Superman (2025)

Truth, Justice ...and the Puerile Goofiness of the Funny Papers!
 or

"1-A!1-A!1-A!1-A! 1-A!" 

 

So, what does a Superman movie written and directed by James Gunn (The Guardians of the Galaxy, THE Suicide Squad) look like? 

 

Well, it's different. Uncomfortably so. But, that's not necessarily a bad thing. A roller-coaster ride from start to finish, Gunn manages to channel the 'Big Blue Boy Scout" aspects of the character that has always been a part of it—but, without the Hollywood temptations to mock them, contemplating "Bad Superman" or the brooding "misunderstood Christ-like alien" of the past films (complete with a lazily slavish devotion to the 1978 Christopher Reeve film—although this one does have a couple character call-backs from it...and the marchable John Williams theme)—while also dusting off some cliches, tossing others, and embracing some of the bizarre aspects that lie deep in the character-archives of the extended DC Comics Universe.

 

Gunn likes the bizarre. He cherishes it. What others might find childish and puerile, he uses with giddy delight. And Superman (2025) leaps into all that in a single bound. Well, actually, too many bounds to count. It's a dense movie that will leave many in the dust, but doesn't take itself so seriously...or iconically...that some of the details don't matter much. Not when you're dealing with sci-fi tech and concepts that verge into "woo-woo" territory almost constantly. Pocket Universes? Check. Manufactured black holes? Okay. Unexplained and unexplainable kaiju? Sure. Getting insurance for anything in the city of Metropolis? Okay, that one's a bit much, with all the mayhem that's tossed at the beleaguered city every few minutes in this film.

Gunn tosses out the destruction of Krypton—how many times have we seen it?—but keeps the red trunks because...the red trunks embarrassed other film-makers...but embraces the tendency of creating mass-destruction set-pieces. There is a scene deep in the film where Supes and Lois Lane are having a heart to heart, while in the far background, members of the "Justice Gang" are battling a "dimensional imp" with clubs and green-energy baseball bats. It's a risk that the serious conversation will be overwhelmed by the goofy action in the background. But, it's also a salve about things getting too grim 'n gritty...this time.

Who are this "Justice Gang"(not to be confused with the "Justice League")? Well, it's a little "inside baseball", but, here goes—they're Earth Green Lantern Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion)—in the comics, this sector of space has 3—Mr. Terrific (Edi Gathegi), a scientific genius who actually has ethics, and Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced), whose origin story has had so many complications even DC comics hasn't decided what it is. Anyway, they're a weird choice for a super-team—but, director Gunn likes weird and even preposterous. But, they're in marked contrast to Superman: these guys want action. In an earlier kaiju fight, "The Gang" want to just kill it; Superman wants to put in an Intergalactic Zoo. He's in marked contrast to the "grim n' gritty" and adrenaline-junkies that mark most superhero movies. It's a stark contrast from the Zack Snyder/Christopher Nolan films. But, then, Supes' himself is a stark contrast.

Gunn starts the movie in media res...no back-story, no explosive origin...with Superman suffering "his first defeat", falling into an Antarctic snowscape after being uppercut by "The Hammer of Moravia", a mecha-Hulk villain out of an autocratic country with a history of invading countries. Evidently, it's pay-back for Supes interfering with one of those invasions. He thought it the proverbial "right thing to do," but when interviewed by Daily Planet reporter Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan—she's great!), he is flummoxed when he is accused of an illegal act, not sanctioned by the U.S. government. Politics doesn't play into the Kryptonian's thinking, nor does race, color, or creed...like it has since the character's first publishing in 1938. He has human values, raised by as rural a couple (Pruitt Taylor Vince and Neva Howell) as you can imagine, but who have the moral fiber and strength to raise a kid who could fry their entire farm with an angry look, But doesn't. More importantly, wouldn't.

Who's behind the daily slings and arrows Superman has to deflect when he could be doing something else? Why, Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult, at full arrogance-mode), of course—maybe the movie people haven't read enough Superman comics...he has other enemies, but they seem to be stuck on Luthor the same way the Batman movies are stuck on The Joker—but, he's back to being a scientific genius (albeit a sloppy one) and tech-bro...not a crooked real estate developer this time...who hates the Kryptonian with a passion ("Super...'man'. He's not a man. He's an 'it'. A thing with a cocky grin and a stupid outfit, that's somehow become the focal point of the entire world's conversation."). 

