Isnin, 21 November 2011

The Star Online: Entertainment: TV & Radio

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The Star Online: Entertainment: TV & Radio

Rich man, poor man

Posted: 22 Nov 2011 01:56 AM PST

It takes all kinds to make a good television-viewing experience.

THE last couple of years have been grim for the United States.

The national unemployment rate dipped to 10% just last month and though the recession seems to be over, the road to economic recovery looks long and painful, particularly for the lower and middle classes.

Joblessness, soaring college debts, rising prices of everything and companies (and local governments) going bankrupt make the headlines practically every day.

Isn't it funny how we don't see any of this gloom on American TV shows? Everyone on "TV America" has a job and the few who are unemployed don't seem to really be struggling with loans or debt, or dealing with the prospect of losing their homes.

Just take a look at some of the new programmes that came on air this year: we have fantastical shows like Terra Nova (about a family transported from the future) and Once Upon A Time (characters from fairy tales trapped in a modern-day town called Storybrook) and we have soap-laced thrillers like Revenge and Ringer where the characters are super rich and are concerned only with their own agendas, the world be damned.

Except for a few shows like David Simon's 2002 classic The Wire (which is bitingly real in it's depiction of Baltimore: the criminal underground, the police force, the education system, etc) and Treme (which debuted in 2010 about life in New Orleans post-Katrina) poor people on TV aren't really poor and rich people are never really hit by the flailing economy.

TV, you see, is a form of escapism. Many of us watch TV to make the gloom go away if only for a few hours. Who wants to turn on the tube and be reminded of the sad realities of life. Right? I for one would rather be watching superheroes, monsters and dashing, charming and absolutely flawless men on TV: yes, all things fantastical!

TV is meant to be watched with a pinch of salt.

Let's take popular dramedy Desperate Housewives as an example. I want to live in Wisteria Lane, too. I want to be Bree Hodge (Marcia Cross) who runs a catering business (apparently, though we don't see much business going on) which she gets off the ground immediately – without any of the problems you would expect a start-off business to have. And, she seemed to have raked in profits immediately. I mean, she bought a Lexus within months of opening her business!

Susan Delfino (Teri Hatcher) and Lynette Scavo (Felicity Huffman) have financial woes sometimes, but they somehow seem to deal with it glamorously and get out of the slump pretty fast: when she was down, Susan stripped down to her lingerie for money on a voyeuristic website which men subscribe to (pornographic, much?) and as for Lynette, well after (barely) struggling for a while, her husband Tom (Doug Savant) got a fantastic job and they became rich again! Yeah, talk about fantasy.

But the show is meant to be over-the-top and campy and so you don't judge these little impossibilities ... there's your pinch of salt again!

Having said that, no amount of salt could get me through one particular anomaly on the 1990s cult drama Sex And The City (SATC).

One thing always bothered me: how in the name of reason could Carrie Bradshaw afford all the designer clothes and shoes that she wore on the show? Now, I loved the show back in the day, and I loved her fashion too. In fact, I still do. Sure, there were more than a few misfires but Bradshaw had an impact on fashion like no other character on TV. Heck, I bought an oversized fabric flower to pin on my blouse because of her. I folded up the cuff of my boyfriend's jeans because of her.

But, while I admired her wardrobe changes, it annoyed me greatly that she could afford Chanel, Gucci, Prada, Balenciaga and Dolce & Gabbana all the friggin' time. Or, that she had a pair of Manolo Blahnik's to match her outfits. Or, that she took cabs to go everywhere and lived in a brownstone on the Upper East Side of Manhattan (now you know that's high-end real estate if you watch Gossip Girl). Bradshaw is a writer – a columnist who writes for the fictional New York Star once a week. Now seriously, how much do you think she could have earned?

If I sound a tad hysterical it's simply because in this instance, harsh reality encroached on fantasy. I'm a writer – how come I can't buy Louboutins? Why do I have to shop at Forever 21 (and I am far from 21, let me assure you)? Here's why. In real life, whether you're in New York, Malaysia or Uzbekistan, writers don't earn a lot. Obviously, I wasn't the only one in hysterics. A fan of SATC (who is a real-life writer living in NYC) decided to calculate Bradshaw's income versus what she spends in her blog, the-frenemy.com.

