NY Times Reviews Corporate Informercial

Today’s New York Times has a rather hapless review by Stephen Holden of a Playboy® faux-documentary hilariously titled Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel.

It is clearly a corporate highlight reel, a two hour branding exercise for the soon-to-be-late Hefner®. What’s next?  The Times reviews informercials for OxiClean® or Orange Glo®… or maybe The Snuggie® Saga:  The Arms Rebellion Against Blanket Oppression in Our Time?

In his penultimate sentence Mr. Holden writes, “There is simply no getting around the fact that Playboy, for all of Mr. Hefner’s assertions that it helped level the playing field in the battle of the sexes by affirming women’s right to pleasure, also objectified women as compliant, ornamental playthings.”

Oh, ya think?  What was it that clued you in, Steve?   Was it the reverse-anthropomorphic rabbit ears and tails, or the displacement of real women’s identities with pre-fab fantasy fake names, fake body parts, fake images, fake biographical sketches, fake emotions and fake personalities?

Hefner’s sole innovation was his ingenious social marketing, which convinced millions of men that there’s nothing embarrassing about having to pay a woman to pretend she likes you while you bore her with your incessant assitude. It paved the way for mainstream commercial interests to use female nudity to build audiences without fear of prosecution or social approbation.

A documentary would address these issues.  A corporate infomercial would not.  This film falls into the latter category.  Six of one, half a dozen of the other, apparently, so far as the Times is concerned.  Which is a marketing innovation in and of itself.

Next up:  the Facebook movie, with theme song by Radiohead performed by the Village of the Damned children’s choir.  No kidding.

Barack’s Special Rule for Ladies

Ladies!  If you are fertile and have a chronic or debilitating medical condition, and you need the government’s help to get health insurance, Barack Obama has a special rule just for you!

“Abortions will not be covered in the Pre-existing Condition Insurance Plan except in the cases of rape or incest, or where the life of the woman would be endangered.”

Dana Goldstein has a short and brutal analysis of what the rule means:

The consumers expected to take advantage of the high-risk insurance program have chronic health conditions that make them ineligible for employee-provided or open-market coverage. Pregnant women diagnosed with cancer or other debilitating diseases are often advised to undergo abortions, as are women whose fetuses develop with birth defects that make life outside the womb impossible. Under the new ban, both of those types of abortions could be defined as “elective” and thus denied insurance funding, as is already the case for federal employees.

Wow.  That rule must be working out really well for Barack to want to expand it to non-federally employed ladies, right?

In 2008, federal employee D.J. Feldman was denied insurance coverage after aborting a fetus that developed without a brain, skull, or scalp. “A few months later I got a letter back from my insurance carrier saying thank you very much,” she told NPR last year. “We saw that your baby was diagnosed with anencephaly. Our medical experts determined that you could have carried to term, because your life was not in danger. And by the way, you owe $9,000.”

Well that’s not good.  That’s the opposite of good.  That’s reprehensible.

We can look forward to many more stories like this.  Also, stories of  pregnant women diagnosed with cancer who can’t afford to abort, and are thus denied chemotherapy because it could cause birth defects. (Docs and hospitals will be afraid of lawsuits).

Horribly, these tragedies will happen not because of lapses in the system or because someone interprets the policy incorrectly.  Rather, they will happen as a result of the policy being carried out exactly as its authors in the Obama administration intended.

The Two Faces of Reed: Salt vs. Bourne

Here’s an excerpt from Rex Reed’s review of Salt:

Dismantling top security surveillance equipment, blowing up government buildings, scaling tall buildings like Spider-Man, smashing through glass doors, leaping from bridges onto the tops of speeding trucks and speeding through the beltway traffic on a stolen motorcycle without losing a single press-on nail, the female half of Brangelina literally defies both logic and gravity as this breathless action circus coasts along on one center-ring question: Who is Salt? A loyal, innocent American patriot, a Russian “sleeper spy” left over from the cold war or a modern-day terrorist in Jimmy Choos who looks like the cover of Vanity Fair?

And here’s an excerpt from his review of The Bourne Ultimatum:

Here, every single set piece—the cat-and-mouse game in Waterloo Station, the rooftop footrace in Tangier, the de rigueur car chase through the streets of Manhattan—is shot and edited at Grand Prix speed, yet the film never loses its momentum, balance or sense of story and character. By the end, Bourne survives more explosions and demolitions than Wile E. Coyote. The scene where he drives himself off the roof of a parking garage strains credulity, to be sure, but by then you’re so wrapped up in the story that you’ll relish every curve the movie throws at you.

Get it?  Hollywood hunk as preposterous character with preternatural ability to evade capture and blow things up – good.  Hollywood beauty as preposterous character with preternatural ability to evade capture and blow things up – absurd.

His J. Crew wardrobe, well-rested countenance, and lack of disfiguring scars pass muster. Her “Jimmy Choos” and “press on nail(s)” (seriously) are patently ridiculous.

And so on.