Arts & Entertainment

Arrogant, Deluded And Ignorant Is No Way To Go Through Life, Jennifer Lawrence…

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Jennifer Lawrence is a charismatic, versatile, talented movie star, but someone misled her into believing that everything that pops into her head is worth saying, and it isn’t. In this case, it wasn’t just banal or gratuitous progressive blather points, but a wildly false and disrespectful over-praising of her own significance at the expense of actresses that she ought to be honoring rather than insulting.

In a recent interview with Variety magazine, the star of the “Hunger Games” movies (beginning in 2012), “Silver Lining Playbook” and other films said,

“I remember when I was doing ‘Hunger Games,’ nobody had ever put a woman in the lead of an action movie because it wouldn’t work. We were told … girls and boys can both identify with a male lead, but boys cannot identify with a female lead.”

If you don’t know your film history, don’t make statements about film history. It makes one look like a conceited fool, as the social media mob rushed to inform Lawrence. Continue reading →

A Christmas Music Ethics Spectacular! [Third Stanza: The Good, The Bad, And The Creepy]

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

The New York Times has an article about the competition to create a new Christmas music standard, or at least a hit song for streaming.  The piece’s “Rules of the Game:

No. 1: The public prefers the old classics, and isn’t too interested in new songs.

No. 2: Singers shouldn’t wander too far from the melody.

No. 3: “You can’t be too corny at Christmas. You totally get a free pass.”

Corny is fine, but what about creepy?

D. Dark Christmas Songs

1. Traditional Carols

The problem with “The Carol of the Bells” isn’t the lyrics, it’s the music. The thing is affirmatively creepy; my mother hated it, and compared the tune to “The Hall of the Mountain King.” No other Christmas music has been so frequently used darkly. It came, then, as no surprise when the TV horror mini-series “Nos4A2,” based on a novel by Stephen King’s son, used the carol as its theme music. The show is the tale of a damned man who kidnaps children and takes them to “Christmasland” where they are kids forever, and also become little vampires. The music, which is by a Ukrainian composer, is unquestionably ominous. Why it has remained in the Christmas canon is a mystery to me.

Another carol in a minor key is “We Three Kings,” which contains this cheerful lyric in Verse 4, sung by Balthazar:

Myrrh is mine; its bitter perfume
Breathes a life of gathering gloom;—
Sorrowing, sighing,
Bleeding, dying,
Sealed in the stone-cold tomb

Merry Christmas!

And why would you give that stuff to a baby?

I’m going to call “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” a traditional carol since its lyrics are more than a century old. It’s not creepy, but it is a sad song, and sadder still when one knows its origins. 

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote a poem titled “Christmas Bells” on Christmas Day, December 25, 1863. He was in despair: his son had been wounded fighting for the Union the month before, and the poet feared he would die. The author of “Paul Revere’s Ride,” “Evangeline” and other famous poems also was still mourning his second wife, who had died horribly in a fire two years earlier. He was not in a good state of mind when he wrote,

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Dispatches From The Great Stupid, “D.E.I.” Division: This Story From The Washington Post Was Not A Joke…Well, Not Intended As One, Anyway

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Yes, sadly, it’s come to this.

Not only has the Left’s obsession with group identification, quotas and “diversity, equity and inclusion” reached peak madness, but the purveyors of this cult, including the mainstream media, are no longer capable of perceiving its excesses.

The article in yesterday’s Post was not a parody. The headline was not supposed to be funny. The tragically biased Post reporter responsible for this insanity is Daniel Wu, a reporting intern in the Post’s Metro section. Stanford University made him this way. And the editors who agreed to insult Post readers with it? Who knows what made them impervious to common sense? Well, let me take that back: “It’s the Great Stupid, Charlie Brown!”