After generously endowing her a monthly income of US$4,000 (RM12,000) and calculating what she spends on her apartment, clothes, shoes, taxis, alcohol and condoms (her blog entry is quite funny, go check it out), this cheezed-off blogger came up with the conclusion that Bradshaw ended the show being at least US$3tri (RM9tri) in debt.

I like it when TV fudges reality, but maybe next time I just won't watch shows depicting writers who seem to earn millions. That's just too close to home.

I've recently become addicted to the American TV series Shameless, which my dear cousins sent across the oceans for me to watch.

It is not just about poor people on TV. That would be putting it mildly. It is about people who are wildly poor, mercilessly desolate, and unapologetically shameless about their decrepit state of affairs. It's really been an eye-opening series for me.

While I've always know poverty exists everywhere, on TV and in this fashion, it becomes almost peversely enjoyable to watch. The Germans have a word for it – schadenfreude – which means to derive pleasure from the misfortunes of others (you know like when you stop to have a closer look at a freak accident on the highway).

What makes it all the more bitingly real, is that Shameless creator Paul Abbott, grew up pretty much in the same situation as the kids on the show. Abbott was brought up by his oldest sister in Lancashire, England, after their mother (and then two years later their father) walked out on them and their eight siblings!

Shameless, the TV series which made its debut at the start of this year in the United States, stars William H. Macy as the drunken patriarch of the Gallagher family who doesn't just neglect his family of five, he exploits them as much as he can and wouldn't think twice about selling out (or selling) anyone of them, if it means a few extra bucks for him.

Emmy Rossum is eldest daughter Fiona who holds everything together and takes care of everyone, including her misguided dad. Justin Chatwin is her ever so cute boyfriend. And Joan Cusack (who was nominated for an Emmy) plays the agoraphobic girlfriend of Macy's character. She's outstanding!

These people live in a house that frequently has no electricity, they (the children) all have to chip in to pay the bills, food is stolen on a daily basis from various sources, everyone takes turns looking after the baby, and dad lives off disability benefits (he's fit as a fiddle, unless you count being in a permanent drunken stupor a disability). Eldest son Lip, who is a genius, earns his keep by taking tests for everyone else at school!

It's really a great show, but has many risque scenes and topics so it's definitely one for adults only. But honestly, poor people never looked so seriously attractive. Aarrgh! It's schadenfreude I tell you!

I seem to be drawn to them for some reason. Take the good (but often dumber than a post) folk in My Name Is Earl. Joy (Jaime Pressly) lives in a trailer, but she gets by somehow, and with two kids in tow, too.

Earl and his brother Randy (Jason Lee and Ethan Suplee) are no better. They have no jobs, live in a motel and I'm not quite sure where they get their income from.

Sure, Earl won US$100,000 in the lottery but there's only so long that will last, especially if one lives at a motel all one's life. Karma's been mighty kind to them, I guess, but still, they're so sweet you just have to love them.

There's something so charmingly hillbilly about the entire cast that makes them easy to love. Darnell, Joy's second husband, who's a cook at the local restaurant, Ernie's Crab Shack, is ever so zen about everything (oh yep, that might be on account of him being under the influence of prescription drugs or otherwise, but that's another story). It just seems that when there's no money involved, life is oh-so much simpler, even on TV.

In most shows where people all live together under one roof – there's a happy mix of poor and not so poor all getting along harmoniously.

Take Friends, for instance. Chandler (Matthew Perry) was IT procurement manager and Ross (David Schwimmer) was a paleontologist, but Joey (Matt LeBlanc) was an out-of-work actor whose resume included sperm donor, selling Christmas trees, dressing up as a Christmas elf and working as a Roman warrior at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas.

Now I'm no careers counsellor, but I seriously doubt an IT manager, palaeontologist and Roman warrior at Vegas make the same amount of money. Yet, they all managed to live fairly similar lifestyles.

Same with The Big Bang Theory, the sitcom about a woman (Kaley Cuoco) who moves into an apartment next door to two brilliant but socially awkward physicists (Johnny Galecki and Jim Parsons). Wait, I'll say that again. Two roommate geniuses who work at the California Institute of Technology, experimental physicist Leonard Hofstadter and theoretical physicist Sheldon Cooper; live across the hall from Penny, a blonde waitress and aspiring actress.

