Scanners

Study: ‘Daily Show’ as substantive as network news

Jim Emerson

Unbelievable? You bet! Here’s your Fox News: See, on Bill O’Reilly’s Nothing But Spin Zone, they simply turned Mark Foley into a Democrat, even though he’s a Republican. Who cares about basic facts? Hey, the Fox slogan doesn’t say anything about being “accurate.”

I’m supposed to be “on vacation” this week, but this was just too good. People are always complaining about studies that simply “prove” the obvious, but in-depth studies and analysis are absolutely needed in a country where majorities of people believe things that are factually wrong (say, that Saddam did indeed have WMDs) or disbelieve things that have long ago been demostrated to be true (say, evolution). So, here comes a journalism study from Indiana University that finds news coverage on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” is as substantive as network news. The only part of this I question is the word “as.” It should be “more.” If you don’t read newspapers and listen to NPR, you might not even understand what’s being satirized on “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report.” If you got most of your news from network evening newscasts, you wouldn’t know what the hell was going on. (See this transcript from a recent Katie Couric CBS Evening Gossipcast, posted on the blog of a prominent conservative.)

No, Stewart and Colbert may claim to be the “fake news,” but they are firmly rooted in the “reality-based community” — and provide more incisive cut-through-the-bull analysis of current events than anything on commercial television. (Only “Frontline” goes deeper — the show that, as at least one TV critic pointed out earlier this week, would have told the powers in the White House and the Pentagon and the intelligence community the things they needed to know, but now claim they didn’t, if they’d only bothered to watch it. It’s on PBS, Condi!)

From the official announcement of the “Daily Show” study, to be published in the Journal of Broadcast and Electronic Media, published by the Broadcast Education Association:

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — Which would you think has more substantive news coverage — traditional broadcast network newscasts or “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart”?

Would you believe the answer is neither?

Julia R. Fox, assistant professor of telecommunications at Indiana University isn’t joking when she says the popular “fake news” program, which last week featured Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf as a guest, is just as substantive as network coverage.

While much has been written in the media about “The Daily Show”‘s impact, Fox’s study is the first scholarly effort to systematically examine how the comedy program compares to traditional television news as sources of political information.

The study, “No Joke: A Comparison of Substance in ‘The Daily Show with Jon Stewart’ and Broadcast Network Television Coverage of the 2004 Presidential Election Campaign,” will be published next summer…

Can you get canned for this?

Jim Emerson

Does this kind of behavior reflect badly on Paramount?

Does it reflect badly on Scientology?

Is it good for the Jews?

Didn’t John Travolta do this very same thing back in 1977?

You tell me. (No, I really don’t care.)

UPDATE: Lunch with David on the non-story: “Have You Picked a Side Yet?”

Joe Dante: One of us! One of us!

Jim Emerson

Director Joe Dante (“Piranha,” “The Howling,” “Gremlins,” “Matinee,” “Homecoming”) talks with Dennis Cozzalio about stories and effects at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, in one of the most enjoyable filmmaker interviews I’ve read in a long time:

… I’m not saying all these new techniques are better. Unfortunately, you can’t go home again, and it is difficult to make films using the old technology. I’ve seen a couple of pictures in Europe when I’ve gone to festivals where they have carefully tried to use the old Rob Bottin-Rick Baker school of do-it-in-the-camera, and it’s often very effective, but those movies often don’t get released anywhere because they’re not CGI, they’re not what people expect. I mean, love it or hate it, CGI is here to stay — the trick is to find a way to work it so that it doesn’t look as sterile and mechanical as by definition it is.

Imagine: Film criticism on TV?

