Here are a bunch of little bites to satisfy your hunger for movie culture:
Dream Casting of the Day:
BossLogic proposes The Dark Knight trilogy’s Batman, Christian Bale, for the role of The Joker in the comic book villain’s newly announced movie and even shows us what he could look like:
Tom Cruise recently injured himself while making Mission: Impossible 6, so Conan lampooned an iconic scene from Risky Business in which the actor kept getting hurt:
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Reworked Movies of the Day:
Scenes from the Alien Vs. Predator movies are a lot better scored with classical music masterpieces, as seen in this video by Antonio Maria Da Silva:
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Remixed Movie of the Day:
Pogo’s latest dance remix of a Disney animated feature samples sounds from Aladdin:
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Cosplay of the Day:
Speaking of Disney animated features, here’s a great Nick Wilde frome Zootopia costume:
Never mind that it made a bazillion dollars or has a 94% Rotten Tomatoes rating, Finding Dory didn’t even get an Oscar nomination and so Wisecrack looks into what’s wrong with the Pixar animated feature:
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Vintage Image of the Day:
River Phoenix, who was born on this day in 1970, receives direction from Steven Spielberg on the set of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in 1988:
Actor in the Spotlight:
You’ve seen her this year in The Mummy and Atomic Blonde, now get to know Sofia Boutella care of Haroon Adalat for Fandor:
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Poster Comparison of the Day:
If the new poster for Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! looks familiar, this comparison to the Rosemary’s Baby poster confirms why:
I’ve been worried MOTHER! looks like a ROSEMARY’S BABY riff; this new poster doesn’t assuage that concern. pic.twitter.com/rXEcqGHqS5
The Department of Justice has narrowed the scope of a warrant it served to web hosting company DreamHost. The government has demanded information about DisruptJ20.org, a website used to organize protests in Washington, D.C., during the Inauguration in January.
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The Justice Department is dropping the most controversial part of its demand for records relating to a website used to coordinate protests during the presidential inauguration.
In court filings submitted yesterday, ahead of a hearing Thursday in D.C. Superior Court, the government suggests modifications to the warrant it attained for files from web hosting company DreamHost, which hosted the website DisruptJ20.org.
The change in scope was made “in light of factual revelations since July,” the filings state.
“The government has no interest in records relating to the 1.3 million IP addresses that are mentioned in DreamHost’s numerous press releases and Opposition brief,” according to the filings, which were submitted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Jennifer Kerkhoff and John Borchert.
The Justice Department goes on to say:
“The government values and respects the First Amendment right of all Americans to participate in peaceful political protests and to read protected political expression online. This Warrant has nothing to do with that right. The Warrant is focused on evidence of the planning coordination and participation in a criminal act – that is, a premeditated riot. The First Amendment does not protect violent, criminal conduct such as this.”
Last week, DreamHost revealed that the Justice Department had delivered it a warrant asking for “all files” related to DisruptJ20.org, a site the government says was used to organize a riot in downtown Washington, D.C., during the Inauguration. The Justice Department is pursing felony riot charges against nearly 200 people; 19 others have already pleaded guilty.
“This is a tremendous win for DreamHost, its users and the public,” DreamHost counsel Raymond Aghaian said in a statement to NPR. “There remains, unfortunately, other privacy and First and Fourth Amendment issues with the search warrant, which we will address in a separate filing and at the hearing Thursday morning.”
The DreamHost matter is complex, and not only because it involves Constitutional issues as well as a lot of technical jargon for all parties to wade through.
Among the “particular things to be seized” from DreamHost in the original warrant: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, image files, or other files; HTTP request and error logs; SSH, FTP, or Telnet logs; MySQL, PostgreSQL, or other databases related to the website.
A different judge, Robert Morin, will oversee tomorrow’s hearing.
One of the challenges of criminal investigations involving electronic evidence, the government said, “is that some of the evidence – particularly the full scope of the evidence – will be hidden from the government’s view unless and until the government obtains a court order or search warrant.”
In its brief, the Justice Department says it simply didn’t realize the depth of the information that DreamHost has, which includes” visitor data maintained by DreamHost that extends beyond the government’s singular locus in this case of investigating the planning, organization, and participation in the January 20, 2017 riot.”
But in earlier filings, the government had been indifferent to DreamHost’s objections, when it explained the extent of its data holdings.
DreamHost attorney Raymond Aghaian told the Justice Department in a July 21 email that the warrant for “all files” related to Disruptj20.org “seems overbroad,” and would include “the IP addresses of over 1,000,000 visitors to the website.”