Lex wants the Kryptonian's reputation...and he wants his power. If he can't have them, no one will, so he either wants to tarnish Supes' image...or kill him. Because that's how you climb that ol' megalomaniacal ladder, not by winning hearts and minds, but by making people lose theirs.

So, though it may still a very fantastical comic-book world in this one, it sure echoes our times...the way the comics version of Superman periodically does since his debut in 1938. Its a different world, where anybody could use their phones to film you changing clothes in a phone booth (if there WERE phone booths, and isn't that ironic?), where information, good, bad or indifferent, is faster than a speeding bullet. Where anybody with a grudge or a cause can, at the very least, bloviate like they're doing a TED talk. And lie through their teeth like they were telling Truth. More people have more access to the power of technology, but use it in the worst ways. 

What differentiates Gunn's Superman from all the iterations that have come before is that he's a good guy despite the "powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men." He knows he's an alien, but when given the old Nature versus Nurture question, he lands with a thud on the latter. He assimilates, and tries to be 110% human to compensate. He doesn't mope, he doesn't question his fate, he's not tempted to abuse his power or even be snarky about it. It's the old comic-book Superman, but without Warner Brothers messing with it to make the character "more hip" for "modern" audiences. Gunn keeps the character pure, but surrounds him with the goofy, the childish, the arrogant, and the just plain bad. To mark the contrast.

Gunn leans into the humanity, but an outsider's view of it, seeing the good, the hope, the striving, and the yearning to be free and wanting to be that. I see an awful lot of internet blather about moments of "cringe" in this Superman, particularly this speech: 

That is where you've always been wrong about me, Lex. I am as human as anyone. I love, I-I get scared. I wake up every morning, and despite not knowing what to do, I put one foot in front of the other, and I try to make the best choices that I can. I screw up all the time, but that is being human, and that's my greatest strength. And someday, I hope, for the sake of the world, you understand that it's yours too.

Good Lord. Maybe it's "cringe" because he admits he makes mistakes, but we could use a lot more of that these days, but that would take character, humility, honesty, and a whole lot of other things missing in this PR-saturated spin-zone we call a world.

For a time now, I've been grousing (and boring friends) about certain notable politicians and corporate Masters of the Universe, by describing each one as an "Anti-Superman." Why? Superman (so the old TV show announced) "fights a never-ending battle for Truth, Justice, and the American Way." But, now its an every-day, non-prosecuted occurrence 180° in the other direction with these guys. There's no relationship with Truth (which has never been so degraded and discarded), Justice, which is consistently delayed and dismissed...and as for The American Way? It's the way of the thug-gangster, that icon of American pop-culture (until it affects us personally). 

And common decency is becoming more and more uncommon.

 

No wonder the last Superman movies were so grim, gritty and stewed in their own existential juices so much. We don't need that kind of inspiration. 

We need this Superman. A Superman who can push against a falling skyscraper, but also push against the inexorable fall of civilized behavior or civilization itself, and not break a sweat or crack with angst. And leads...by example...for the good. The common good.

We need this Superman now.

Snow White (2025)

What Do You Mean By "Fairest"?

or

Snow White (and the Height-Challenged, but Competently-Abled and Platonic POSSLQ's)—There, That "Woke" Enough For Ya?

 

The seven dwarfs were each on different little trips. Happy was into grass and grass alone … Happy, that's all he did. Sleepy was into reds. Grumpy, too much speed. Sneezy was a full blown coke freak. Doc was a connection. Dopey was into everything. Any old orifice will do for Dopey. He's always got his arm out and his leg up. And then, the one we always forget, because he was Bashful. Bashful didn't use drugs. He was paranoid on his own. Didn't need any help on that ladder.