Jim Emerson

I think QT is wrong about Paul Dano (who is, to repurpose his Anderson-Tarantino comparison, Montgomery Clift to Daniel Day Lewis’s Marlon Brando), but this makes me want to see “There Will Be Blood” again, willing to reconsider it afresh. Dano’s character Eli Sunday is supposed to play the smaller, weaker, younger, inferior charismatic performer to the bombastic Daniel Plainview — but both characters are born salesmen in different fields (religion, business), comparably calculating, bitter, egomaniacal and insane. Day Lewis got all the attention (and the Oscar), but he owes half of it to Dano, without whom his performance could not be what it is.

Eyeless in Monument Valley, Part II

Jim Emerson

Above: That gritty Hollywood literalism and/or naturalism: “Off-putting to the contemporary sensibility.”

I was wrong. Last night, just before going to bed, I read Stephen Metcalf’s “Dilettante” column, “The Worst Best Movie: Why on earth did ‘The Searchers’ get canonized?”. This did not make it easy for me to get to sleep, so I dashed off a preliminary response in which I harshly characterized Metcalf’s piece as an “inexcusably stupid essay… about a classic John Ford Western.” But now, re-reading the column in the light of day, I realize that Metcalf was hardly writing about “The Searchers” at all. And nearly every observation he does make about the film itself is cribbed from something Pauline Kael wrote (see more below). He’ll just fling out an irresponsible, non sequitur comment like, “Even its adherents regard ‘The Searchers’ as something of an excruciating necessity,” and let it lie there, flat on the screen, unexplained and unsupported. So, while I stand by my claim that what Metcalf has written is stupid and inexcusable (for the reasons I will delineate below), I don’t think it has much to do with “The Searchers.”

Instead, Metcalf is reacting to his own perception of the film’s reputation (and in part to A.O. Scott’s recent New York Times piece admiring “The Searchers”), using the movie to snidely deride people Mecalf labels “film geeks,” “nerd cultists” and:

… critics whose careers emerged out of the rise of “film studies” as a discrete and self-respecting academic discipline, and the first generation of filmmakers — Scorsese and Schrader, but also Francis Ford Coppola, John Milius, and George Lucas — whose careers began in film school. (The latter are later characterized as “well-credentialed nerds.”) The fault, then, in Metcalf’s mind, is not so much in the film as in those who brazenly take film seriously as an art form. Using “The Searchers” as an anecdotal, ideological bludgeon, Metcalf attempts to attack the impudent and insidious notion that movies are worthy of serious study and artistic interpretation. Holy flashback to Clive James!

Film history from A to Z…

Jim Emerson

… in 7 minutes and 31 seconds: Think of this as the Opening Title Project. It’s called “working title” by cuechamp, and it’s a mesmerizing, rapid-fire montage of movie title cards, in alphabetical order, from silents to the present. It will only take a few minutes, but I guarantee you’ll be flashing on subliminally glimped movie titles (“The Leech Woman”) for days. Look for your favorites. Some of of my lesser-known faves that I’m glad to see acknowledged: “Accident,” “The Brood,” “Miracle Mile,” Herzog’s “Herz aus Glas” (“Heart of Glass” — did I really see that?), the Sherlock Holmes picture “The Woman in Green” … I’m getting dizzy. I’m going to have to go watch it again. I think I’m addicted.

WARNING: If you’re a cinephiliac prone to seizures, procede with caution!

(tip: Dennis)

Mr. Cheney Explains It All For You

Jim Emerson

I’m still on vacation. Back Thursday with some thoughts on Martin Scorsese, the late Tony Wilson and Merv Griffin, Michelangelo Antonioni (surprise!), video games, the Meaning of Life, and more. In the meantime, here’s what in any rational world would be a shocking clip (if the country wasn’t already so jaded by nearly seven years of malfeasance), from a man with (evidently) unimpeachable integrity:

And the best Oscar nomination goes to…

Jim Emerson

Skip Lievsay, sound genius. (photo: Mix Online)

… Skip Lievsay, Craig Berkey, Greg Orloff and Peter Kurland — and un-nominated co-conspirator, Carter Burwell — for sound in “No Country for Old Men”! (See below.)

