bored the other day and started tooling around IMDB. I’ve looked at their “Trivia” section for Cast Away in years previous and just wanted to see things again. Some of the facts seemed to have been changed, some of them seemed to be deleted (I do recall hearing that there was a different ending to the film originally that did not test well and was replaced. Hearsay and speculation on my part because I cannot find reference to this on the web).
One piece of cynical trivia that was on that page, however, caught my eye, and spoilers are ahead for those who have not seen the movie. Read More
Sports journalism that hasn’t quite been “honest…and unmerciful”
For a very long time I’ve had problems with reading local newspaper reports about the local teams. It’d usually be Marc Topkin that’s rubbed me the wrong way — assuming tthe Atlanta Braves were Tampa Bay’s team in the early 1990’s, reporting personal favoritisms as fact with Tampa Bay (Devil) Rays (which seldom goes on today ) and is often proved wrong. This has nothing to do with Topkin as a person, it had everything to do with how an “inside” story was being presented, or from the angle in which the facts were aligned up (that Atlanta Braves angle, which I mentioned).
This is an example of how the media sometimes gets things lumped on it for setting the narrative. Stories that are carried, stories that are ignored, angles that are looked at and the “factual” narrative. I’m not going to even try to take on the general perception of the media and news reporting, by doing it I open myself up to the same criticism after all.
The point of this story isn’t about that at all anyway. It’s another thing I am noticing that hinders traditional media reports as well as gives a narrative that fans start following, the message that they start following. Â It’s their personal relationship with who they are writing about. Read More