In a motion filed a week later, the government said Aghaian’s concern about the warrant’s breadth was “simply not a sufficient basis for DreamHost to refuse to comply with the warrant.”
Mark Rumold, senior staff attorney at Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is advising DreamHost, says the government’s new, narrower warrant is an improvement — but problems remain.
“The new warrant excludes most visitor logs from the demand, and it also withdraws the demand for unpublished content, like draft blog posts and photos,” Rumold says in an email to NPR. “This was a sensible response on DOJ’s part—both legally and politically.”
“But the new warrant is not without its flaws,” he adds. “Most critically, DOJ is still investigating a website that was dedicated to organizing and planning political dissent and protest. That kind of activity — whether online or off — is the cornerstone of the First Amendment, and DOJ’s ongoing investigation should be cause for alarm to anyone, no matter your political party or beliefs.”
DreamHost’s counsel provided NPR with the document below, showing the modifications to the warrant.
“Roman” by Mashrou’ Leila is Lebanon’s song of the summer.
Courtesy of the artist
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Courtesy of the artist
Sometimes musicians write a song for a cause. Sometimes, the cause chooses the song.
That is what has happened with “Roman,” the latest release from Mashrou’ Leila, the Lebanese alternative rock band who toured the U.S. to huge acclaim this summer (and performed a spine-tingling Tiny Desk concert at NPR last summer).
When Mashrou’ Leila conceived “Roman” some five years ago, the band thought of it as a song about betrayal. Its opening lyrics are dark: “I don’t intend on swallowing your lies / The words will burn my throat.” Later, lead singer Hamad Sinno cries: “Worms carve my body and the earth embraces my skin / How could you sell me to the Romans?”
The music is slow, painful yet beautiful. Its chorus is a rebellion in a single word: “alehum,” which means “charge” in Arabic.
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But upon its release this summer, “Roman” unexpectedly became an anthem for women’s empowerment.
“I definitely didn’t have that in mind when we were writing the song,” says Sinno. He says the meaning of the song was only transformed when the band met Jessy Moussallem, a film director, who pitched the idea that the music video should be about patriarchy.
In the video, a woman in a hijab contorts in a moderndancein an abandoned concrete building. She leads other women, many in brightly colored abayas —the conservative, loose-fitting robe worn by some Muslim women — to a beach. They hold hands and make kaleidoscope patterns through dance. Their expressions are defiant; they radiate self-respect. Later, a covered woman rides a galloping white steed.
The video and the song combined were a huge success; they’ve been described in Lebanon as being all but revolutionary. Blogs have written about “Roman,” and fans have left streams of adoring comments on Mashrou’ Leila’s Facebook page.
Sinno sees the video as an ode to self-realization: a rejection of the idea that Muslim women, especially in the Arab world, cannot be empowered unless they lose their adherence to tradition.
“The thing that kind of always drives me insane is that people are so quick to say stuff about Muslim women or veiled women,” he says. “And it’s like, dude, just come to one of our gigs, and you see all these women who are veiled, who are just celebrating other people’s diversity — who are clearly not without agency, right?”
Mashrou’ Leila headlined a festival in Ehden, a town nestled high in the mountains of north Lebanon, earlier this month. When Sinno introduces “Roman,” the crowd packing the stadium goes wild.
As the band performs the song, the video plays on a screen behind it — something Mashrou’ Leila hadn’t done before in Lebanon. The audience rises to its feet. Eyes closed, swaying, arms in the air, fans surrender to the music.
Afterwards, I meet Hazar Malab, a 16-year-old fan ecstatic about the song. I ask her: Was “Roman” her favorite song of the summer?
“Yes, yes, yes, yes,” she answers, almost breathless with excitement. “It is. It is.”
All her friends at school feel the same way, Malab says. She has forced her parents to listen to it, and even they “love it.”
Another fan, Jihad Saifi, says he believes the impact of “Roman” will go beyond a single summer. This is not just about making memories in the sun – the song and video together break important new ground for the portrayal of women in the Middle East, he says.
“It’s a beautiful picture to paint Arab women in,” he says. “I’ve never seen Arab women dance like this. And it’s liberating to men and women.”
One of the reasons the song has become so successful in Lebanon is that it speaks to different people in different ways. Some Mashrou’ Leila fans tell me that for them, “Roman” is about more than women’s empowerment: It’s also a response to greater feelings of insecurity about the future of the Middle East and beyond.
Rima Sleiman Frangieh, the organizer of the Ehden festival, says she believes many people see the song as a response to the war in neighboring Syria, the rise of jihadist groups like ISIS and what they perceive as a rise in fanaticism “around the world.”