The piece begins by describing the tragic circumstances of LisaWhitenack, now a biology professor at Allegheny College, a shark researcher who was tormented as a child she didn’t see many shark researchers on the Discovery Channel’s “Shark Week” that looked like her. So she decided to study this dire and under-recognized phenomenon “Was “Shark Week” feeding audiences the wrong messages about sharks — and who studies them?” The Post continues,

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Ethics Quiz: The Cartoonist’s Regret

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

                                        Hell’s video store

Sometimes Ethics Alarms is on these matters quicker than anyone; sometimes it takes a while. Two years ago, retired “Far Side” cartoonist Gary Larson confessed that the above cartoon was the only one he could think of at the moment that he felt he should apologize for. He wrote,

Ace Ethics Alarms commenter JutGory alerted me to Larson’s lament, which had been recalled in this recent post on the site “Screen Rant.” I tended to find that the cartoonist’s apology reflected well on his  ethics alarms, as did the Screen Rant pundit, who wrote,

In the end, he put his ego aside and admitted he unfairly judged the movie and criticized it without ever seeing it. The Far Side creator sharing his mistake shows that even the most talented and self-aware cartoonists can accidentally cross a line without initially realizing it. Thankfully, after seeing the movie for himself, Gary Larson understood an apology was warranted for the Far Side comic.

Jut, however, has a different take. He wrote,

It was a joke that landed well because of popular sentiment at the time it was made. Thinking about it another way, what if he saw Ishtar at the time and liked it?  He could still make the same joke because it would resonate with the public.  It would still be funny. I guess the real question is whether comics are bound by the same rules as a critic.  A critic should know what it is criticizing.  A comic is going for a laugh.  And, to the extent it was an “unfair” joke (I am not sure it is, as the movie had a widely-known bad reputation), is an apology necessary.  Most jokes are “unfair” to some extent.  But, does that, in itself, require an apology.  From a critic, yes; from a comic, no.

Ooooo, I think I may have to agree with Jut.

Maybe.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Does Gary Larson have anything to apologize for?

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A Christmas Music Ethics Spectacular! [Second Stanza: Lyrical Incompetence]

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

In the first installment of this year’s Christmas music ethics review, I only plumbed the depths of the insulting lyrics in the Unethical Lyrics category. A much larger and more irritating sub-category lies ahead: incompetent Christmas song lyrics.Before I start, I must mention a lyric that now ruins a wonderful Christmas hymn for me, thanks to my sister. When we were children, she commented after hearing a rendition of the 19th century carol “O Holy Night,” “Why would I want to fall on my knees? It hurts to fall on your knees!” Then, year after year, every time we heard the song, she would interject a loud “OW!” after the lines,

Fall on your knees!O hear the angel voices!

I can’t hear the song now without hearing the “OW!” as well. But that lyric isn’t the lyricist’s fault. These are… Continue reading →

Best of Ethics Award 2022, Best Ethics TV Show: “The Good Fight”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Ethics TV shows, once, long ago, a major segment of popular television fare, are an endangered species. When I last gave out this award six years ago, the winner was the zombie apocalypse AMC hit “The Walking Dead.” Eventually TWD itself became a zombie; if I had named a winner of the award in recent years, based on what I saw, it probably would have been old standby and previous champion “Blue Bloods” on CBS, or as I call it, “The Conflict of Interest Family.” To the great credit of Tom Selleck and the writers, it’s still a strong ethics show in its 13th season; brave too (imagine: in 2022, a pro-police drama about a devout Catholic family that meets for Sunday dinner every week!). But I’ve found—finally–a better one.

And if I had been more alert, I would have found it six years ago. The show is “The Good Fight,” a spin-off of “The Good Wife” which Ethics Alarms discussed frequently during its run. I was a bit jaded after “The Good Wife,” because, as good legal series often do if they go on too long, it began resorting to outlandish plot devices as new ideas became harder to come by. Maybe that’s why I was so late checking in on “The Good Fight.” The series picks up the story of Christine Baranski’s character in “The Good Wife,” and streams on Paramount Plus, which I only recently subscribed to. This is the show’s final season, its sixth, but I’m starting from the beginning.

