March 28, 2018

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Entertainment March 28, 2018

Today in Movie Culture: Stop-Motion 'Ghostbusters,' the Art and Importance of Editing and More

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

Remade Scene of the Day:

Watch the climactic battle of Ghostbusters redone with action figures and stop-motion animation (via /Film):

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Filmmaking Craft of the Day:

This well-cut video from Jake Cauty showcases the art of editing in all its best uses (via Cinematic Montage Creators):

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Franchise Supercut of the Day:

Here’s another video to get us excited there’s less than a month until Avengers: Infinity War comes out, focusing on the coming together of all the Marvel characters in one epic movie:

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Film History of the Day:

For Vanity Fair, the cast of the new season of RuPaul’s Drag Race react to drag in classic movies, including Some Like It Hot, Mrs. Doubtfire and Tootsie:

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Vintage Image of the Day:

Dianne Wiest, who turns 70 today, won her first Oscar for her performance in Hannah and Her Sisters. Here she is looking very hip in a promotional photo for the movie:

Video Essay of the Day:

If you’re ever wondering if you should watch the Ridley Scott’s director’s cut of Kingdom of Heaven, Film Radar makes a great case for why it’s the better version:

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Adaptation Comparison of the Day:

See how similiar the old TV series The Incredible Hulk and the 2008 MCU movie The Incredible Hulk are with this side-by-side comparison from Dimitreze:

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Cosplay of the Day:

These two cosplaying Coco fans did such a great job they made me forget the Pixar feature is an animated film:

These #Coco coplays are amazing at #wondercon#wca2018pic.twitter.com/zhZWTw5jLN

— Creepy Kingdom (@CreepyKingdom) March 25, 2018

Movie Trivia of the Day:

Clickhole shares a whole bunch of incorrect trivia about Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas in order to “change the way you watch” it:

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Classic Trailer of the Day:

Today is the 55th anniversary of the release of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. Watch the filmmaker’s original teaser trailer for the classic horror drama below.

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and

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Business March 28, 2018

America Has A Large Trade Deficit, But Economists Aren't Too Concerned About It

A container ship waits to be unloaded at the Port of Oakland in California. President Trump says the trade deficit that the U.S. runs with other nations must be slashed for the well-being of the country.

Ben Margot/AP

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Ben Margot/AP

Like a lot of Americans, President Trump sees the U.S. trade deficit as an urgent problem — a symbol of U.S. economic decline.

“Any way you look at it, it is the largest deficit of any country in the history of our world. It’s out of control,” Trump said earlier this month when he announced proposed tariffs on Chinese imports.

Most economists, of various political leanings, are a lot less worried about the trade gap, which totaled $568 billion last year.

“I don’t think it’s a problem for the U.S. to have a large trade deficit,” says Veronique de Rugy, senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

The United States buys a lot of products from other countries, everything from oil and chemicals to shoes and automobiles, and when it does, it pays for them in dollars, she notes. As a result, countries such as China and Japan accumulate vast piles of U.S. currency.

Those countries have to exchange those dollars for something, and for a long time they’ve used them to buy U.S. assets, such as stock, real estate and Treasury bills.

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“Every dollar that we send in exchange for goods will come back to us from foreigners in the form of investment. In a sense, if you think about it, it’s a win-win for the U.S.,” de Rugy says.

Bilateral trade deficits — such as last year’s $375 billion U.S. goods gap with China — are even less important, says Alan Blinder, a former Federal Reserve governor and a professor of economics.

“They’re absolutely normal components of trade. I now have a very large bilateral trade surplus with my employer, Princeton University, which gives me a paycheck, and I buy almost nothing from the university,” Blinder says.

“I have a bilateral deficit with the grocery store, where I buy lots of food and they buy nothing from me. That’s the way trade goes,” he says. Blinder says trade deficits can become a problem if foreigners suddenly stop wanting to invest in a country. That’s what happened to Greece, he notes.

“When it can be a problem is when the rest of the world decides you’re not such a good credit risk,” Blinder says.

That hasn’t happened to the United States and it doesn’t appear that it will anytime soon. Foreign investors continue to shovel money into U.S. government debt, for example, resulting in a long period of low interest rates. And they’re big buyers of U.S. real estate and stock.

