Have an Ego, Mr. Goldstone

It's a foregone conclusion that actors have massive egos. And if you've been famous for more than five decades, like Barbra Streisand, it's been a long time indeed since someone tried to steer you away from a vanity project that hinges on improbable casting. 

But the news that Babs is finally set to star in and direct a new version of Gypsy, the biopic treatment of stripper Gypsy Rose Lee's life and rise to fame, strikes me as a bit desperate. Streisand is 72, after all, and at the start of the story the part requires her to play the mother of a child under the age of ten. Rosalind Russell was about 55 when she croaked and brayed her way through the Mama Rose songbook in the 1962 version, but she only got that part because she was married to the producer. At least Bette Midler was a more reasonable 48 in the 1993 version. 

Granted, Streisand did pull off playing a young girl pretending to be a young male Talmudic student in Yentl, 31 years ago at the age of 41. And I'm pretty sure her first Instagram post this week, showing her looking, er, refreshed, was intended to address critics like me who might call her out for being too long in the tooth for the part. I don't doubt for a minute that she can still sing the hell out of the role. But should she? 

Size Doesn't Matter

There's no question that the story of King Kong is enduring. That's why it's been remade twice since the 1933 original (including the 1976 version that has Kong tumbling off the World Trade Center, making it a bit hard to watch today), and spawned dozens of cultural spin-offs. 

But in every version, there's always been the uncomfortable question -- the big gorilla in the room, if you will -- sure, Kong loves Ann Darrow (well-played in the latest version by Naomi Watts). But what exactly is he supposed to do with her?

The Peter Jackson reimagining, which I watched again late one night recently, tries to answer that question. When Kong breaks out of his chains at the theater and lopes through Manhattan smashing cabs and movie marquees, he's looking for Ann, grabbing every blond he sees and tossing them away in disgust when he sees they're imposters. Suddenly his obsession appears to him on the street, walking toward him through the chaos of crowds fleeing in horror. 

While every frame in the film has a painterly sheen and the CGI recreation of Depression-era New York is exquisitely detailed, the reunion of the two star-crossed "lovers" is moving. And to celebrate it, Kong and his girl enjoy a charming skating session on a frozen pond in Central Park, twirling and spinning on the ice before their revelry is shattered by cruel gunfire. 

So now we know: love conquers all, and size doesn't matter. 

Word wizards

If there's a lesson to be learned here, it's to never second-guess one's creative instincts. 

About a six weeks ago, I was reviewing a campaign one of my copywriters had written for a summer Outdoor Living promotion. It featured patio furniture meant to transform the customer's outdoor spaces into pleasant warm-weather entertainment areas.

"Can't we have a little more fun with this headline?" I asked, looking at the rather flat line she'd written.

"The truth is these chairs are not all that special," she answered. "We don't want to over-promise anything."

Believing that retail should always be aspirational, I thought for a second. "I know, what if we did a short, punchy headline that was a play on words. Something like 'Lounge wizards.' Because they're simple, affordable ways of making your patio or deck into a nice place to hang out."

"I don't know," she said, "Will people get that it's a play on 'lounge lizards'? Maybe that's too archaic a term."

If there's a way to get me to back down on a creative concept, it's to call out that my personal demographic may not be in touch with a modern mindset. I let her run with the more literal headline she'd chosen and forgot about it until I was having lunch at a Japanese noodle house in Vancouver about a week later. I opened the local newspaper to the Home Decorating section and saw this headline anchoring the section on patio furniture.

Lesson learned: listen to your instincts. 

Dodging a Solar Bullet

In just the last 20 or so years, we've become so technology-dependent that it's hard to imagine life without WiFi hot spots, GPS and smartphones that shape and inform our every action and interaction. What would happen if someone pulled the plug?

In July 2012, we almost got a chance to find out. A massive coronal ejection surged up from the surface of the sun, shooting a pulse of plasma straight into earth's path. Luckily, it was an indirect hit, because it would have knocked our entire satellite grid out of commission for months or years and fried every transformer on that side of the earth. In a world where people can't disengage from their phones long enough to eat dinner or drive to the corner, it would have been the equivalent of an electronics nuclear winter. 

