I mentioned here last week that on his show, Craig Ferguson was complaining about how his show isn't promoted and he said there were "no bus ads for Craigy." This kinda baffled me because I see plenty of ads on the sides of buses for The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. Every time I've been out lately, I see one in my neighborhood...which happens to also be his neighborhood.
Someone needs to take Craig outside and show him a couple of them. Or if he doesn't want to do that, he can just try watching his own program. There's a shot of one in his opening titles.
I thought Jay Leno missed an opportunity on his return Tonight Show to demonstrate that he might have new tricks up his sleeve. Yeah, NBC is probably so desperate to get back his old ratings that there was a natural inclination to try to bring back the old show. Back it came...complete, oddly enough, with the same theme song that got his failed 10 PM program off to such an unexciting start. (I did, however, smile to hear my pal, Wally Wingert, who's been retained from the prime-time show as Leno's announcer.) Bandleader Kevin Eubanks is reportedly leaving in a few weeks or months...but other than that, is there any reason to expect Jay's new show to not feel like a fresh rerun every night?
I like Jay and think he got a bum rap from those who think he somehow kicked Conan O'Brien out. But I've also gotten weary of the repetition...his and Dave's. It's like each guy reached a point years ago when he decided his show was just the way he wanted it and now he goes in every night to do that same show. I know the credo, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," but there's also such a thing as preventive maintenance.
Leno's opening monologue was solid but a bit too familiar...and then he did a remote piece based on the now shopworn premise that if you're from a famous TV show and you haul around a camera, you can get people to go along with darn near anything you want them to do. The best thing about it was that Jay did it himself, rather than dispatch some "correspondent" that you never heard of before and, the way their batting average goes, will probably never hear of again. Then came Jamie Foxx, who was a decent guest, and Olympic skier Lindsey Vonn who sat for a pretty good interview. I don't think any of the late night hosts except Craig Ferguson are good interviewers, but Jay at least seems to like most of his guests and he tries to make them the star of their segments, rather than to just prove he can top them.
How Jay will do, I dunno. Better than Conan did, I'm sure. In all the Sturm und Drang that accompanied the latest Late Night Wars, one topic that went largely unaddressed was why Mr. O'Brien's ratings weren't a lot better. His show deserved more than the numbers it was pulling down and weak lead-ins couldn't have been the only problem, maybe not even the main one. Jay does connect with the audience in a way that Conan didn't at 11:35. (I have a friend at one of the networks who argues that Conan wasn't even connecting that well with the audience his last year or so at 12:35.)
Still, I just find it hard to imagine audiences getting as excited about the second coming of Leno as they were by the first. I thought his 10 PM show suffered from too much familiarity. You get a new time slot — especially a prime-time one — and people are expecting something new. Sometimes, the old and familiar is comforting and people are glad to see it again. But it's a short hop from that to déjà vu and "I've seen this before," especially since the old can look older in a new context. If Leno's resurrected Tonight Show falters, I don't think it'll be because America resents him for taking Conan O'Brien's dream away and leaving Coco with that paltry $43 million consolation prize. I think it'll be because people just feel that, as enjoyable as it might once have been for some, they've seen that show before. Too many times.
Tomorrow, March 2, is my birthday. I'm only mentioning that for one reason: If you are a friend of mine and you'd like to give me a gift for my birthday...or if you are an appreciative user of this website and would like to give me a gift for my birthday, I know what I want.
I want you to go to the website of Operation USA and make a donation.
This is not just a matter of them needing help in Chile or needing help in Haiti or even certain disaster spots in this country. There are plenty of places where human beings are suffering and/or dying and there will be more. There are many worthy organizations that help these folks and I'm certainly not suggesting that Operation USA is the only one doing good work. But I did some investigating and research on this a few years ago and I doubt the following has changed. I found that no charitable effort put the money to better use. Operation USA spends very little on the administrative stuff. They spend almost all the money on the actual, hands-on helping of people. And perhaps what is most important is that they spend the money wisely and effectively.
Last year, a number of you donated money to me on my birthday as a nice gift...and all through the year, people send me loot because they appreciate this silly weblog. That's great but right now, I'd like you to send the bucks to Operation USA. Here's that link one more time: Operation USA. Thank you.
I've now had an iPhone for close to three months and I'm still adding and deleting apps. I expect to be doing this for the rest of my life or until the iPhone becomes hopelessly obsolete and I pitch it and get something better. I'm guessing this will occur by May.