George Carlin

 

Disney made the first Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in the mid-1930's, and gosh, "not much has changed". I'm being sarcastic, of course. It premiered during The Great Depression, Hitler had not yet attacked Poland (but the Japanese had invaded China). And the world was about to evolve, rendering the tropes of "Snow White"—the biases, the weak role of women, the "princessy" thing, the deus ex machina of the necessity of a rescuing handsome prince—all of that would age as gracefully as an Evil Queen into a Crone. It's almost unfathomable that, at the time, Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was something of a revolution in the animated art-form. It was the first cel-animated feature film (the ads announced it "in multiplane technicolor"), and the first animated feature ever made in the United States. At the time, Disney was discouraged by business partners, other Hollywood moguls, and potential backers that a feature cartoon just couldn't "work," for diametrically opposed reasons: either it couldnt hold an audience's attention for longer than the accustomed 7 to 10 minute running time, or the length would simply exhaust them (and in fact, at the time, the young Disney company depended on the more robust RKO Studios to distribute the film to theaters—Disney is still very much around; RKO is not). It's release and success changed everything, and despite its calcified ideals, it remains a classic of the form, still topping recent 10 best lists for animated films. And, in fact, the United States Library of Congress deemed the film "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and selected it as one of the very first 25 films for preservation in the National Film Registry in its first year in existence in 1989.

So, why remake it? To make money, of course (one does have to go back to the mine...and the well). And maybe, aesthetically, as a way to "update" it for a new generation not born in the previous century. Then, also, there's the legal matter that the original 1937 film is going to become part of the public domain in 1933. There is that. Plus, there has been an awful lot of competition lately from other versions of the exact same story: Snow White and the Huntsman (2012) and its Snow White-less sequel (2014), Tarsem's Mirror, Mirror (2012), Snow White: A Tale of Terror (1997). Of the Grimm fairy tales, it is the most adapted for film. And Disney's version is iconic. Were it not for the 1937 film, one doubts the other versions would exist.

Now, the optimal movie-going experience is to go in without prejudices or expectations (I mean, if one is doing it "right"). However, as this is a remake, you can pretty much throw that out the window. This puts me on an even par with about every single movie reviewer or internet hack, as the grousing, bitching, and over-dramatic moaning about this release has reached new levels of "hair-on-fire." Me, I wanted to see what they could do to make it less of a dinosaur of the Depression-era (I mean, the first feature came out before Gone With the Wind!), how much of the classic songs were retained, and if the new film-makers—Marc Webb, primarily, he of the Andrew Garfield Spider-mans, the films (500) Days of Summer and Gifted, and I'm something of a fan—could make their third act top the action scene of the dw...oh, let's call them "colliers", shall we? (nobody can argue with that unless they're being trenchantly snippy)...chasing the evil crone who poisoned Snow White to fall off a cliff. And if they could balance the light and dark as effectively as old Walt did back in the day (the thing that's always impressed me about Disney is that he could scare of the tar out of his intended audience of children, and in such a way that he'd gain the cynical respect of their parents).

So...how is it? Actually, quite good, better than I was anticipating.

To my points, it is still quite a dinosaur and of another time, but, this iteration of Snow White (and Disney's Snow White, if there were any questions) still tries to be relevant to the times, even if it can't quite distance itself from the ghosts of the earlier version, rooted as it was in what was being done in films of the time, still taking cues from Broadway, vaudeville and musical theater. Even more than the first one, you can smell a song coming on, and there are far more of those song-breaks than previously.

How are those songs? Genuinely good...and smart. Yes, they trot out "Heigh-ho" (and damn if that song doesn't still work) and they've done a buff-and-polish on the lyrics, using it as an introduction to the various...colliers. "Whistle While You Work" is revived, also with new lyrics, some of them quite surprisingly funny.* Some of the lyrics make use of modern idioms, which is momentarily jarring, but it passes. "I'm Wishing" (the first of the now de rigeur Disney "I Wish" songs) is pitched, replaced with a new one "Waiting on a Wish", and "Some Day my Prince Will Come" has been been tossed for all sorts of reasons, the primary one being the story's lack of an actual prince, handsome or otherwise. Instead, there is a roguish thief (Andrew Burnap), living with his band of cut-throats out in the forest, having been banished from the kingdom.

