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June 24, 2009
Ellen Bry: Stamford Connecticut girl makes good (again).
Some girls just love to work. Our friend Ellen Bry, a nighttime drama television mainstay (St. Elsewhere, Dexter, Boston Legal, Monk, The Closer) for decades, and known in the LA-NYC underground as WAC?'s in-house photographer, has the lead role as Ester Hobbes, a Chicago socialite who suddenly loses everything, in The Lost & Found Family, a new Sony Pictures release. In the film, we meet a strong and spiritual woman who is surprised to learn that she has inherited just one thing from her dead businessman husband: a run-down old house in Georgia, and the turbulent foster family living in it.
Taken from the story Mrs. Hobbes' House, The Lost & Found Family is a poignant, uplifting, instructive and remarkably powerful family film set in the American South. It was filmed in Jackson, Georgia, a town between Atlanta and Macon, with a population of about 4000, in Butts County.
It is a movie for people who go to church, sing, say "golly", watch lots of TV, eat a lot, and are afraid of virtually everyone and everything all the time. It is therefore bound to be a cult classic, comforting to millions residing in the vast grayness and troubled reverie that is American Fly-Over Country.
Just joshing you.
Early in 2008, I saw a rough cut of The Lost and Found Family--then still entitled Mrs. Hobbes' House--before Sony acquired it. I recognized the people portrayed. Many Americans, including my own family, have roots that reach deeply into, say, southwestern Virginia, east Tennessee, and southern Missouri (where I've visited family my entire life), going back well over two centuries.
Later generations are still there: always hard-working and proud, sometimes devout, seldom well-to-do, and worlds away from the country club life Ester Hobbes led when her husband was alive. They often struggle to make the best life they can.
You need not be Southern, rural or devoted to any form of organized religion to be moved by Ester Hobbes' story. This film will touch every viewer with simple but forgotten verities that bind us to one another.
There are artful, and moving, performances by Ellen and her younger cast members, who include teen heartthrob Lucas Till (Walk The Line, Hannah Montana: The Movie), and Jessica Luza, a film and television actress (The Sullivan Sisters, Boston Legal) and MTV fashion host. Ellen's other movie credits include Mission Impossible 3, Deep Impact, and Bye, Bye Love.
Posted by JD Hull at 12:59 AM | Comments (0)
U. S. Copyright Office: Getting the bugs out of a $52 million "process".
"Who sold you that [expletive] and why did you buy it?" Ironically, over at the Library of Congress, a new $52 million electronic technology designed "to speed things up" has resulted in delays at the U.S. Copyright Office in processing paper copyright applications. Instead of the customary 5-month processing time, paper applications (which still account for roughly half of all submissions) may take up to one year to process. The Washington Post noted last month that applicants are reportedly waiting up to 18 months for their paper applications to be processed. Meanwhile, the Copyright Office says it's getting an "upgrade".
Posted by Rob Bodine at 12:59 AM | Comments (0)
June 23, 2009
Hello. City Desk? Get me rewrite, doll. This is Juror No. 8.
And stop the presses. Here's something you don't see every day--but then you wonder why more jurors aren't taken to task for texting, tweeting, phoning, blogging and otherwise messaging. Milwaukee's Anne Reed at Deliberations has this one from March we almost missed, and there's nothing stale about it: "The Fourth Circuit And The Juror Who Called The Press". And see U.S. v. Basham, the Fourth Circuit's March 30 opinion reviewing claims of errors in the grisly 2004 murder trial of a defendant sentenced to death.
It starts out when a producer from a Greenville, South Carolina television station contacted the district court judge right after the verdict came; he told the judge that during deliberations a juror had called to inquire why the station was not reporting on the trial, and to offer a few observations on the proceeding. No big deal, maybe, right? But then, as Anne Reed notes:
When the phone records came out, there was even more. "Wilson [the jury foreperson] made a six-minute call to WSPA, two one-minute calls and a four-minute call to WHNS Asheville, a two-minute call to WYFF in Greenville, a two-minute call to the Greenville News, and a one-minute call to the Spartanburg Herald. These latter two calls to newspapers had not been reported by Wilson during her initial testimony."
And more: "seventy-one calls between her and two other jurors from September through October 2004," including calls on days of critical testimony.
Read Anne's post to learn the Fourth Circuit's take on the foreperson's misconduct, and whether a new trial was warranted.
Posted by Rob Bodine at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)
It hovers, takes hostages, and moves on to the next town.
"I see defeated people. They're everywhere. They walk around like everyone else. They don't even know they're defeated." It's a choice--in your life and in your work. You always know if you are "there". You just don't know how you got there. You started compromising on things you once embraced as essential. Redford sent us this short Seth Godin post called "On the Road to Mediocrity" about "settling along the way". Avoiding mediocrity? Keeping the monster at bay? WAC? is no Seth Godin. But our take is that great habits learned early on difficult work is step one. Step two is vigilance. The fine thing about posts like Godin's? If it bothers you, you needed to read it.
"I see people who keep mailing it in." (Buena Vista Pictures)
Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)
The National Journal: Team Obama
The "people who run things" in the new administration are carefully collected for you in this interesting and useful article cataloguing what looks like a talented, credentialed and hard-working Team Obama. See by James Barnes and the National Journal staff "Obama's Team: The Face Of Diversity". It's marred only by a trumpeted and somewhat lame observation that less than half of the senior posts are filled by white men. Can we get past that, please?
Posted by JD Hull at 12:11 AM | Comments (0)
June 22, 2009
Antitrust: Catching up with ICANN.
A complaint alleging antitrust violations against Verisign--the corporation with exclusive contracts with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to maintain .com and .net domain name registries--states a valid claim.
In Coalition for ICANN Transparency, Inc. v. VeriSign, Inc., No. 07-16151 (June 5, 2009), the Ninth Circuit reversed and remanded the decision of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California with respect to one of the contracts. It held that the claims concerning the ".net contract" were correctly dismissed due to the competitive bidding process that preceded its execution; however, it held the ".com contract" to be much more suspect in the absence of such bidding--and so those claims were valid.
The Ninth Circuit explained that, because the complaint alleged that an automatic renewal provision harmed free-market competition in and of itself (as opposed to individual competitors), it properly stated a claim for restraint of trade under Section 1 of the Sherman Act. The Ninth Circuit also allowed a claim under Section 1 that alleged that the price per domain name--to which VeriSign and ICANN agreed--exceeded the rate competitive market conditions would produce, thus causing actual injury to competition. It recognized that this bilateral action is held to a higher standard than the unilateral price setting appearing in the cases on which the district court relied.
Finally, based on arguments both by the parties and in amicus briefs, the Ninth Circuit noted that expiring domain names may now represent a market distinct from other names, and remanded the case to the district court to make that determination. If deemed a separate market, the claims under Section 2 of the Sherman Act for attempted or actual monopolization based on predatory conduct should be allowed.
The plaintiff here must still prove the allegations. But at least it will get its day in the Northern District.
Posted by Rob Bodine at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)