What Other Types of Guns Can Sen. Feinstein Fail to Ban? What About Ones Made of Pixels?

Having
all but failed in her ill-considered, poorly argued efforts to
ban assault weapons (the usual caveat: whatever “assault weapons”
are), now California Sen. Dianne Feinstein seems ready to fail and
fail harder going after violent video games.

At a speech in San Francisco on Wednesday, she took her typical
aim against the National Rifle Association. But then she all but

joined the NRA in complaining about the
glorification of violence in video games. Via the Associated
Press:

Feinstein also encouraged the entertainment and video game
industries to take voluntary steps to produce products that do not
glorify big, powerful guns before Congress feels compelled to step
in. She mentioned that Adam Lanza, the 20-year-old man responsible
for the Sandy Hook Elementary School slayings, practiced shooting
both at a range with his mother and on a video screen.

Video games play "a very negative role for young people, and the
industry ought to take note of that," she said. "If Sandy Hook
doesn't do it, if the knowledge of these video games this young man
played doesn't, then maybe we have to proceed, but that is in the
future."

Well, we can all look forward to that future failure as well.
One: Just as with movies, the video game industry has a voluntary

ratings system that thoroughly documents a game’s contents and
recommends appropriate ages. Two: The Supreme Court has ruled that
the contents of video games are
constitutionally protected free speech in a case that
originated from Feinstein’s own state.

The idea of video games playing “a very negative role for young
people” is just unsupported nonsense without
foundation. Yesterday, when I wrote about film critic’s

Roger Ebert’s awkward relationship with the creative culture of
video games, I noted the gap between Baby Boomers and the younger
generations over the role of the medium in their lives. The
industry took Ebert’s dismissal of video games as a potential art
form as a challenge.

Feinstein’s poorly chosen words and vague threat will likely not
inspire much introspection. She doesn’t understand the medium at
all and clearly has no interest in understanding the medium. But
unlike Ebert, Feinstein has the power to shape government policy,
or at least try to, anyway. It would be interesting to see how the
heavily California-based video game industry would respond to
Feinstein actually trying to go after them.

Below, Reason TV highlights several extremely stupid
Congressional hearings where politicians presumed to justify
censorship against various forms of media:

Read More

In Memoriam: Roger Ebert

The
late Roger Ebert's writing would have left a mark if he had never
gone on television in his life, but it was his TV show with Gene
Siskel that made him a celebrity. You wouldn't have expected that
from their
first show together: two writers droning on, not always sure
where exactly they should be looking, with no excitement beyond the
possibility that Siskel's 'stache will start eating his face. But
it wasn't long before they perfected the bickering-brothers dynamic
that made their show more entertaining than at least 60% of the
movies they reviewed. Instead of suppressing their offscreen
rivalry, which is on display in various outtakes
floating around the Web, they channeled it into arguments about
movies; and made those arguments meaningful by actually giving a
damn about the pictures they were rating. They also had a healthy
sense of self-aware humor about their personas, as their inevitably
entertaining guest spots on
Letterman and other shows proved. The act could be
imitated but it could never be equaled, as countless other programs
-- including, eventually, Ebert & Roeper -- would
learn.

But if the TV show ensured that Roger Ebert was
famous while he was alive, it's his writing for newspapers and the
Web that should ensure he'll be remembered long after he's dead.
For one thing, he was an exceptional stylist. I might disagree
strenuously with Ebert's opinion about a movie; I might bristle at
a factual flub or two about the plot; but I was almost always awed
at his prose, which was thoughtful, graceful, funny, and
accessible. He didn't just write about movies: He had been a
sportswriter early on, and an interview he did for his college
paper with the left-libertarian author Paul Goodman was good enough
to get reprinted in
one of Goodman's books. (He invoked Goodman in at least one of
his reviews too -- a thumbs-up
take on Paul Schrader's underappreciated Blue Collar
-- and there was a time when I had hopes that underneath it all
Ebert was some sort of anarchist. Alas, when he unleashed his
political-pundit side late in life he turned out to be a
standard-issue liberal.) In the last few years he wrote many
wonderful memoirs for his website, and then a much-admired
autobiography. But of course it was his movie writing that
defined him, and it was here that he made his other great
contribution to American culture.

Ebert, you see, didn't care about those old
highbrow/middlebrow/lowbrow distinctions that occupied so many
debates about criticism in the middle of the 20th century. If you
were interested in learning about cinema as a high art, he could be
your gateway to the greats, writing capably about Bergman and
Welles and Kurosawa and other filmmaking giants. (I'm pretty sure I
first heard of Fassbinder in a Roger Ebert essay. Or, at least,
that essay was the first time I wanted to run out and rent a
Fassbinder movie right away.) On the other hand, if you wanted
to know if the latest spy flick was exciting or if the new Mel
Brooks movie was likely to make you laugh, Ebert was perfectly
capable of waxing enthusiastic about those kinds of films too. It's
not that he liked everything, you understand. (Check out his

evisceration of Priest.) It's that he was
capable of liking everything, or at least everything that
was done well. Even when he joined in the chorus denouncing the
slasher genre in the '80s, -- he had to confess that yes, he
was the guy who gave three and a half stars to
Last House on the Left.

And that
leads us to what may be my all-time favorite Roger Ebert review: a

joyful little essay about the pleasures to be found in even the
most indefensibly trashy pictures. The subject is a
blink-and-you'll-miss-it release called Rapa Nui. I've
never seen it, and I don't think I even would have heard of it if I
hadn't read Ebert's review. He gives it just two stars, and much of
the piece consists of a litany of everything ridiculous about the
picture. But then he says this at the end:

Concern for my reputation prevents me from recommending
this movie. I wish I had more nerve. I wish I could simply write,
"Look, of course it's one of the worst movies ever made. But it has
hilarious dialogue, a weirdo action climax, a bizarre explanation
for the faces of Easter Island, and dozens if not hundreds of
wonderful bare breasts." I am however a responsible film critic and
must conclude that "Rapa Nui" is a bad film. If you want to see it
anyway, of course, that's strictly your concern. I think I may
check it out again myself.

My head can't bring itself to believe in an afterlife. But my
heart hopes that Ebert gets another chance to see it.

Read More

8 'Love Actually' Cast Members Who Made It Big On TV (PHOTOS)

What do Betty Francis (née Draper) and Rick Grimes have in common? Neither character would be who s/he is without "Love Actually."

"Mad Men" star January Jones and "Walking Dead" leader Andrew Lincoln both appeared in the 2003 romantic comedy hit along with plenty of other now-familiar faces.

Before she was Betty, Jones was "Love Actually's" flirtatious Jeannie, who picked up British horndog Colin (Kris Marshall) at her local Wisconsin bar along with her roommates, one of which was played by "Happy Endings" and "24" star Elisha Cuthbert.

Read More...

Read More

Assault Rifle Made Of Bones: New Zealand Artist Mahalski's AK-47 Art Is Creepy, For Sale (PHOTO)

It's only $3,500 bones for this assault rifle.

New Zealand artist Mahalski made a life-size AK-47 completely out of animal bones, and it's up for auction.

The non-working -- but inarguably awesome -- replica features a variety of bones and skulls that the artist himself found, including rabbit, ferret, sheep, hawk, pheasant, wallaby, snake, seal, cat and possum. Mahalski says that one of the skulls once belonged to the now-extinct moa.

Read More...

Read More