“We have seen nothing but ugliness and black and pain and sorrow,” she says. “So this song: It’s about liberation and everything that opens windows of hope. I think [it] has a direct positive effect on people.”
Some fans even tell me they think the song has especially caught fire this summer because people see it as a response to Donald Trump’s presidency.
Sinno and Haig Papazian, the band’s lead violinist, agree with this interpretation. And Sinno says the band agreed to Moussallem’s pitch for a political music video in part because of current events in the U.S. and Lebanon.
Sinno says it’s “very hard not to be thinking about this stuff with, you know, Trump being in office,” or, he says, with the fact that the Lebanese state minister for women’s affairs is a man.
The meaning “Roman” holds for both its listeners and its creators has definitely changed since it was first written, Papazian says. “You have certain intentions when you first write it,” he says, “but then everything around you is constantly changing and then new meaning is given to a song after a while.”
All those years ago, “Roman” started off as a song about betrayal, but now it has become a song about hope and empowerment. And for Mashrou’ Leila fans, it’s yet another reason to dance.
Across the state of Maine, the number of prescriptions for painkillers is dropping. But some patients who have chronic pain say they need high doses of the medication to be able to function.
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A year ago, Maine was one of the first states to set limits on opioid prescriptions. The goal in capping the dose of prescription painkillers a patient could get was to stem the flow of opioids that are fueling a nationwide epidemic of abuse.
Maine’s law, considered the toughest in the U.S., is largely viewed as a success. But it has also been controversial — particularly among chronic pain patients who are reluctant to lose the medicine they say helps them function.
Ed Hodgdon, who is retired and lives in southern Maine, was just that sort of patient — at least initially.
Name a surgery, and there’s a decent chance Hodgdon has had it.
“Knee replacement. Hip replacement. Elbows. I’ve got screws in my feet,” he says.
Dr. Don Medd, an internist in Westbrook, Maine, has found that working with patients to find alternatives to opioids has helped many taper their dose and reliance on the drugs — and reduce side effects.
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Patti Wright/Maine Public Radio
Hodgdon has rheumatoid arthritis. And along with each surgery came an opioid prescription for pain. At first he got some relief from the drugs, but it didn’t last.
“It just numbed it for a while,” he says, “and then I needed more.”
Though Hogdon keptincreasing the dose, the pain never went away.
“And then I found Dr. Medd. That’s my angel right there,” Hodgdon says, nodding toward Dr. Donald Medd, a general internist in Westbrook.
Medd had already started to taper high doses among patients like Hodgdon before Maine put a cap on new prescriptions for opioids last July. The new limit allows a maximum of 100 morphine milligram equivalents (the standard used to measure potency for all prescription opioids) for most patients per day — with certain exemptions for some cancer patients, those in hospice care, and some others. Patients with existing prescriptions were, by and large, given a year to meet the new restriction.
Medd was ahead of the game because he’d noticed that many of his patients on high doses of opioids grew increasingly angry about their pain as time wore on, and tended to demand ever more medication. At the same time, they were struggling to function in daily life because of the drugs’ side effects.
“You know, at some point the medications get in the way of some sort of recovery,” Medd says.
Opioids were affecting Hodgdon’s mood and his memory. Medd worked with him to cut the dose he was taking every day by two-thirds and helped him get in touch with a psychologist for further help. Though Hodgdon still lives with some pain, he says his life is infinitely better.
“I can remember things,” he says. “I get along better with people.”
Despite success stories like Hodgdon’s, Medd says he initially opposed Maine’s law. He didn’t want the legislature to interfere with medicine.
But now he thinks the law gave a necessary nudge to many doctors. Compared to a few years ago, Medd says, he and colleagues in his medical practice have cut the number of their chronic pain patients who are on opioids by almost half — from about 1,500 to 800.
In nearly all counties in the state, the number of prescriptions for painkillers is dropping. It’s a trend that Gordon Smith, executive vice president of the Maine Medical Association, says was underway even before the law took effect.
“We had the fourth largest drop in the country,” he says, citing a 21.5 percent reduction in opioid prescriptions from 2013 through 2016.
The data only include the first few months after Maine’s prescribing cap went into effect, Smith says; he expects the law will accelerate further reductions.
“Now having said that, it’s not been easy,” he says. “It’s been particularly difficult for patients,” he says — specifically for the 16,000 patients on high-dose opioids who were expected to taper to the 100 morphine milligram limit by July of this year.
Brian Rockett runs a wholesale lobster business in Maine, despite his chronic pain from past injuries. He needs high doses of opioids to be able to work, he says, and his doctor agrees.
