Behaving Badly

First it was the “You lie!” heard around the televised nation by Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina. Then Serena Williams let loose a volley of threats at an official during a U.S. Open match. Next up was the Kanye madness at the MTV Video Music awards.

And that was just what... one week?

What’s next?

If I had to guess, I’d say plenty.

Remember back in the day when “sportsmanlike” conduct was EXPECTED? Taken for granted … whether it was a Little League baseball game or a professional basketball game with a championship on the line?

John McEnroe used to be in a class all by himself when he ranted and raved during tennis matches. It was a thing to behold … watching a grown man act like a two-year-old. The same with former Indiana University basketball coach Bobby Knight’s antics of flinging chairs and losing control during basketball games. He, too, was in a class by himself.

Since then, the offenses have been piling up. You can barely get through a week’s worth of news without hearing about an athlete getting fined for offensive behavior.

After this week’s worth of bad behavior, Serena Williams got fined the maximum penalty of $10,000. Rep. Wilson was officially admonished in a House resolution for his outburst during President Obama’s speech… and Kanye? Well, his penalty has amounted to publicly apologizing for boorishly stealing the spotlight from country singer Taylor Swift.

But I have a feeling those penalties are highly unlikely to put a stop to bad behavior — in any arena … sports, political or otherwise.

There’s that publicity thing. You know what I mean. “Any publicity is good publicity.” Or as, Oscar Wilde once put it: “There is only one thing worse than being talked about and that is NOT being talked about.”

As long as these characters get plenty of media coverage, (yep, that includes me, I guess), there will be plenty of people behaving badly.

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by Shari Scales Finnell

What’s Wrong with this Picture?

It’s not my imagination. Movie previews are starting to become bigger than the movies themselves.

That became crystal clear during the holiday weekend when I finally decide to carve out some time to take the two smaller Finnells to see Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.

We scramble to get to the theater in plenty of time — even though we know that the 1:05 p.m. showing of Harry Pottery is more likely to start at about 1:20 or 1:25. We just don’t want to miss those glorious previews.

And glorious they are.

The preview of Avatar seems to be shown in real time … like a full 3-minute segment of the movie, instead of a series of excerpts. There’s a funny clip of Despicable Me — again showing a full excerpt of the animated movie. Those are accompanied by previews of New Moon, 2010 and about three or four other promising films.

By the time the “real” movie starts up, my son turns to me and asks, “What movie are we seeing again?” I give him a funny look and don’t answer, because I assume he’s just joking.

Then I realize he’s not alone.

A boy sitting directly in front of us turns to the woman sitting next to him and asks the same question: “What movie are we seeing?”

Just then my son shoots me a look that says, See, I’m not the only one!

To cap off all the madness, a little girl sitting on the woman’s right starts whining, “I’m ready to go home!”

The girl, who seemed to be about 5 or 6 years old, obviously thought she already had had enough entertainment for the day after sitting through all those previews.

After a couple of minutes of more whining, I turn around to see if I can find another set of seats, because I know it’s going to be a long afternoon. Really long. The girl has no idea that the movie we’re about to see has a running time of 2 ½ hours — 153 minutes to be exact.

It could get really ugly.

But who can blame her? I could have walked out at that point, feeling pretty satisfied that I had gotten at least one or two bucks worth of entertainment value.

I’m not complaining. I like previews. They’re like tasty appetizers. But I’m starting to worry that previews are heading in the direction of movies. At one time, you could expect a movie to wrap up in 1 ½ hours unless it was a major epic like Gandhi, Titanic or The Lord of the Rings. Movies more than two hours in length are now becoming the norm.

When NBC aired a 7 1/2-minute long preview of Spiderman 3 a couple of years ago, it seemed to be a foreshadowing of things to come. You know some production company is just itching to top that.

Oh... my verdict of the movie Half Blood Prince? Mildly scary.
Long previews? Really, really scary.

Too long? Just right? Or a necessary evil to keep you coming back to the theater? What are your thoughts about movie previews?

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by Shari Scales Finnell

Sugarcoating the Realities? Ten Kennedy’s Chappaquiddick tragedy, Chris Brown’s felony assault & Philip Garrido’s rape-release-kidnapping.

In the midst of the celebration of Ted Kennedy’s life, including the daylong CNN specials, I couldn’t help but think about an art assignment I had back in my teen years.

“Draw a caricature of a famous person,” my high school art teacher instructed my class.

For some reason, I came up with the idea of drawing Ted Kennedy. I can’t remember why, but I decided to sketch the political figure — in classic large-headed caricature style — sitting in a boat with a large grin on his face as he paddled away from a sinking car. It was my wry take on the 1969 Chappaquiddick tragedy.

Evidently, the “incident” as it now frequently called, boggled my teenage mind. That’s most likely because I, like many other people, didn’t feel that Kennedy’s punishment for leaving the scene of a fatal accident was sufficient.

I mentioned the assignment to a friend the other day. “I must have been really cynical back then,” I told her.

After thinking about it later, I thought about my comment. “What’s so cynical about expressing my thoughts about what I considered to be a lack of justice in the Chappaquiddick case?”

Though I don’t believe a person should be judged for their past mistakes for the rest of their lives, I also don’t believe we should sugarcoat reality.

Chris Brown

Today’s reality paints a picture some disturbing trends in crimes related to the victimization of women. Chris Brown, who pleaded guilty to felony assault, still gets to play the part of a celebrity by appearing on Larry King Live this week.

Then there's Philip Garrido, who was sentenced to 50 years to life in federal prison for the 1976 brutal rape and kidnapping of a woman in Nevada. The victim, who went through an 8-hour ordeal, thought the soonest Garrido would get out was 2006. Instead he was paroled in 1988 — three years before he kidnapped a little girl and held her for 18 years. I’m sure the question eventually will come up as to why a 50-year-to-life sentence was reduced to 11.

Philip Garrido

In the meantime, statistics indicate that there are thousands and thousands of other similar cases that will never hit the news. According to the National Institute of Justice and the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, 1 in 6 women in her lifetime will be sexually assaulted. Only 6 percent of rapists will ever spend a day in jail, partly because 60 percent are never reported to law enforcement officials.

Also, 12 million women — 25 percent of the female population — will be abused in their lifetime, according to the Mental Health Journal.

It almost seems to be too much to hope for, but I wish the next generation of young girls could be presented with an entirely different picture of what their lives will be like — lives free from
violence and sexual assault.

What are your ideas on addressing the high rate of violence and sexual assault against women? Do you think there’s any chance of diminishing the numbers?

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by Shari Scales Finnell