If the next five season raised no ethics issues at all—an impossibility with ethics-obsessed creator-writers Robert and Michelle King in charge—“The Good Fight” would still be the smartest and most sophisticated legal ethics drama since “The Defenders.” You can watch it here.

There are a lot of legal dramas on streaming services right now: “The Lincoln Lawyer,” “The Firm” (based on the John Grisham novel and film, with Grisham producing), “Partner Track,” “Extraordinary Attorney Woo,” the now-completed “Better Call Saul,” and the extremely entertaining if over-the-top drama “Goliath,” starring Bill Bob Thornton as an alcoholic, depressive, idealistic litigator. If I had to recommend one over the rest, “The Good Fight” would be my choice.

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‘HA! You Fell For The Trap, White Boy!’

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

I almost made this an Ethics Quiz, but then decided that there is only one ethical answer.

Star high school quarterback Marcus Stokes posted a video of himself in a car singing a rap song that used the term “niggas.” Or maybe it was “niggers.” We can’t find out, you see, because our infantile, unethical news media will only write  that he said the “N-word,” and the video has been deleted. Journalism!

Stokes’ video caused the University of Florida to rescind its scholarship offer. Stokes is white; there is little question that if he were the right color, singing the song and posting it would not have raised any issues at all. But as Yahoo!’s Murjani Rawls observes, “Saying the N-word as a white person goes into another territory,” at least in the hypocritical, race-obsessed worlds of sports and academia. Continue reading →

The Ethics Alarms 2022 “It’s A Wonderful Life” Ethics Guide, Revised And Updated

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

2022 Preface

I had this year’s introduction all written in my head—that’s how I write, you know—and then discovered hat it was what I wrote last year. No wonder it seemed so obvious. Well, never mind: there are still plenty of new matters to consider.

The main one is that “It’s a Wonderful Life” is a Thanksgiving film as much as it is a Christmas story. In the end, it is all about being thankful and grateful for life, family, friends, being lucky enough to live in the United States, and avoiding bitterness and regret. George Bailey is a good man who is nearly destroyed by bitterness, anger, frustration and regret, and Frank Capra, who directed and partly wrote the screenplay, is telling us that this is no way to live, or even survive. It’s a tough lesson: I have been tempted many times to fall into that trap. Regular readers here have seen me do it. Like George, I often feel like I didn’t achieve and experience what I could have, that my choices too often didn’t pan out, that I barely missed the breaks that I needed when I most needed them. I feel this way even though my father constantly lectured me, really all the way through our relationship, never to fall into George’s pit of despond. As long as you’re breathing, he said, there is always opportunity and hope. Reflecting on what might have been is foolish, depressing and paralyzing.

Ironically, Capra’s fable shows a man for whom revelations of what might have been are decisive evidence that his life, however disappointing to him, nonetheless had meaning. “It’s A Wonderful Life” is perhaps the first screen time travel parable, a forerunner of “Back to the Future,” and anticipated chaos theory long before Edward Lorenz figured out how chaos works. Harry’s toast at the finale, as I wrote last year,

states a life truth that too many of us go through our own lives missing. What makes our lives successful (or not), and what makes makes our existence meaningful is not how much money we accumulate, or how much power we wield, or how famous we are. What matters is how we affect the lives of those who share our lives, and whether we leave our neighborhood, communities, associations and nation better or worse than it would have been “if we had never been born.” It’s a tough lesson, and some of us, perhaps most, never learn it.

I’m not sure I have learned it yet, to be honest with myself. Intellectually, perhaps, but not emotionally.

I just watched the film again today; every time I notice something new, which is reflected in the updated guide  below.  I am also convinced that this is the greatest, riches, most complex ethics movie of all time.  “A Man For All Seasons” was long my winner in this category, but having watched that film too again recently, it doesn’t measure up to Capra’s masterpiece. Recalling the the real Thomas More burned heretics alive rather takes the sheen off Paul Scofield’s marvelous performance.