Meanwhile, I’m happy to see several mildly surprising nominations: Viggo Mortensen for “Eastern Promises”; Saoirse Ronan for “Atonement”; Hal Holbrook for “Into the Wild”; “Persepolis” for animated feature. No surprise, and absolutely proper: Roger Deakins for shooting both “No Country for Old Men” and “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” (though I hope they don’t cancel each other out). But nothing for “Zodiac”? At the very least it should have received a nomination for its amazing visual effects. But unless you’ve seen the Director’s Cut DVD (or some Digital Domain clips on YouTube) you probably wouldn’t have known they were effects. That’s how good they are.

Looking at the odds, “Atonement” is an unlikely best picture because its director (Joe Wright) wasn’t nominated. “Michael Clayton” and “Juno” lack an editing nomination, which (statistically speaking) is are crucial to winning the top prize. On the other hand, “Michael Clayton” is honored in three acting categories, for George Clooney, Tom Wilkinson and Tilda Swinton — and guess which branch of the Academy is the biggest? “No Country for Old Men” didn’t claim a lead acting slot, perhaps because it’s an ensemble piece. If you go strictly by statistically significant nominations, only “There Will Be Blood” has ’em all — an old-fashioned Hollywood epic built around a big performance (by a previous Oscar winner). But will its unremittingly bleak nihilism (and the bizarre ending that alienated even some admirers) prove too bitter for Academy voters? I dunno.

I just want to take a moment here to acknowledge my favorite nomination. (This is where I congratulate myself on my foresight — hey, I predicted Tom Wilkinson, too — even though I’m a lousy Oscar guesser.) Back in September when I first saw “No Country for Old Men” in September, I wrote:

Holy theology! Holy film!

Jim Emerson

View image A non-god’s-eye-view from the final sequence of Michelangelo Antonioni’s “L’Eclisse.”

In the discussion about my hypothetical Athiest Film Festival (before the deaths of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni), I was trying to get at the difference I see between Bergman’s theological sensibility (seeing/defining the world in terms of man’s relationship with god, even if that relationship involves god’s silence, indifference, death or nonexistence) and a view in which god is not only not a default position, but not even a question. This, I think, is closer to Antonioni’s aesthetic and philosophical outlook, at least as far as his films express it.

There’s an excellent, and long overdue, article in the New York Times Magazine today (“The Politics of God”), which is primarily about how the West has (catastrophically?) failed to comprehend that, even in modern times, “theological ideas still stir up messianic passions, leaving societies in ruin. We had assumed this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, that fanaticism was dead. We were wrong.”

The piece, by Columbia University humanities Professor Mark Lilla, is adapted from his upcoming book “The Stillborn God: Religion Politics and the Modern West,” but the passage that got me thinking about the Atheist Film Festival (and the “Banana as Atheist’s Nightmare”) again was this one:

Theology is, after all, a set of reasons people give themselves for the way things are and the way they ought to be….

Imagine human beings who first become aware of themselves in a world not of their own making. Their world has unknown origins and behaves in a regular fashion, so they wonder why that is. They know that the things they themselves fashion behave in a predictable manner because they conceive and construct them with some end in mind. They stretch the bow, the arrow flies; that is why they were made. So, by analogy, it is not difficult for them to assume that the cosmic order was constructed for a purpose, reflecting its maker’s will. By following this analogy, they begin to have ideas about that maker, about his intentions and therefore about his personality.

In taking these few short steps, the human mind finds itself confronted with a picture, a theological image in which God, man and world form a divine nexus. Believers have reasons for thinking that they live in this nexus, just as they have reasons for assuming that it offers guidance for political life. But how that guidance is to be understood, and whether believers think it is authoritative, will depend on how they imagine God. If God is thought to be passive, a silent force like the sky, nothing in particular may follow. He is a hypothesis we can do without. But if we take seriously the thought that God is a person with intentions, and that the cosmic order is a result of those intentions, then a great deal can follow. The intentions of such a God reveal something man cannot fully know on his own. This revelation then becomes the source of his authority, over nature and over us, and we have no choice but to obey him and see that his plans are carried out on earth….