It just doesn't quite add up when you do the Math ... especially if you watch Property Virgins on Li Channel and you know how much those kinds of apartments cost (with onsite laundry and public transport services nearby). Either Penny is a double agent or Caltech pays its staff a pittance. Since this is television, I'm going with Penny being a secret agent, like Jennifer Garner in Alias. It's easy to throw the enemy off your scent when you have geek neigbours who chat about stuff like Schrodinger's cat, worship Leonard Nimoy and have shower curtains sporting the periodic table.

As for rich people on TV? Apart from a brief fascination with The O.C. some years ago (mainly because of Ben McKenzie and Adam Brody) and well, yes Dallas a gazillion years ago, I haven't been as fascinated with many rich folk on TV.

Kimora Lee auctioning stuff from her home? Nah, not my cup of tea. The Kardashians going out to dinner? Ransacking each other's wardrobes? Griping about each other and everyone else on the block? I'd rather watch Jamie Oliver getting his hands dirty, pulling vegetables out of the ground.

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The Star Online: World Updates

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The Star Online: World Updates

International space trio lands in Kazakhstan
U.S. lawmakers abandon deficit-cutting effort
U.S. lawmakers abandon deficit-cutting effort

International space trio lands in Kazakhstan

Posted: 21 Nov 2011 07:43 PM PST

ALMATY (Reuters) - Three astronauts inside a Russian Soyuz capsule parachuted safely back to Earth Tuesday after nearly six months on the International Space Station (ISS), the first landing since NASA retired its space shuttles this summer.

U.S. astronaut Mike Fossum, Japan's Satoshi Furukawa and Russian cosmonaut Sergei Volkov landed at 02:26 a.m. BT, shortly before sunrise on the snowbound steppe of central Kazakhstan, NASA TV showed.

"The landing was great. Everything's good," said Volkov, flashing a thumbs-up signal after he was extracted from a Soyuz TMA-02 capsule blackened by the extreme temperatures on re-entry to the atmosphere.

The closure of NASA's shuttle program means Russian spaceships are the only way to ferry goods and crews to and from the $100-billion (63 billion pounds) ISS, which is shared by 16 nations, until commercial firms develop the ability to transport crews.

Russia hopes the textbook landing will help to restore confidence in its space program after the August crash of an unmanned Russian cargo flight suspended manned space missions.

The returning crew have been replaced in orbit by NASA's Daniel Burbank and Russians Anton Shkaplerov and Anatoly Ivanishin, whose successful launch last week allayed fears that the station would be left empty for the first time in a decade.

But the troubles have left the space station with half the usual handover time. The new crew had only six days with the outgoing astronauts to get up to speed on the quirks of life in space and the station's operations.

NASA said the Soyuz capsule had landed on its side, not unusual in windy conditions, about 90 km (55 miles) north of the town of Arkalyk. Temperatures at the landing site were 15 degrees Celsius below zero.

The three-man crew had spent 167 days in space and their return to Earth took about three-and-a-half hours.

Volkov, huddled in a thermal blanket, is a second-generation cosmonaut and was following in the footsteps of his father, NASA said. It called him: "a rising star in the cosmonaut corps."

Fossum, second to emerge from the capsule, called his loved ones by satellite phone from the landing site. Furukawa, a 47-year-old professional surgeon, was last to emerge. An assistant mopped sweat from his brow.

After initial medical checks in an inflatable tent on site, the returning crew will be taken be helicopter to the city of Kostanai in northern Kazakhstan.

The ISS will regain full, six-person occupancy with the late December launch of U.S. astronauts Don Pettit, cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko and Andre Kuipers of the European Space Agency.

(Additional reporting by Dmitry Solovyov; Editing by Myra MacDonald)

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U.S. lawmakers abandon deficit-cutting effort

Posted: 21 Nov 2011 06:17 PM PST

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. lawmakers abandoned their high-profile effort to rein in the country's ballooning debt on Monday in a sign that Washington likely will not be able to resolve a dispute over taxes and spending until 2013.

Senator Jon Kyl departs a "super committee" meeting in the Capitol in Washington November 18, 2011. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

The admission of defeat by Republicans and Democrats on a 12-member congressional "super committee" is likely to cement perceptions among voters and investors that politicians are too divided to tackle trillion-dollar budget deficits and a national debt that now is roughly equal to the U.S. economy.

"Despite our inability to bridge the committee's significant differences, we end this process united in our belief that the nation's fiscal crisis must be addressed and that we cannot leave it for the next generation to solve," Republican Representative Jeb Hensarling and Democratic Senator Patty Murray said in a joint statement.