And there are a bunch of new ones. One song in particular stands out, as it makes a point of calling out the story's short-comings and considers the world at large (much more than the film's opening "world-building" number "Good Things Grow") and that there might be bigger fish to fry than Snow's deposition and loss of status, and that is the ingeniously titled "Princess Problems":

Self-aware and brings up a point that if you're living under an evil regime, there might be some people suffering worse than you. I found that refreshing—but, then, I've never been concerned with the "plights" of royalty.

How about that ending, which was visceral and exciting (if a little too much an easy fix)? Well, I can't say this one's that exciting, although it does work in a story-logic kind of way and I like how, metaphorically, the Queen (Gal Gadot) is dispatched by her own narcissism. It just doesn't get the heart pumping as much, but then Disney animators have always had a penchant for making dramatically hysterical resolutions.

Okay, you want to know about the casting. Let's start with Snow White. As far back as my review of Spielberg's version of West Side Story, I've thought that Zegler seems to have been genetically engineered to be a Disney princess with eyes too big for her head just like she was animated that way (it's a Disney design trope to draw big eyes in order inspire warm feelings like you were looking at a baby). So, she looks preternaturally perfect for this. And the thing is, Snow is a tough sell—just as Maria in West Side Story is—where the character is just so cutesy—and not in a self-aware way—you want to sit her down on a tuffet and tell her to wise up and stop being such a victim. Snow in this has a bit more grit and certainly is more expressive than the plasticene-rotoscoping allowed in the 1937 version. And she's not a sap...or a simp. I like that. Plus, Zegler's singing voice has always been astounding and she belts out the songs the way every Disney princess should, full-throated but with enough character to make her more relatable when she drops the arias.

And Gal Gadot is great as the Evil Queen. I don't know what she's done to deserve this "bad-Kevin-Costner" phase of her career, But she trods the thin line between camp and making her Evil Queen a serious threat, which is what she should do. It's the same tactic Michelle Pfeiffer takes when playing villains: be evil but show you're enjoying it, like any good autocrat. There's one moment when Gadot's Queen snaps her head in fury at the huntsman (Ansu Kabia) ordered to kill Snow White and I swear she did it in a mere film-frame of time that was jolting. And the theatricality she throws into her musical numbers threatens the set-rafters, CGI or not.

So...uh...how are the "colliers?" I must admit, I was a bit taken aback by them, but then they don't have the rubbery cartoonishness of their animated ancestors.  They're a lot more starchy and have a bizarre facial structure that makes them all-jaw—they look like hummel figurines you'd find in a some rural backyard in Ochsenwerder (Hey, why didn't we just call them "gnomes" in the first place?) and they're the same attribute-centric personalities they were in the 1937 version ( rejected contenders at the time were Hoppy, Jumpy, Baldy, Hickey, Stuffy, Burpy, Tubby and Dizzy). After awhile, you get used to them, although the character of Dopey kept reminding me of Alfred E. Neuman of Mad Magazine fame.

Those are quibbles. I find the 2025 to be a fairly successful effort to make a problematic—if beloved—part of history a bit more "present". It's certainly nothing—nothing—to engender the vitriol I've been seeing online. Look. I'm as evil as they come when I see something bad and write something snarky. But, then, I don't have an "agenda" other than a critical one and I certainly don't make a living at it, amping up my outrage as a cottage industry). I don't know what they're "on" or "on about" but it's not there in the movie.

Children (as I witnessed) will be delighted by it. "Bro's" who haven't grown up...won't (Hence, the film's low IMDB score perpetrated by basement-dwellers who haven't actually seen it, as IMDB has no way of checking veracity). There's a big difference between having prejudices (as I had) and agendas.**

So, the new truncated Snow White is good, sometimes incrementally better in places and a good effort, but it is hardly revolutionary. And so nobody should treat it as if it is.

 

 

* Even if it can't quite shake the specter of how the song was satirized and mocked by—of all things—Disney's own Enchanted. Sometimes, you just have to hand it to the Mouse-house for being so smart, clever, and self-aware:

** Oh, one little piece of advice to the "bro's" out there who swamped IMDB with negative scores—don't do the job "too well" or the basic law of averages will point out the obviousness of the ploy. Live by the aggregate, die by the aggregate.