The specter of foreigners buying up U.S. properties may disturb a lot of Americans, who view it as ceding economic control over the country’s assets. But it shouldn’t, de Rugy says.

“I’m French, and I can tell you these fears also exit in France,” she says. “I remember the frenzy about Japanese buying our castles. It just never materialized. This fear people have that it will change the country, that it will put us at risk, it actually doesn’t happen.”

And with the U.S. government amassing growing amounts of debt every year, it needs the money that foreign investors offer.

“We should be happy that there are countries willing to lend us money at a lower price, because if they weren’t it would mean the interest on the debt we pay would be way higher, and it would mean a bigger share of what the government spends going to interest payments,” she says.

But Celeste Drake, trade and global policy specialist at the AFL-CIO, is more skeptical about U.S. trade policy.

Economists have been making lavish promises about trade agreements such as NAFTA for years. They’ve said trade makes U.S. companies more productive, allowing them to sell more products abroad and creating good, high-wage domestic jobs.

Instead, the trade deficit has persisted and wages for many workers have been stagnant or worse, Drake says. It’s reasonable to ask how long that can continue without damaging the economy, she says.

“This is where we have to say, ‘Why don’t we revisit the policies that we’ve put in place? Why don’t we start looking at this trade deficit that we’ve ignored for more than 30 years and to try to figure out how we can address it?’ ” Drake says.

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Health March 28, 2018

Opioid Treatment Program Helps Keep Families Together

Velva Poole works to reunite children with parents who have been grappling with substance use disorder. Mentoring the parents, she says, is a big part of the state-sponsored program’s success.

Lisa Gillespie/Louisville Public Media

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Velva Poole has spent about 20 years as a social worker, mostly in Louisville, Ky. She’s seen people ravaged by methamphetamines and cocaine; now it’s mostly opioids. Most of her clients are parents who have lost custody of their children because of drug use. Poole remembers one mom in particular.

“She had her kids removed the first time for cocaine. And then she had actually gotten them back,” she says. But three months later, the mother relapsed and overdosed on heroin.

“She had to go through the whole thing all over again — having supervised visits with the kids, then having overnights,” Poole recalls. Starting again from the bottom, the mom took steps to reclaim her life.

And, eventually, she did regain custody of her children. Poole recently ran into the woman at the grocery store.

“She hugged me,” Poole says. “I don’t know how to describe it. It just makes you feel like, wow, what you did really did make a difference in someone’s life.”

Poole is now a supervisor in the Sobriety Treatment and Recovery Teams program, which is funded primarily by the state. It’s an intensive program for parents who have had their kids taken away because of substance abuse and the resulting neglect or mistreatment of the children. The goal is to create a faster process to reunite those families.

It works like this in Kentucky: Someone reports a parent to Child Protective Services if they suspect the adult has an addiction problem and children aren’t being taken care of. If there’s evidence to support the claim, the parent then has a choice — they can go through the standard CPS process, or enroll in START.

Both options have the parent meet with a social worker, and include weekly drug screenings and daily drug treatment, as well as regular attendance at meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous. But START also assigns a mentor to families; the parent has to meet with the mentor once a week. The mentor also drives the parent to and from some appointments and helps them get other services they may need.

Rhonda Maddox is one the family mentors.

“I’m able to open that door, and say, ‘I’ve been where you are. We might not walk down the same road but I done some of the same things you have,’ ” Maddox says.

She stopped using drugs 14 years ago.

“I began using drugs at the age of 9,” Maddox recalls. “My mom was gone [and] my dad was gone, due to their addictions. So I started using. It stayed like that for a long time, going on into high school. I had a few kids then, and then I abandoned those two kids on my granny.”

Maddox eventually got sober and regained custody of her children. Hearing her story makes it easier for clients to open up and and accept help, Poole says.

“It’s very helpful for the client to be able to relate to someone that’s been in their shoes,” she says.

The START program began in Ohio and expanded into Kentucky in 2007. Since then, research has shown it has a higher success rate in reuniting families than the traditional child welfare process.

But the opioid crisis has posed new challenges, Maddox says.

“I had a few of my clients that passed away [after] an overdose — was kind of devastating,” she says. “Sometimes I wonder if there was something else I could have done.”

In each case, Maddox and Poole have a year to try to reunite START parents with their children.

Former START director Tina Willauer says, despite the benefits of enrolling in the START program, parents are still up against significant societal stigma because of their drug use.