But lawmakers will be less willing to compromise as they shift their attention to the November 2012 presidential and congressional elections.

The finger-pointing began within minutes of the announcement.

President Barack Obama said at the White House that Republicans had scuttled the talks by refusing to consider tax hikes on the wealthy.

"They simply will not budge from that negotiating position and so far that refusal has been the main stumbling block that has prevented Congress from reaching an agreement to further reduce the deficit," Obama said at the White House.

Republicans blamed Obama for a lack of leadership and said his Democrats had been unwilling to consider a fundamental overhaul of government-run healthcare programs that could swamp the economy in coming decades as the population ages.

The panel waited until after U.S. markets closed at 4 p.m. (9:00 p.m. BT) to formally declare the effort dead, but shares on Wall Street had already hit a one-month low due to fears of out-of-control government debt in Europe and the United States. Japan's Nikkei index opened lower on Tuesday, hitting its lowest level in eight months.

UNCERTAINTY AHEAD

The committee's failure to agree on $1.2 trillion (766.6 billion pounds) in deficit reduction sets up a year of uncertainty on taxes and spending that could further rattle investors already shaken over euro zone debt woes.

Congress is now set to deliver those budget savings through automatic cuts to defence and domestic programs, but some Republicans have vowed to prevent them from hitting the military. Obama said he would veto any effort to do so.

He will have to contend with a concerted lobbying effort by his own defence secretary to preserve the Pentagon's budget.

"If Congress fails to act over the next year, the Department of Defence will face devastating, automatic, across-the-board cuts that will tear a seam in the nation's defence," Defence Secretary Leon Panetta warned.

Credit-rating agencies, already dismayed by Washington's inability to produce a credible plan to tackle the country's debt, could downgrade U.S. debt if the cuts are rolled back.

Standard & Poor's said the news validated its decision to issue a first-ever U.S. credit downgrade in August. Moody's Investors Service said that failure, by itself, would not lead to a rating change.

Fitch said it would finish its assessment of the U.S. rating by the end of the month. It said previously that failure by the super committee to reach agreement would likely result in a negative outlook.

Congress will have to deliver close to $4 trillion in savings to ensure that the national debt, now at $15 trillion, does not swamp the economy, budget experts say.

"The United States is on a perilous debt course, and today's announcement does nothing to alter it," said Maya MacGuineas, head of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget think tank.

In the coming weeks, Democrats will scramble to extend economy-boosting measures, such as a tax cut for workers and enhanced jobless benefits, which are due to expire at the end of the year. Analysts say the economy could suffer if they are not extended, but Republicans are likely to insist on spending cuts to offset their $168 billion cost.

Keeping up the pressure on Republicans, Obama will renew his call for Congress to pass the payroll tax cuts during a trip to New Hampshire on Tuesday.

Obama has kept his distance from the talks, choosing instead to emphasise a job-creation package that has been blocked by Republicans. Aides say the collapse of the super committee will help him paint Republicans as obstructionist as he campaigns for re-election.

Congressional leaders set up the super committee after a fierce budget battle brought the government to the brink of default in August. The panel bypassed the usual Capitol Hill power centers in an effort to find common ground where other efforts had come up short.

During the talks, Republicans showed a new willingness to move from their staunch opposition to tax increases as they pushed for an overhaul that would have closed tax breaks and lowered rates.

Democrats rejected the proposal after they determined it would have led to a lower tax burden for the wealthy.

Outside the negotiating room, interest groups like the conservative anti-tax Americans for Tax Reform and the seniors' lobby AARP pushed hard to protect their turf.

Several groups said they were happy the panel had fallen short. "Simply put, no deal is better for America than a bad deal," said the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a liberal group.

Democratic Senator John Kerry, a member of the super committee, said those outside of Congress were as much to blame for defeat as those who hold elected office.

"There is an enormous ideological divide in politics today, and today's outcome underscores the rigidity and unwillingness of forces outside of Congress to allow for rational consensus," Kerry said in a statement.

(Additional reporting by Steve Holland, Rachelle Younglai, Kim Dixon, Susan Cornwell, Donna Smith, Alister Bull and Dave Clarke; Writing by Andy Sullivan; Editing by Peter Cooney)

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U.S. lawmakers abandon deficit-cutting effort

Posted: 21 Nov 2011 06:01 PM PST