In grand Overthinking It tradition, Matthew Wrather and Peter Fenzel cover the 2010 Oscars by barely talking about them, concentrating instead on the rapidly decentralizing media landscape, the counterproductive use of racial and gender distinctions (e.g., first woman “Best Director”), and career advice for Busta Rhymes.
→ Download Episode 88 (MP3)
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Matthew Wrather hosts with Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Jordan Stokes to overthink Eye-talian Americans, tokenism and the minority experience, Zombieland, spoilers and violence w/r/t same, Reference Movies, and the meaning of the undead.
Tell us what you think! Leave a comment, use the contact form, email us or call 20-EAT-LOG-01—that’s (203) 285-6401.
Download Episode 67 (MP3)
Matthew Wrather hosts with Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, John Perich, Ryan Sheely, and Jordan Stokes to answer your calls and emails. Topics include invisibility, Paradise Lost, John Hughes and Race, our small-minded American chauvinism, science in the media, and the meaning of Meta.
Tell us what you think! Leave a comment, use the contact form, email us or call 20-EAT-LOG-01—that’s (203) 285-6401.
Download Episode 62 (MP3)
If you read last week’s OTI open thread, you would have learned that I was having trouble coming up with the content of this week’s post. The eight episodes of Lost I watched were all over the place in terms of tone, theme, character, and so on. For the first time ever, I got the impression that wildly different writers were working on the different episodes. Take Locke, for instance. In one episode, he’s punching a guy out over a misunderstanding; in the next, he’s so trusting of other people that he does the stupidest thing imaginable, allowing Sawyer to steal the camp’s entire supply of medicine and guns. Then, in the very next episode all-trusting Locke is allowing Sayid to torture a guy just because he looks a little fishy. Say what?
So it was hard for me to get a handle on these episodes. Add the fact that I still don’t have any real information about who The Others are and you can see why I couldn’t think of a good topic for this blog post. Luckily for me, the wonderful readers of this blog deigned to help me by giving me some good topics and questions to overthink. But before we get to that, let’s review what we watched last week…
I once heard a story… “Whatever blooms from the Baobab is given back to the earth, because the mighty tree never forgets its roots.” Like the mighty Baobab, McDonald’s and I will not be moved.
You’re not going to believe this, but the statement above is a direct quotation from the official McDonald’s website. First of all, it makes no sense. The tree gives back to the earth, and the speaker “will not be moved.” I don’t really get the analogy. And I really don’t get how McDonald’s factors into it. Does McDonald’s give back to the earth? Is McDonald’s impossible to move? Here’s my best shot: McDonald’s gives the speaker the strength of a mighty tree. But it’s certainly a confusing way to put it, not to mention a silly thing to say. Not only that, McDonald’s is equating itself with one of the most sacred trees in African folklore, known as “the tree of life.” That seems sort of disrespectful to the culture they’re pandering to, and gloriously ironic given how unhealthy McDonald’s food is and the high rate of obesity among African-Americans.
So basically, it’s not the best two sentences of marketing copy ever written. But the Baobab quote is merely the gateway to something even stranger: 365black.com, McDonald’s special website for black people. I promise you this is real.
[This continues our coverage of New York Comic-Con 2009]
While Miley Cyrus’ Asian Eyes were spreading controversy throughout the interwebs, a group of Asian-American comic book authors and illustrators were at New York Comic-Con promoting their upcoming anthology of Asian American superhero stories, Secret Identies. OTI’s writer of the Asian persuasion was there, of course. Not surprisingly, the portrayal of Asian-Americans in pop culture is an issue near and dear to my heart, so I was intrigued to see how their work deals with the oh-so-sensitive subject of race and ethnicity.
According to IMDB’s