November 17, 2016

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Entertainment November 17, 2016

Today in Movie Culture: Marvel's 'Beauty and the Beast,' 'Harry Potter' Trivia and More

Here are a bunch of little bites to satisfy your hunger for movie culture:

Mashup of the Day:

Darth Blender has come through with another necessary mashup, this one redoing the Beauty and the Beast trailer with footage of Marvel’s Black Widow and the Hulk:

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Redone Trailer of the Day:

Where’s the old school video game tie-in for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them? At least here’s an 8-bit graphics redo of the movie’s trailer:

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Movie Trivia of the Day:

Speaking of the wizarding world, ScreenCrush shares some trivia about Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban you might not know:

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Movie Comparison of the Day:

And speaking of Prisoner of Azkaban, Couch Tomato has 24 reasons it’s the same movie as The Monster Squad:

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Video Essay of the Day:

More on Harry Potter, here’s a video essay on the series’ theme of politics of hate by Kaija Siirala for Fandor Keyframe:

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Vintage Image of the Day:

Martin Scorsese, who was born on this day in 1942, directs Tom Cruise while Paul Newman and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, who was born on this day in 1958, look on during the making of The Color Money in 1986:

Reimagined Movie of the Day:

It’s also Danny DeVito’s birthday, so here’s a trailer for Matilda as if it was directed by Scorsese instead of him:

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Actor in the Spotlight:

Ranker’s latest actor-focused supercut shows us how John Goodman is always really angry in his movies:

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Star Wars of the Day:

Watch Ben Schwartz and Bill Hader help give BB-8 a voice in this new bonus feature from the Star Wars: The Force Awakens Collectors Edition (via /Film):

BB-8 speaks in “Sounds of the Resistance,” from Star Wars #TheForceAwakens Collector’s Edition. https://t.co/vOOTyXzurL pic.twitter.com/z1NUjT7nic

— Star Wars (@starwars) November 15, 2016

Classic Movie Trailer of the Day:

Today is the 40th anniversary of the release of Elia Kazan’s The Last Tycoon, starring Robert De Niro and Jack Nicholson. Watch the original trailer below.

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Sports November 17, 2016

Cubs' Kris Bryant And Angels' Mike Trout Named Baseball's Most Valuable Players

The Chicago Cubs’ Kris Bryant celebrating with his teammates after they won the World Series against the Cleveland Indians. The Baseball Writers’ Association of America named him the National League Most Valuable Player for 2016. David J. Phillip/AP hide caption

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David J. Phillip/AP

After powering the Chicago Cubs to their historic victory in the 2016 World Series, second-year third baseman Kris Bryant claimed one of Major League Baseball‘s most coveted individual awards on Thursday. He was named the National League’s Most Valuable Player.

Bryant, 24, is only the fourth player in baseball history to win the MVP award one year after being named the Rookie of the Year. He smacked 39 home runs, had a .292 batting average, along with hitting 102 runs batted in and scoring 121 runs, the league’s best. Bryant played third base and outfield.

The last Cubs player to win the MVP award was Sammy Sosa in 1998.

Bryant received 29 of 30 first-place votes in the balloting by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, beating out Washington Nationals second baseman Daniel Murphy and Los Angeles Dodgers shortstop Corey Seager.

Mike Trout of the Los Angeles Angels has been named the American League’s Most Valuable Player for the second time. Chris Carlson/AP hide caption

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Chris Carlson/AP

Over in the American League, the Los Angeles Angels’ Mike Trout was named MVP. The 25-year-old center fielder and five-time All-Star won his first MVP award in 2014. This year, he batted .315, hit 29 home runs, driving in 100 runs, and scoring 123 runs.

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Trout, widely regarded as the best player in the game, received 19 first-place votes from the baseball writers, surpassing Mookie Betts of the Boston Red Sox and Jose Altuve of the Houston Astros. He’s been in the running for the AL MVP award in each of his five seasons in the majors. However, his club finished a disappointing 74-88, placing fourth in the AL Western Division.

As ESPN reports, Trout is the sixth player to win two MVP awards before the age of 26.

The baseball writers’ vote was held before the start of the postseason.

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Business November 17, 2016

Federal Reserve Chair Throws Cold Water On Trump's Economic Plan

Federal Reserve Board Chair Janet Yellen told Congress on Thursday she didn’t agree with President-elect Donald Trump’s plans for more infrastructure spending and less banking regulation. Win McNamee/Getty Images hide caption

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Win McNamee/Getty Images

President-elect Donald Trump has pledged a $1 trillion infrastructure spending program to help jump-start an economy that he said during the campaign was in terrible shape.