So what do I like in the meantime? Well, for one thing, the way Mobile ME enables me to sync my home computer's contact list and calendar with the ones on my iPhone. I haven't lost my iPhone yet but I'm bound to...so it's great that you can use Mobile ME to track its whereabouts down via GPS. And hey, if I were still writing detective stories, I bet I could use that in a plot. The hero hides his iPhone on the criminal and then uses Mobile ME to track the crook's travels. Don't anyone steal that idea before I have a chance to use it.
In the "app" department: I gave up on Reqall, which is a program that combines a "to do" list with voice recognition software. It works but, I decided, not as well as a parlay of the Toodledo "to do" list app and the Dragon Naturally Speaking voice recognition program. In fact, Dragon is a must-have because you can turn speech to text rapidly and with pretty decent accuracy, and you can use that text in any other program. And Toodledo has been great in helping me organize my tasks and things I must get done. You can access it on your iPhone but also on the web from home. I put a little icon on my desktop and when I think of something I have to do (or, less often, when I've actually done one of them), I pop open ToodleDo and add or check off the duty. At last...a "to do" list that works for me...and it and Dragon are both free.
OpenTable has proven to be another useful free app. OpenTable enables you to make reservations at zillions of restaurants around the country. Better still, it allows you to change those reservations when everyone's running late. I also like using Yowp and the Yellow Pages apps to find restaurants and other businesses near my current location...wherever that is at the moment. Neither is perfect but they're better than nothing.
I've tried using i.TV for remote programming of my TiVo. It'll do in an emergency but it's clunky and slow. TiVo is rumored to be about to introduce a new generation of their DVRs — TiVo Series 4, although they may call it something else. Speculation among TiVo owners seems high that they haven't introduced a good programming app for the iPhone because they're waiting to roll out the upgrade and they'll have an app that will work with that. Okay, fine. But in the meantime, what about those of us who have Series 3 and may have it for some time?
I enjoy using Pandora, which is an Internet radio juke box. You pick out an artist or song or style you like and it crafts a "station" that plays that kind of music (not necessarily the artist or song you specify) through your iPhone. They claim to be drawing from a library of half a million songs but somehow, every time I "tune in" any station that features Classic Rock, I get Elton John singing "Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road" or Frankie Valli unable to take his eyes off of me. Still, it's handy and between it and TuneIn Radio, which brings in actual stations, I may never use conventional radio again, not even in my car.
My biggest problem seems to be battery life and I'm starting to think I may have a faulty iPhone in that regard. It seems to leap from 100% charged to about 80% in two blinks, even when I'm barely using it. I've been playing with one of these, which is a chargable external battery that's supposed to recharge your iPhone — and it does but it takes a while and only goes so far towards keeping me energized. I'm trying to decide if I should take my iPhone back to the store and see if they have any way of testing it, or if I need to compile some sort of usage/time stats first. If anyone has any experience in this area, I'd appreciate an e-mail.
Otherwise, very happy. No desire whatsoever to roll back to my old BlackBerry — and I liked my old BlackBerry. I just like my iPhone more.
I have a theory that the special effects wizardry of today is changing the way audiences view movies. Put simply, it's creating at least the subtle assumption that anything impressive you see on the screen is trickery. The big, impressive set or scenery is a CGI construction. The impressive bizarre creature is a CGI creation. The impressive physical stunt was not actually done by any human being. It's an illusion created by CGI.
Remember that great opening scene in The Spy Who Loved Me when James Bond does a ski jump off a cliff and you think — just for a split-second — that he's doomed? Intellectually, of course, you know that he's not going to die because, well, he's 007. You also know that if he did die, he wouldn't die from that because it's the start of the movie. And of course, you know that you're looking at a stuntman, not at Roger Moore. Still, there's a moment there when you're fooled for a half an instant; when you think that maybe you're watching the guy with a license to kill get killed. Then, of course, the parachute you didn't know he was wearing opens and the entire audience goes, "Ahhh..." because it collectively and happily realizes how foolish it was to underestimate James Bond.
It works because you don't feel like you're watching a cartoon. Okay, so it's not Roger Moore. But an actual human being actually did that stunt. (The stuntman's name was Rick Sylvester and apparently, he almost had an awful accident when one of his skis nearly became entangled in the chute.) The feat feels real because on some level, it is real.
And I think that if you put that scene in a movie today, exactly the same way, it would have a third the impact. Because after all the CGI we've seen, something in us says that if it's impressive, it was created in a computer. There's nothing real on the screen.
What's amazing is that a lot of stuff that doesn't scream "Special Effects!" isn't real, either. Green (sometimes, Blue) Screen is used in an awful lot of movies and TV shows for street scenes, panoramas...sometimes so seamlessly that it never dawns on you that those buildings in the background weren't really in the background. Here's the demo reel for a studio that does a lot of this kind of thing...
March 2, 2010
