We Review Netroots Nation
Also under review: The new movie Julie & Julia and the Dollhouse DVD.
By Kay Steiger, Emily Rutherford, and Daniel Strauss
August 14, 2009
Sen. Arlen Specter admits he's just here because he's worried about re-election. (Flickr/BuffaloPundit)
This is my first Netroots Nation, but I've met a lot of people that have come here for years, back when it was called Yearly Kos. From their accounts, it's smaller than it has been before, but it's also more diverse. (There is a Second Life caucus this afternoon, which shows just how nerdy a blogger covention can be.)
At the risk of bordering on self-promotion, the panel we planned, called "Who's Left Out?" asked some interesting and important questions about how insular the Netroots can be. The panel used political scientist Matthew Hindeman's book The Myth of Digital Democracy, as a launching point for the discussion. Eszter Hargittai, a sociologist at Northwestern University, noted that giving lower socioeconmic status individuals more access to the Internet won't solve the problem, and that skill needs to be paired with access. The panel, as someone who works for Washington, D.C.'s Bread for the City pointed out, was the closest the nebulous group known as the "netroots" came to discusing poverty issues this week in Pittsburgh.
Still, it's exciting to be around so many famous-on-the-progressive-Internet bloggers: Yesterday I got to meet Pam Spaulding from Pam's House Blend, one of the foremost LGBT blogs in America today. I shared an elevator with FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver, who stared awkwardly at the wall while he checked his Blackberry. But perhaps the best part was when the AFL-CIO decided to host a free beer tasting of union-made beers in support of the Employee Free Choice Act.
7 out of 10 bespeckled bloggers
-Kay Steiger
Meryl Streep does a good job with Julia Child's vowels. (allmoviephoto)Julie & Julia
Written and directed by Nora Epheron
Columbia Pictures
Released: Aug. 7, 2009
Like many who have reviewed Julie and Julia in the past week, I would have regarded it as one of the best movies of the year if it had done away with the "Julie and" part and just stuck with "Julia." The life and career of Julia Child is historically significant and obviously interesting to a general audience, which makes you wonder who thought the parallel narrative--of a New York woman (played by Amy Adams) who deals with her own personal post-9/11 by starting a blog wherein she documents her obsession with Child and her recipes--is at all equal to Child's own story.
Adams' performance pales to that of her co-star. Meryl Streep is just so perfect as Julia Child. She has Child's mannerisms down perfectly--most especially and entertainingly her voice, complete with its mellifluous vowels. When Streep as Child decides she is going to start taking cooking lessons because "I must have something to doooo," it's clear that the self-centered monologues Julie has to work with can't possibly compete. I found myself sitting through every Julie Powell segment of the film wondering when the next cut to a Julia Child segment would occur, and I suspect I wasn't the only one.
But there's an interesting meta aspect to the Julie segments in the film. They are an interesting depiction of blogging back in 2002, in the early days of the medium. I was fascinated by the very personal relationship Julie has with her readers, with her negotiation of how much of her personal life she should include in the blog, and even with the shots of a clunky laptop, displaying the old-style pre-Google Blogger. It was strange, to me, to see blogging represented as such a personal affair, as such an out-of-the-ordinary thing for someone to do, and particularly as an integral part of the plot of a movie. I would be willing to bet that the word "blog" occurs more times in Julie and Julia than in any other major studio film--and while that milestone perhaps isn't quite as culturally significant as the publication of The Art of French Cooking, well, I guess we should take what we can get in the 21st century.
6 out of 10 successfully deboned ducks
-Emily Rutherford
DVD
Dollhouse
Created by Joss Whedon
FOX
Released: July 28, 2009
I didn't pay for my copy of the Dollhouse DVD set. But I also didn't steal it. I won it.
I think the big difference between my experience of watching the Dollhouse DVD versus other peoples is that I didn't actually buy the DVDs, I won them in a contest (read my entry here, I'm commenter ds4). Not sure how much of a factor that plays but I think it deserves an upfront disclosure.
I watched the entire series in one sittting. I noticed an overarching pattern that I hadn't realized until now: This show is not a happy one. In fact, it's quite the contrary. In each episode there's always a very dark, serious, even depressing element. Either the client is a psychopath or our heroine, Echo, is trying to help a mentally decrepit girl.
The one thing I struggled with is that the DVD's special features are aggravatingly hard to find. But once you do find them, they're a real treat. There are a lot of interviews with Joss Whedon and Miracle Laurie, and they also feature some funny outtakes from the season's twelfth episode.
The DVD set also comes with unaired episodes, the original pilot, "Echo," and the unaired season 1 finale, "Epitaph One." These episodes are the bleakest of the bunch; they're so hopeless that I'm starting to question whether the show would have gotten a second season if they had aired. Don't get me wrong, these are good episodes and they definitely expand on the series. The DVD boxed set is definitely worth owning.
8 out of 10 legal free DVD boxed sets.
-Daniel Strauss
Kay Steiger is editor of Campus Progress
. Emily Rutherford and Daniel Strauss are staff writers at Campus Progress.
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