My question is: By what authority does anyone claim to know, and be able to interpret, the intentions of such a God? It’s always puzzled me how many leaps of faith a person has to take before even getting to the idea of a deity… which may be one reason why, if I had to compare, I’d have to say Antonioni’s films do speak to me more deeply and personally than Bergman’s.

(Of course, when it comes to movies, you can usually just substitute the term “auteur” for “God” in that quotation above.)

See Martin Scorsese’s eloquent appreciation of Antonioni for more…

Blu-ray: Higher fidelity to what?

Jim Emerson

The announcement of a pristine, digitally enhanced Blu-ray release of Edgar G. Uhlmer’s grimy 1945 noir “Detour” got me thinking in granular terms…

The first CD I ever bought was Ennio Morricone’s soundtrack to Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in America.” I had hundreds (thousands?) of LPs by that time, but it was the first thing I got on CD — because of the dynamic range of the music and the recording, and the really quiet passages that always showed off the flaws in the vinyl pressing (rumble, ticks and pops from imperfections, static, scratches, dirt, etc.), no matter how careful you were with the record. There was a vinyl shortage in the 1970s, and most American records sounded terrible. Vinyl was mixed with cheaper plastics and additives (don’t get me started on RCA Dynagroove), LPs got thinner and less uniformly flat, contaminants (like bits of label from recycled records) got pressed right into the grooves… I got used to the idea that I’d have to take back one out of every three or four records I bought for audible — and often visible — defects.

What is up with that Seinfeld guy?

Jim Emerson

Is this guy is incredibly depressing, or what?

So, what was the deal with Jerry Seinfeld at the Oscars, smoothly delivering a chunk of some old act before presenting the documentary feature award? Who does this guy think he is, and why was he invited? What does he have to do with films or documentaries, besides having once starred in a feature-length advertisement for himself (and American Express commercials before Ellen DeGeneres)? Was he auditioning to be Oscar host next year, hoping to follow in the footsteps of Johnny Carson or something? What is up with that? Doesn’t he have enough money and get enough attention? Next year will they ask Michael Richards to comically complain about how the subtitles, and the amount of dermal melanin in the actors, make him uninterested in seeing some or all of the Best Foreign Language Film nominees? Ho-ho!

John Sinno, the Seattle-based Oscar-nominated director of “Iraq in Fragments,” has written an open letter to the Academy about Seinfeld’s snide, extended putdown of docs at this year’s Oscars:

I had the great fortune of attending the 79th Academy Awards following my nomination as producer for a film in the Best Documentary Feature category. At the Awards ceremony, most categories featured an introduction that glorified the filmmakers’ craft and the role it plays for the film audience and industry. But when comedian Jerry Seinfeld introduced the award for Best Documentary Feature, he began by referring to a documentary that features himself as a subject, then proceeded to poke fun at it by saying it won no awards and made no money. He then revealed his love of documentaries, as they have a very “real” quality, while making a comically sour face. This less-than-flattering beginning was followed by a lengthy digression that had nothing whatsoever to do with documentary films. The clincher, however, came when he wrapped up his introduction by calling all five nominated films “incredibly depressing!”

While I appreciate the role of humor in our lives, Jerry Seinfeld’s remarks were made at the expense of thousands of documentary filmmakers and the entire documentary genre. Obviously we make films not for awards or money, although we are glad if we are fortunate enough to receive them. The important thing is to tell stories, whether of people who have been damaged by war, of humankind’s reckless attitude toward nature and the environment, or even of the lives and habits of penguins. With his lengthy, dismissive and digressive introduction, Jerry Seinfeld had no time left for any individual description of the five nominated films. And by labeling the documentaries “incredibly depressing,” he indirectly told millions of viewers not to bother seeing them because they’re nothing but downers. He wasted a wonderful opportunity to excite viewers about the nominated films and about the documentary genre in general.