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Keith Shortall/Maine Public Radio
“I was about four times above that,” says Brian Rockett. He operates a wholesale business buying lobsters on the Maine coast. Rockett started taking opioids years ago to ease the pain of injuries from racing motorcycles and boats. When he tried to taper the dose, he says, he had unbearable pain. So, he filed a notice of intent to sue the state over its restrictions on how much he could be prescribed.
“I just knew that I was facing possibly losing my business,” he says.
Rockett wasn’t alone in his inability to taper his use of the drug, and Maine lawmakers — like Dr. Geoffrey Gratwick, a state senator who is also a rheumatologist — took notice.
“A certain group of people simply cannot come off [opioids],” Gratwick says.
He recently pushed through a change to Maine’s law that allows broader exemptions, so that people with incurable, chronic conditions can continue to take high doses.
It put the decision about that back in the hands of the doctor and patient, Gratwick says, “where it should be.”
Under the revised law, Rockett was able to increase his dose, and dropped his lawsuit.
Even though more patients could, potentially, seek exemptions, Maine’s law is seen by its advocates as an important step. Recent data from the federal Centers for Disease Control suggest that nationwide, despite an overall decrease in recent years, the number of opioids prescribed still triple what it was in 1999.
The 1988 Carter High School football team won that year’s Texas state championship. Filmmaker Adam Hootnick says, “For a lot of people, that’s the top.”
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Courtesy of ESPN Films
A lot of people already know the story of Friday Night Lights, in which a West Texas high school fights for the state football title. It started as a nonfiction book, then it became a movie (with Billy Bob Thornton as the coach) and finally a TV series. In the film, Thornton tells his team that to win state, they’ll have to beat “a team of monsters” from Carter High School in Dallas (which they fail to do).
Carter High School is really an afterthought in Friday Night Lights — the evil, thug-like team that stole a championship. But if you look at the real team’s journey to the 1988 state title, you’ll find a story about race and the pressures young athletes face — a story Adam Hootnick explores in his documentary What Carter Lost.
“The number of scholarships they got, the number of guys who went on to play some form of professional football — by every measure this was one of the greats,” Hootnick says of the school’s reputation.
Carter served a black, middle-class neighborhood in Dallas. According to Hootnick, it was “mostly two-parent families, mostly professionals. … The joke was the student parking lot was a heck of a lot nicer than the teacher parking lot.”
But there was trouble during that season’s playoffs when questions arose about a Carter player’s algebra grade. The other, mostly white schools fought a legal battle to kick Carter out of the playoffs.
“There is no question that if Carter had been one of the predominantly white schools that was always there, everything would have been handled differently,” Hootnick says.
Parents, teachers and school officials fought back, and in the end Carter was allowed to play. Carter won the state title — but the story doesn’t end there.
“After the roller coaster of this season and postseason,” Hootnick explains, “you had a few guys on that team really, to my mind, inexplicably going and joining an armed robbery ring for pretty much no reason. You know, they were middle-class kids, they had cars, they had all the clothes they want. But I think they weren’t ready for the adventure to be done. … I think at some level they were chasing a rush.”
The players were arrested, tried and convicted.
“I don’t think you can fall much further,” Hootnick says, “and I say that in part because of the level of the pedestal that, as a Texas high school football star, that’s almost as big as it gets.”
In the film, Hootnick interviews Texas high school football stars who went on to play professionally. He says, “These guys talk about the fact that no matter how far they went after playing big time Texas high school football, there was no crowd that felt more intense, there was no game that felt bigger than their biggest games in their Texas high school careers. So the level of attention and adoration and intensity around that experience — for a lot of people, that’s the top. And so to fall from grace like that, that’s a long way down.”
In the end, five Carter players served time in prison. Many of them talk in the documentary about how much they lost and how they’ve tried to rebuild their lives.
Carter was ultimately stripped of its 1988 state title, and there’s no doubt that the Carter community’s fight to defend its reputation got a lot harder because of what those young men did. To Hootnick, some of the story’s unsung heroes are the parents who fought to keep the team in the playoffs.
“I think that fight for them was not just about wanting to see their football team win, but about resisting being caricatured in a way, and saying, ‘We’re not cheaters. We’re not thugs.’ … So the way that those parents were undercut after everything they did to keep that team on the field and to try to put forward their version of who they were — to have that all undone, you know, I think that’s the story that’s never been told.”
Emily Ochsenschlager and Jessica Smith produced and edited this interview for broadcast, and Nicole Cohen adapted it for the Web.
