Tide Theft Was Made for TV News; Robert Altman on Football in 1951
Every day The Atlantic Wire highlights the video clips that truly earn your five minutes (or less) of attention.
.We realize there's only so much time one can spend in a day watching new trailers, viral video clips, and shaky cell phone footage of people arguing on live television. This is why every day The Atlantic Wire highlights the videos that truly earn your five minutes (or less) of attention. Today: Glenn Beck wonders why HBO is still picking on Sarah Palin, a look at how your TV news covered the purported spike in Tide thefts, and a newly rediscovered Robert Altman primer on how football is played.
HBO's Game Change adaptation, which the bulk of people we talked to seemed to think was "pretty OK, I guess," was not at all OK with Glenn Beck. Not because it lacked historical accuracy, which Beck likes to think he is a stickler for, though that was part of the problem: Beck's main issue is that HBO would have spent millions of dollars on a movie that didn't portray Sarah Palin in a balanced light. In effect, Palin is over, and that her critics should move on to bigger game. [GBTV]
If we learned one thing from monitoring this news cycle, it's that today's modern thief -- for reasons that are unclear and might not even exist -- love stealing Tide detergent almost as much as television news producers love segments about the thieves who inexplicably love to steal Tide detergent. Which, based on the number of news segments (locally and nationally) devoted to the purported detergent-swiping uptick, means they love stealing Tide very, very much. [My Fox DC and ABC News and KNBC and My Fox Phoenix]
We don't say this lightly, but when starling flocks wing us when we are sitting outside just trying to read the paper like a regular person and threaten to fly through our windshield on the way home from work at least twice a week, we tend to see them as a nuisance, rather than "fine feathered colleagues," as Troy McClure put it. But as it turns out, we can't blame the starlings at all for their ritualistic dive-bombing. Science says they can't help it, the same way metals can't help being magnetized. So wing away, starling. Wing away. [Wired Science]
Finally: a Kansas City filmmaker named Gary Huggins unearthed what's believed to be director Robert Altman's first film -- an industrial short about the rules of modern football, circa 1951 -- for $10 at a flea market in Missouri. (You can spot Altman himself ducking into the frame at the 2:37 mark.) There's none of the overlapping dialogue and sprawling ensemble casts that go on to become the director's trademark in films like MASH, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, and The Player, but it's a good reminder that everyone starts somewhere, and that that place sometimes has no clue regarding basic football protocol. [Via Filmdrunk via Movieline]