To have a presenter introduce a category with such disrespect for the nominees and their work is counter to the principles the Academy was founded upon. To be nominated for an Academy Award is one of the highest honors our peers can give us, and to have the films dismissed in such an offhand fashion was deeply insulting. The Academy owes all documentary filmmakers an apology….

I have to agree with Sinno. This wasn’t like Chris Rock taking a gratuitous swipe at Jude Law (only to be “corrected” by the utterly humorless and pompous Sean Penn). Sure, Seinfeld was doing his obnoxious putz routine, playing the Philistine. His schtick was slick, and his jokes (though hackneyed and predictable) pandered to the prejudices of the crowd in the room and the general audience watching on TV. But his bit was, no question, lengthy and dismissive — in a year when the documentary nominees were, for the most part, better movies than those in the Best Picture category. The docs deserved so much better.

Sinno’s letter continues after the jump…

An American Carol: Anybody seen it?

Jim Emerson

“All the really good suicide bombers are gone,” laments a trio of bumbling Afghan terrorists early on in “An American Carol,” and that’s about the high-water mark for humor in this jaw-droppingly awful political comedy from veteran spoofer David Zucker.

— Steven Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer

After “An American Carol” opened in some cities last week, RogerEbert.com received a few insinuating inquiries from readers asking why we did not publish a review of the film , a biographical musical celebration of the beloved wide-mouthed Broadway star of “Hello, Dolly!”. The comedy, directed and co-written by David Zucker (“Airplane!”), is a conservative re-telling of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol, with a fat, unscrupulous, bespectacled, baseball-capped, America-hating documentarian named Michael Malone (played by the late Chris Farley’s brother Kevin) as the Scrooge figure. Our correspondents suggested that, because the movie’s politics reportedly tilted to the right, perhaps the liberal falafel-loving media establishment was deliberately ignoring it. (Meanwhile, the conservative corporate media establishment was evidently off celebrating a lonely cinematic triumph in a quiet place.)

Oddly, we did not receive a single comment or e-mail asking why we did not carry a review of “Beverly Hills Chihuahua,” the Number One Movie of last weekend, but the reasons are the same: neither “An American Carol” nor “BHC” were screened for critics. That is usually the studios’ way of ensuring that reviews do not appear on opening day. If any critic-type person still wants to cover it, he or she can simply buy a ticket to a show on Friday or Saturday and file a notice over the weekend.

RottenTomatoes lists 65 reviews for “Beverly Hills Chihuahua” (27 positive), 119 for “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist” (85 positive), and 28 for “An American Carol” (4 positive), all of which opened the same day.

To help fill in the critical information gap, are some excerpts from the few higher-profile “American Carol” reviews I could find, some of which are kind of funny. The first one is from a review RT.com categorizes as “fresh”:

Personal note: Off to Toronto!

Jim Emerson

Tomorrow (Wednesday) I hit the air for the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival. I can’t believe how much stuff I miss in Seattle simply because of busyness, laziness and/or inertia. But in Toronto I can go full-throttle (watching, talking, eating, blogging — OK, I’m getting tired already), concentrating completely on the movies at hand. My customary Seattle-Toronto companions are Dave McCoy, Kathleen Murphy and Richard T. Jameson — and this year I plan to catch up with some of my fellow bloggers, such as Girish Shambu and Andy Horbal (whom I’ve never met). And Roger’s going to be back again!!! (Meanwhile, Dennis, I’ve sent you something else to keep you occupied and out of trouble while we’re gone. Wish you could join us.)

For now, I’ve got an earworm that just won’t quit: “Oh, Canada!”

Sudden impact

Jim Emerson

View image A stunning shot from “The Bourne Supremacy” that does preserve spacial integrity: It begins from the inside of the car, looking out the rear window.