We only have to look to the Carrington Event, a solar storm in 1859 that may not even have been as strong, to see how close we came to disaster. Throughout North America and Europe telegraphs, the nascent telecommunications system of the day, failed spectacularly, in some cases giving operators severe electric shocks and throwing sparks from pylons. Aurorae lit skies the world over to such an extent that gold miners in the Rockies, believing it was dawn, started making breakfast in the middle of the night. People in the northeastern U.S. were said to read newspapers by the Northern Lights, which dropped as far south as Hawaii and Cuba. Our atmosphere was so charged that even telegraphs that were unplugged from their power source continued to send and receive messages.

It's hard to even imagine the chaos and disruption an event of this magnitude inflict on our modern world. But why am I a little disappointed that it didn't actually happen?

Some Contents May Have Shifted During Flight and May Contain Sharks

In the eighth season of the acclaimed comedy series Seinfeld, Julia Louis-Dreyfus' Elaine Benes tries to convince a date to see a frothy, light-weight comedy called Sack Lunch instead of the oppressively pretentious The English Patient. "So do you think they got shrunk down, or is it just a giant sack?" she asks. The date marches off to see the more acclaimed film, and Elaine enjoys a good low-brow movie wallow by herself. 

There's something wonderful about fully surrendering to a low-concept film, as I was thinking last night when I saw a trailer for Let's Be Cops. Yes, I definitely would have spent a little more effort on that title. And while on the surface it seems as mouth-breathing and misogynistic as a lot of the usual summer fare aimed at the all-powerful teenaged boy demographic, it really is a fun idea -- who wouldn't want the power and excitement that comes with a police uniform and a black and white cruiser?

To pile on the irony, the film's trailer ran during the premier of the brilliantly titled Sharknado 2: The Second One -- in case you didn't get that it's a sequel, they told you twice. It's a cheesy follow-up to last year's SyFy hit, and it serves up an entire gallery of guest stars: Kelly Osborne as a violet-haired flight attendant whose head is consumed by a shark in mid-flight; Judd Hirsch, who starred on the series Taxi 35 years ago, driving a taxi through a shark storm; and Robert Hayes, who played the reluctant pilot who saves the day in the '80s comedy Airplane!, to name just a few. The premise has something to do with climate change prompting an increase in tornadoes; why they suck up multitudes of sharks and deposit them in mid-town Manhattan is never quite clear. 

In a world of 24-hour news feeds and a constant barrage of reality pinging at us from all our devices, I think we could all benefit from kicking off our shoes and relaxing with a nice, empty Sack Lunch or Sharknado. Personally, I think the family was shrunk down to sack lunch size. 

Please Don't Fling Your Soiled Panties

Several years ago I described how the Charmin toilet tissue brand had veered from its decades-long track of discreet, jovial advertising to feature a marketing campaign that essentially answered, quite unnecessarily, the question of whether a bear shits in the woods. 

Now Kotex has launched a campaign that features the dissatisfied women of the world flinging their dirty undergarments into the street -- panties that have been soiled by substandard feminine hygiene products. 

It's hard to see how this creative direction ever got to see the light of day. Historically, products that dealt with bodily functions involving human waste or sexual activity focused on the high-level benefits to the customer without wallowing in the sordid facts. If the softness of a toilet paper brand was elevated as its key feature, you didn't have to elaborate where that softness would be applied. If a feminine hygiene product or baby diaper was said to be highly absorbent, there was no need to elaborate as to what substances needed to be absorbed. 

I give a solid "fail" to any effort that not only endorses littering our streets and byways with menstrual-encrusted undergarments but showcases women wearing them on their heads. Kotex, you can do better than this. 

The Chimp Returns

It's been almost exactly two years since I abandoned this blog. At the time, I felt I was somehow running out of subjects, or more likely I was experiencing a feeling of being overwhelmed by a world that evoked so much conflicting outrage and heartbreak.  

If anything, our tiny blue planet -- made so much more fragile by recent pronouncements that there are an almost infinite number of earthlike planets in our galaxy alone -- is seething with conflict and trauma like never before. Undeniable climate change, Ebola outbreaks, the missile strike and loss of another Malaysian jetliner, the Gaza warfare, hobby lobby dramas, and so much more, all promise an endless stream of human-driven conflict and content to react to and write about. 

And, after some interesting but, in the end, unsatisfactory forays into social media (one Twitter account as myself, and one masked within an unidentifiable persona), I realize that long-form writing is what I enjoy most. It doesn't matter how many followers I have, only that I have this free-form forum to espouse about out culture and its mystifying insistence on goose-stepping our species ever closer to oblivion. 

Please watch this space for more entries.