Speaking on Capitol Hill Thursday, Federal Reserve Board Chair Janet Yellen warned lawmakers that as they consider such spending, they should keep an eye on the national debt. Yellen also said that while the economy needed a big boost with fiscal stimulus after the financial crisis, that’s not the case now.

“The economy is operating relatively close to full employment at this point,” she said, “so in contrast to where the economy was after the financial crisis when a large demand boost was needed to lower unemployment, we’re no longer in that state.”

Yellen cautioned lawmakers that if they spend a lot on infrastructure and run up the debt, and then down the road the economy gets into trouble, “there is not a lot of fiscal space should a shock to the economy occur, an adverse shock, that should require fiscal stimulus.”

In other words, lawmakers should consider keeping their powder dry so they have more options whenever the next economic downturn comes along.

Trump was harshly critical of Yellen during his campaign. But testifying before the Joint Economic Committee, Yellen said she is not going to quit just because Trump won the election. Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., asked Yellen, “Can you envision any circumstances where you would not serve out your term as chair of the Federal Reserve?” “No, I cannot,” answered Yellen, “It is fully my intention to serve out that term.” Yellen’s appointment goes through January 2018.

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Another target of Trump’s during the campaign came up at the hearing: the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Rep. Pat Tiberi, R-Ohio, cited Trump’s criticism that the Dodd-Frank banking rules were stifling lending and stunting the economy. But Yellen gave her support to Dodd-Frank, saying:

“We lived through a devastating financial crisis, and a high priority for all Americans should be that we want to see put in place safeguards through supervision and regulation that result in a safer and sounder financial system, and I think we have been doing that and our financial system as a consequence is safer and sounder and many of the appropriate reforms are embodied in Dodd-Frank.”

Yellen added, “We wouldn’t want to go back to the mortgage lending standards that led to the financial crisis.”

She also said she thought banks were actually willing to lend to small businesses, but that sales haven’t been growing sufficiently fast to justify borrowing, suggesting the demand for loans was the real problem.

As far as the ever-present question about when the Fed will raise interest rates, Yellen signaled that she didn’t see any reason to alter the Fed’s prior guidance now that Trump has been elected as the next president.

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Health November 17, 2016

To Make A Big Stink About Diarrhea, Ask 'Em To Write A Poo-em

A trio of toilets, photographed by Samantha Russell, a Peace Corps volunteer, in Viti Levu Island, Fiji. Samantha Russell/Courtesy of PATH hide caption

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Samantha Russell/Courtesy of PATH

How do you get people to discuss diarrhea? Ask them to write poetry about it.

That’s the idea behind Poo Haiku, a competition created by Defeat DD, a campaign dedicated to the eradication of diarrheal disease.

Although everybody’s had the runs, it’s not something most folks talk about, says Hope Randall, digital communications officer for PATH’s Center for Vaccine Innovation and Access, which created DefeatDD to bring together resources on vaccines, nutrition, oral rehydration therapy, sanitation and more.

Silence is a problem because diarrheal disease is a problem. It’s the second-leading cause of death for children under the age of five. And it disproportionately affects kids in the developing world, where it’s tougher to access safe water and medical care.

Attention translates into more resources, Randall says, which is why Defeat DD wants to get people comfortable with words like “poo.” Hence, the call for “poo-ets” to write “poo-ems.”

Turns out there are plenty of potty mouths eager to show off their creativity. For the third Poo Haiku contest, which wrapped up on Nov. 4, Twitter was flush with submissions — a record 146 poo-ems, Randall boasts. The prize? Social media fame and the chance to be featured in DefeatDD’s 2017 calendar, which will be shaped like a toilet.

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Most contributions came from the global health world. Take, for example, this winning entry from Kat Kelley of the Global Health Technologies Coalition, which references a recent study published in The Lancet:

Just six pathogens
But eighty percent of kids’
Diarrheal deaths.

Currently, there’s only a vaccine for one of these six pathogens — rotavirus, Randall notes. So DefeatDD is pushing for investment in vaccines to fight two more, ETEC, a type of E. coli bacteria, and Shigella.