“There’s this question, ‘should we even give them treatment?’ — almost as if they’re throwaway because they have an opioid use disorder,” Willauer says.

She believes there are important reasons to keep families together.

“If you’re pulling a child out of a home and putting them in a foster home, we’re removing them from the only people they know — their family. They might have to leave their church; they might have to leave their community,” Willauer says. “So, everything they know. It’s traumatic on many, many levels.”

Willauer and the staff at START wish every parent could go through their demanding program. But START costs more money than the standard, less-intensive process of child protective services. With the state of Kentucky facing a budget crunch, expansion of START is not likely to happen anytime soon.

This story is part of NPR’s reporting partnership with Louisville Public Media and Kaiser Health News.

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Sports March 28, 2018

The 1963 'Game Of Change,' Or Lack Thereof

The 1963 men’s basketball game between Loyola University Chicago and Mississippi State was dubbed “The Game of Change.” But ESPN’s Kevin Blackistone tells David Greene that name might be misleading.

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

This morning, we’re remembering two moments from the civil rights movement. One involved the basketball team at Loyola University Chicago. They are, of course, the Cinderella story in this year’s NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. They also had an amazing run 55 years ago and made headlines for a different reason. In 1963, Loyola Chicago played a tournament game against Mississippi State. Sports journalism professor Kevin Blackistone recently wrote about the game for the Washington Post, and he says it almost didn’t happen.

KEVIN BLACKISTONE: The state of Mississippi at that time basically had a rule that said white teams were not allowed to play against black teams. Mississippi State, which had missed out on a couple of NCAA tournament opportunities in previous years because of that rule, snuck out of the state in the dark of night to go all the way to Lansing, Mich., to play in the first round of the NCAA tournament that year against Loyola, which happened to have four black starters. So it was a violation of Mississippi Jim Crow laws. And it really made for a fascinating story. And Loyola would go on to win the national championship.

GREENE: Well, so was Mississippi State doing this to make a statement about civil rights or mostly just because they wanted to keep playing in the tournament, didn’t matter who they were playing, but they’re like, we’re not going to let a law get in the way of us?

BLACKISTONE: Well, you know, a half a century later, it has become lore that Mississippi State may have been trying to make a statement. But when you look back, they really weren’t. They were a little ticked off that they hadn’t been able to play in the NCAA tournament. They thought they had a good team. Their coach, Babe McCarthy, wanted to get them that opportunity. He thought he was a really good coach, and he wanted to win.

GREENE: And this is where some of the feel-good narrative starts to break down in your mind. I mean, this was called the Game of Change in the midst of the civil rights movement. What, if anything, did it change?

BLACKISTONE: It really didn’t change very much. Some of the most horrific incidents in racial violence in this country that happened in the state of Mississippi happened after that game – the horrible beating that Fannie Lou Hamer suffered, the murders of the three civil rights workers, the assassination of NAACP leader in Mississippi, Medgar Evers, happened after this game, James Meredith, his march in which he was shot. So there were a number of things that happened after this particular Game of Change, which evidenced the fact that not really that much changed in the state of Mississippi.

GREENE: You actually went a bit farther in writing about this and talking about some deeper lessons about the role of people who are white who make sacrifices. Can you tell me what you were really digging into there?

BLACKISTONE: Sure. Well, we’ve been involved in a lot of mythmaking in sports writing, particularly when it comes to the role of sports stories in the civil rights movement and in social justice. We kind of make white figures the central figure. So Babe McCarthy, the white coach of the all-white Mississippi State team, gets talked a lot about being a conduit for making this happen.

GREENE: What would you say is the larger lessons about how we deal with civil rights from this story?

BLACKISTONE: I think we have to look at it in context. I think we have to look at it in terms of history. It troubles me every year at the star the baseball season where we talk about Jackie Robinson and he gets lionized at these games. And it is as if the three generations of black men who were unable to play this game, it gets lost. And so we only think of 1947 going forward. We heroize the white men who helped him come into the game, who shook his hand on the field. And we have all but forgotten those who kept the Jackie Robinsons out of the game for so, so long.

GREENE: Hey, Kevin, thanks so much for chatting, as always.

BLACKISTONE: Hey, thank you, David.

GREENE: Sports commentator Kevin Blackistone.

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