I also realized that this is very much an adult film. Kids don’t get it; indeed, I wonder if anyone under 40 really does. That makes it a strange Christmas movie. I grew up without seeing the film; the period when it was sold at junk prices to local TV stations which then resuscitated it reputation by wide exposure (I live when that happens) began while I was in college. Now that I think of it, I don’t know if my son has seen the movie. The black-and-white film block for so many younger Americans is a genuine obstacle to both cultural literacy and ethical instruction, and no, Ted Turner’s colorized version of IAWL doesn’t help, since it stinks.

Last year I wrote—and this was one of the points I had forgotten that I had made in last year’s introduction—

This movie’s intended message needs to be considered and taken to heart in 2021. Frank Capra, the movie’s director, designed the film to explain why it’s a wonderful country we live in. It may be that more and more vocal and powerful people want to send the opposite message today than ever before.

Tragically, it is definitely true that more vocal and powerful people want to send the opposite message today than even last year. Show them the movie, and all they will do is count black faces: yup, the only black resident of Bedford Falls appears to be the Baileys’ maid. Clearly, that means that “It’s a Wonderful Life” is just one more relic of systemic racism, and should be ignored and forgotten.

A society that can or will no longer learn from “It’s a Wonderful Life” is doomed to creeping stupidity and confusion. Ethics Alarms presents this annual ethics guide in the hope that we have not reached that desperate state yet.

1. “If It’s About Ethics, God Must Be Involved”

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Who Couldn’t Tell That The Chrisleys Were Crooks?

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Gee what a surprise.

Since my sock drawer has been in desperate straits, I missed the news that Todd and Julie Chrisley, the oogy, greed-obsessed mater and pater in the family reality show “Chrisley Knows Best,” had been convicted of federal charges of financial fraud and tax evasion in June. They are going to be sentenced today, maybe for as much as 30 years each, while having to disgorge about 20 million bucks of ill-gotten gains.

I watched less than ten minutes of the USA series maybe five years ago, got nauseous, and never went back. I was immediately reminded of the marketing line for the slasher film “Black Christmas”, “If this movie doesn’t make your skin crawl, it’s on too tight!” It seemed screamingly obvious that this family that gorged on bad taste, conspicuous consumption and nouveau riche excess and smuggery was as corrupt and ethically inert as human beings could be. Even as accustomed as I was to really awful and/or sick people being the stars of these trashy shows—Danny Bonaduce, Scott Baio, Ryan O’Neal, the “Jersey Shore” cast, Anna Nicole Smith and so many others—the Chrisleys were special, so throbbingly vile that I would be tempted to investigate anyone who tuned in for more than one episode.

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Sunday Afternoon Ethics Reflections, 11/20/2022, Part 2: The Rest Of The Stories…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

[Part I, consisting of the introduction to today’s random collection and a related selection from the EA archives, is here…]

1. This marks the official beginning of the yearly holiday runaway emotions train wreck for me, with which I have permanent love-hate relationship that grows more intense each year. I inherited from my mother an immediate nostalgia, regret and sense of loss with this season, typically kicking in with the first Christmas song, which Sirius was cruel enough to offer weeks ago. I think that’s why I gravitate to the Karen Carpenter version of “Home for the Holidays,” because her early loss was so tragic, and her unique voice was so emotionally expressive. This coming week is our 42nd anniversary, of which I am proud from a perseverance and integrity standpoint, since almost nobody among our contemporaries are still on their first marriage, Thanksgiving, which will have fewer people around the table than ever before, then the anniversary of my finding my father dead in his easy chair on my birthday, followed by the annual hell of getting 2000 lights on a live 8 foot tree, a task that falls entirely on me now, and then Christmas madness. What fun. And yet I love the memories, the lights, the music, the spirit and the values the season represents.

Rats. Here we go again…

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