The Substance

Substance Abuse: An Exercise in Horror

or

"Oh, That This Too Too Solid Flesh Would Melt, Thaw and Resolve Itself Into a Dew! Or That the Everlasting Had Not Fix'd His Canon Against Self-Slaughter. Oh God!"
 

Submitted for your approval one Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a flickering fitness guru for the "beauty-is-only-skin-deep" believing house-bound. A body-suited drill sergeant, who kills with kindness and only for your own good. Every stretch, every kick, every high-step is designed to make you as good as you can be because, after all, it works for her and she's shy a half-century. 

But Time waits for no man...or woman, for that matter, and Elizabeth Sparkle is about to learn something that will shock her down to her leg-warmers and trainers. It's a little lesson in Inevitability, in Life and the Television Industry, and it will take her the way Ponce deLeon traveled for the fabled Fountain of Youth. It's a little known path between Desperation Street and the Avenue of Self-Deception, which are all just detours that spill out...into The Twilight Zone.

Apologies to Rod Serling

The DNA of The Substance is very much that of a typical episode of TV's classic "Twilight Zone" in that it takes a mercurial person comfortable with their situation and up-ends it to which they have to act in an atypical way, even fantastic way, which then, ironically, comes back and bites them in the ass.

Elizabeth Sparkle is the host of a television work-out program that she has been doing for years and years, long after her career as an Academy Award-winning actress. On her 50th birthday, she is given a card, a present, red roses...and the pink slip. She has been sacked. Her network (run by her cartoonish producer, Harvey, played by Dennis Quaid) is (of course!) appreciative of her and her "long run" but, now, is another day and they're looking for a new host. A younger host. A sexier host. And, at 50, Elizabeth is not considered either of those things. She has lost some of her sparkle.

Most celebrities would consider product endorsements, a line of cosmetics or scents, maybe a tell-all book (how about a pod-cast?), but not Elizabeth. She stews. Then, a car accident—from which she emerges miraculously unhurt—lands her in the hospital, but bereft and in tears. A young orderly slips the sobbing Elizabeth a flash-drive with a note that says "It changed my life." The flash-drive has a presentation for "The Substance" and it's pitch is intriguing:

Have you ever dreamt of a better version of yourself? Younger, more beautiful, more perfect. One single injection unlocks your DNA, starting a new cellular division, that will release another version of yourself. This is the Substance. You are the matrix. Everything comes from you. Everything is you. This is simply a better version of yourself. You just have to share. One week for one and one week for the other. A perfect balance of seven days each. The one and only thing not to forget: You. Are. One. You can't escape from yourself.

That last bit probably serves as the warning of side-effects.

Elizabeth calls the number on the flash-drive and orders. She receives an address and a key-card and rushes to a run-down, seemingly abandoned site that discourages investigation. Inside, she comes to a pristine locker-room (it's amazing how the Substance organization runs like Amazon—except they answer the phone faster) and eagerly rushes back home to her posh condo to sample her wares.

The Substance kit has everything she'll need but it's an odd mix of syringes and tubing (lots of tubing), bizarre containers of "food" and sutures and bandages and vials, lots of vials. It's a bit intimidating, but Elizabeth takes the stuff to her "panic room" of a bathroom and injects herself with the "Activator," tripping out and falling like a dead lump to the floor.

Like most drugs, The Substance should come with warnings. Like, watch it somewhere in a chair that has something to grip onto. Because "The Activator" sequence is a horrific exercise where Elizabeth's naked body starts to roil and heave and mutate until the skin of her back starts to split like a busted seam and from it's zippered wound emerges..."Sue" (Margaret Qualley)—as she will call herself—who is literally "Born Sexy Yesterday." Sue stumbles about the bathroom, taking it all in, but once she reaches a mirror and sees herself, she calms down, stretches, and gets down to business. She has work to do.

Like clean up the mess. She sutures up Elizabeth's back (filmed in excruciating detail), hooks her up to the "food matrix" package—Elizabeth's going to be unconscious for a week—and experiences some head-spins and nose-bleeding, so she instinctively goes to the "Stabilizer" package, pulls out the hypodermics and inserts a needle into Elizabeth's spinal column and withdraws some liquid from the "matrix". Once she injects herself with it, she is good to go.