The other pressing item on the DefeatDD agenda, Randall says, is the need to address the fact that even kids who survive diarrhea often deal with long-term consequences. Randall herself penned an entry on that topic:

A vicious cycle,
Gut damage, malnutrition
We can halt the churn.

Some Poo Haiku are more emotional than informational. Alanna Imbach, media relations manager for WaterAid, offers a good reminder that behind the stats, there are individual children out there facing hurdles to hygiene:

She is just a girl
Out looking for a toilet
Trying not to fear.

Other “poo-ems” will put a smile on your face, promises Randall, who’s partial to this one from a fifth grader who learned about Poo Haiku at school:

Go now, Mister Poo
Hurry, quick to the toilet,
When done wash your hands.

The ultimate winner, of course, is the fight against diarrheal disease. “As simple as it sounds, these kinds of words are so rarely used in polite discourse,” Randall says, noting that anything that helps poo become public makes the campaign a success.

Although the contest is now over, Randall would love to see people continue to share poo-ems through Saturday, which is World Toilet Day — the annual reminder that 2.4 billion people don’t have access to a toilet. Check out all of the poo-ems, including some videos, by searching for the hashtag #poohaiku on Twitter.

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Entertainment November 17, 2016

In This Bobo Yéyé Box Set, Find The Creativity And Optimism Of A Lost World

Volta Jazz, also known as Orchestre Volta-Jazz, was one of the most prominent Bobo Dioulasso bands of the ’60s and ’70s. Sory Sanlé hide caption

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Sory Sanlé

Imagine that an important American musical city, one at a crossroads of commerce and culture (say, Memphis), was unknown to much of the world. Bobo Dioulasso in Upper Volta, the name Burkina Faso went by during the French colonial period, could be described in this way. French author and producer Florent Mazzoleni has spent years visiting that city, literally going door to door to collect vinyl records that rarely circulated beyond the country’s borders.

The music Mazzoleni collected is described as “Bobo Yéyé.” Bobo refers to its city of origin. Yéyé is how French-speaking people in the 1960s and ’70s talked about the era’s rock n roll, especially The Beatles with their immortal refrain, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Mazzoleni’s work has culminated in a box set, which he titled Bobo Yéyé: Belle Époque in Upper Volta. “Belle Époque” means “a beautiful era.“

Among the groups featured in the box set is Volta Jazz, one of the most prominent bands of this time. You can hear a strong Afro-Cuban influence in their music, because Latin music was huge in West Africa in the ’60s. Bobo was a market center and an army town, booming, full of nightclubs and bands that catered to locals, soldiers and visitors alike. All sorts of cultures, including rock and roll, collided merrily in this hopeful milieu.

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The bands featured in this box set were all processing the excitement, complexity and upheaval of Upper Volta’s recent independence from France. Radio was introducing new sounds, and musicians and fans were keen to fuse their local identity with international trends. In the song “De Nwolo,” Tidiane Coulibaly and his band Dafra Star incorporate the region’s most prominent instrument, the wooden xylophone known as the balafon, into electric guitar pop.

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Unfortunately, this rich cultural moment was crushed after 1984, when a new military leader, Thomas Sankara, imposed a curfew in the country’s cities and decreed that musicians could no longer charge money for their concerts. This box set gives us 41 tracks and over 100 black and white photographs depicting stylish musicians and their fans, African mods and urban warriors, young people with high hopes and big dreams. Bobo Yéyé lets us savor the seductive creativity and optimism of a lost world, a belle époque indeed.

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Entertainment November 17, 2016

New 'Kong: Skull Island' Trailer Is Full of Monsters

Kong Skull Island

There have been a lot of King Kong movies. Maybe not quite as many as his giant cohort Godzilla, but when a franchise has been rebooted four times, you’d think all of the creative juices would have been taped by now. And yet here we are with a new trailer for Kong: Skull Island, a fifth franchise reboot which not only looks wildly different from any King Kong movie before it, but it just looks flat out amazing.

Seriously, if you thought you were done with the giant ape after Peter Jackson’s 2005 reboot, you are really, really going to want to watch this trailer. If you’re still not sold, we don’t know what else to say. This looks like one of the most exciting movies of 2017.

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Kong: Skull Island stars Brie Larson, Tom Hiddleston, John C. Reilly, Samuel L. Jackson, John Goodman, Corey Hawkins, Jason Mitchell, and Terry Notary. Oh, and a whole mess of monsters. It’s directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts (The Kings of Summer) and hits theaters on March 10, 2017.

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