That is, go to the audition for Sparkle's old job, which she wins handily. Producer Harvey agrees that she can be allowed to work every other week (she explains that she has to take care of her elderly mother, which is true in a way), and everyone starts prepping for the new exercise show that will be flashier, sexy, and more provocative with other things on its mind than just body management. Elizabeth's happy. Sue's happy. Even Harvey is happy. What could go "worng"?

Everything, if you believe the altered cliché of "Nothing exceeds like success." Although Elizabeth and Sue "are one" they are experiencing different realities and so become of two minds about the situation, which results in bent rules, missed deadlines, and adverse effects on their twin. Things turn nasty very quickly, and given "The Activator Sequence" (which will seem tame in awhile) that nastiness is going to become bloody, gooey, and, at times, painful to watch.

Yet, you giggle throughout The Substance, not because it's inherently funny—maybe ironic—but because of the sheer verve of the thing...and the nerve. The twisted nerve. Writer-director Coralie Fargeat is not playing subtle here, but her playbook is spot-on with some arresting images and a boldness that you can't help but admire. It will ultimately fall apart (heh) as the third act will descend into a frothing, spewing gore-fest that is so over-the-top, you'll feel the need to shower afterwards. But, before it goes down the drain, it revels in its satire and makes its point about society's age-adverseness and obsession with form over substance. And the lesson that even fitness gurus should know something about karma.

Fargeat settles the look of the film directly and comfortingly in the sci-fi realm with a steely one-person perspective with wide-angle lenses, emulating Kubrick, but more directly from John Frankenheimer's similarly-themed Seconds. For some reason, that made me feel all warm and fuzzy. And, thematically, she has aspects and far-away echoes from dissimilar films as All About Eve and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?. The reverberations of past films are all over this, but Fargeat keeps it fresh and innovative.

And the performances are quite good—Quaid's over-the-top, but I think that was deliberate, with Qualley providing just enough of that Manson-girl predatoriness that she seems to inhabit. And Demi Moore does some of the bravest image-flagellation since Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard. Kudos. Brava.

We should all be so brave. But, like any pharmaceutical ad, we should probably end with some warnings. The Substance is not for the squeamish. The Sunstance is not for those who are offended by extensive nudity, whether attractive or not. Or react to needles, or open wounds, or festering sores, or a vast amount of red-colored Karo syrup being sprayed like a fire-hose, use caution. Or if you don't like being taught "lessons" in movies that run the danger of changing your encrusted attitude (but don't worry, there's a lot of scary stuff at the end).

 

Always read the label and make sure you read the possible side-effects. Do not take The Substance if you're allergic to The Substance. Nor, should you take it if you don't know yourself very well. And, of course, you should always take it...with a grain of salt.

September 5

Schrödinger's News

or

Up-Close and Personal (Duct-Tape and Spit)
 

We are inundated by news. Saturated with it. Awash with it. Some is fact-checked, some have two sources, a lot of it—most of it—is just blather, speculation, filling time and selling soap...or pharmaceuticals. "I heard a guy who said..." followed by professional blowhards, who used to have a job, saying what they think, and their "act" is that they know. So much of what poses as "news" is "opinion"—newspapers traditionally limit that to just two pages. That's on the national level. On the local level, it's all sports and weather with the top story being somebody died...and the last story something about puppies. All smiles. "Have a good night."

 

It didn't used to be that way, back in the "old" days, before "24 hour news" channels (which never have 24 hours of news), and back when there were only three networks and each one had their own news department that encapsulated the news in 30 minutes (minus commercials). They didn't have time for opinion (we shouldn't have time for it at all). That's the way it was...and somehow you were assured that was right.

The only time you saw a lot of news was in the Dickensian "best of times, worst of times". Coronations. Moon missions. Assassinations. And the 1972 Munich Massacre. If you don't know about it, Spielberg made a movie of it...and its vengeful aftermath. But, to boil it down, during the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, a terrorist group called "Black September" broke into the Israeli compound in the Olympic Village, killed some, took hostages, made demands to be flown with the hostages to Egypt, and then everyone was killed, hostages and terrorists before the plane could get off the ground. And it was covered "live" on television.

 

By ABC Sports.

September 5, the film by Swiss director Tim Fehlbaum, tells the story of what was going on inside the ABC Sports facility and the herculean task of trying to report a terrorist attack with the same resources they used to show swimming, boxing, and track-and-field. In charge of their broadcast unit was Roone Arledge, head of the ABC Sports division and whose promotional mantra was "up-close and personal" in that he would have pre-produced background stories for athletes to engage viewers with the drama inherent in the matches rather then merely showing anonymous individuals competing. It was a brilliant model for sports-broadcasting, adding the back-story to the competition, raising the dramatic stakes and adding the element of "inspiration" to what was merely gamesmanship—which would, in turn, serve as inspiration to future generations of viewers who might, then, want to take on the challenges of sport—that's why "talent competition" shows these days fill up their time-slots with back-stories of simply everybody who participates. "Up-close and personal."

But, nobody was prepared for this. A world-stage of athletes from all over the world competing in peace, and that year in a country whose previous hosting was under the leadership of Adolph Hitler, who saw the Olympics as a political tool, advancing Germany's status, and trying to make a point of Aryan superiority in the process. That was the year of Jesse Owens and "The Boys in the Boat" so things didn't go according to the Master-Race plan. The 1972 Munich Olympics were envisioned by the country to bury past ghosts and be seen as a meeting place for peace after having plunged the world into war and committing genocide on an inhuman scale. And, again, things didn't go according to plan.

A Palestinian-militarist group breached the lack of security in the Olympic Village—armed guards and security would have provided a bad "image" for this post-Nazi German Olympics—and started killing Israeli athletes. They made demands that, if they weren't met, would mean the death of another Israeli on the hour. It was political warfare as theater, or—in the word that would become despicably familiar then from—"terrorism." To cover it would be to give the bastards what they wanted. But, cover it, ABC News did.

What else were they to do? Ignore it? Lives were at stake. Early on, Arledge made the decision that ABC News would not take over the coverage—they were half-a-world away and would have consisted of talking heads filling time. ABC Sports was on-site and closest to the story. In their zeal to do as complete a job as possible, they probably went too far—planting cameras across from the Israeli living quarters to get "good shots," deceiving security guards that their runners were athletes in order to smuggle film back and forth between their photographers and the ABC facilities. They punted. No one at the base could speak German, so an assistant editor (played in the film by Leonie Benesch) became the eyes and ears of official announcements and police scanners. The audio guy started soldering make-shift connections between walkie-talkies, telephones, and the control board.* For replays of video-tape, hands manually moved the reels. It was all duct-tape and spit and flying-by-instinct, but without the journalistic rigor associated with news coverage (except for the on-site presence of Peter Jennings (played by Benjamin Walker, whose voice-imitation of Jennings is eerily good).

They got the story. But, in one critical juncture, they got the story wrong—okay, they reported mis-information from the German spokespeople, but it was still wrong. And it was still put out in the world, and spread by other sources monitoring the ABC coverage, and it was just as wrong. That information was that the hostages were rescued in a daring raid by German police. It wasn't true. They were all killed and (although the truth didn't start coming out until 2012) that the raid was an unmitigated disaster. Those "rescued hostages" were all dead. There was a rush to judgment to get out the story. And rather than get the story right, they just wanted the pictures.

Eight years later, CNN started business and the business of getting the pictures, rather than the story right became a news business model. And we've seen examples of "news specialists" getting it wrong ever since. September 5 shows us where it all began...we in our bubbles and they in theirs...and how we haven't learned anything since. So much for keeping us "informed."

Gabrielle Giffords still lives...

and I hear she plays a mean French Horn. 

The WNYC program "On the Media" which is something of a "news-watchdog" has put out a series of handy "Breaking News Consumer Handbooks" with helpful advice on how to listen to "Broken News." There are quite a few of them, but I'll post a few salient ones.

* One thing they got right (but for all the wrong reasons): the invention of the "network bug"—those irritating graphics burned into the corner of network feeds to identify the source-station. ABC started burning their logo into their coverage because so many news sources were copying it and ABC wanted it known where the pirated sources came from. It also tells us who we can blame.