View image A whip-pan to driver Bourne puts us in the passenger seat.

“[‘The Bourne Ultimatum’] has been described as bare-bones but it’s actually quite flashy. All the crashing zooms (accompanied by whams on the soundtrack), jittery shots, drifting framings, uncompleted pans, freeze-frame flashbacks, and other extroverted devices call attention to themselves.”

— David Bordwell

View image A beautiful example of indirection: Bourne is still looking in the rear-view mirror at the cop cars that are chasing him. His attention is not focused on the road ahead of him — or the side-street visible to us out his driver’s side window, as he passes through the intersection.

View image The police car is already trying to brake/swerve to avoid collision, but Bourne’s attention is still behind him.

It is possible that there are four non-moving-camera shots in “The Bourne Ultimatum.” That’s how many I thought I saw, anyway. I wasn’t taking notes, but I believe the only shots that weren’t shaking, dollying, zooming, tilting, panning, refocusing or some combination of all those things are: two consecutive shots as Bourne breaks into Daniels’ CIA office in Madrid; a high-angle flashback image of Bourne sitting in a chair in The Room; a shot from behind the desk of a committee in a hearing room. There could be a few more tripod (or non-telephoto, carefully hand-held) shots — a brief establishing shot of Turin (which may have been taken from a hovering helicopter), a really quick interior or two during a chase through some buildings in Tangiers, a couple dark underwater night shots where there are no fixed visual bearings — but that’s out of approximately 3,200 shots (by David Bordwell’s count) in a 105-minute movie. They really stood out. Bordwell determined the average shot length in the film to be about 2 seconds, and the stationary shots I couldn’t help but notice were probably in the one- to three-second range.

View image Bourne turns his head away to look back. He doesn’t see what’s coming, though we do, and that makes it feel all the more suspenseful and shocking — all in less than a second.

View image Crash. This is a hand-held shot (lasting only 2-3 seconds), but it feels logical and natural, like the head-motion of a passenger looking back and then to the side at the driver, which magnifies the impact.

I sat in the third row, as usual, in a fairly big auditorium at Seattle’s Oak Tree Cinemas (maybe 500-600 seats?), and I found Paul Greengrass’s style in this film to be distracting almost to the point of self-parody. I was a big fan of “Bloody Sunday” and “Bourne Supremacy,” but this one (and “United 93”) didn’t impress me as much. “Supremacy,” I thought, was stronger because it was better at establishing your (and the characters’) bearings. “Ultimatum” made my eyes hurt a little, but I didn’t get nauseous — as some reportedly have. I hung around and listened to ticket-buyers exiting the theater, and while I overheard a couple of say the movie had made them extremely “nervous” and “edgy” (and that’s by no means a negative reaction to a thriller), I didn’t hear anybody complain that they felt like throwing up.

My problem with the film was that the “look-at-me!” technique kept whiplashing me right out of the picture. This kind of camerawork, with its rapid and disorienting glimpses of abstract motion, is often effective during a chase or an action sequence, but Greenglass chose to shoot every moment in the picture this way, including simple dialog scenes around a desk or a table in a cafe. (The repeated use of the back-of-the-head eclipsing half a person’s face in close-up, for no particular reason, was so silly it made me laugh inappropriately.)

People’s heads, of course, are not usually perfectly steady, but we’re not conscious of every single move our eyeballs make, either. If we were, well, we’d probably puke a lot more often. The exceedingly self-conscious camerawork in “Bourne Ultimatum” didn’t feel organic or (as Peter Debruge calls it, “immersive”) to me; it actually felt studied, like a formal strategy that was simply being pursued to the point where it became counter-effective. Maybe that’s in part because of what I’d already read about the movie — and also because of my customary vantage in the third row, I don’t know.

Ben Stein: Worst Person of the Year

Jim Emerson

Ben Stein, whose spectacularly idiotic “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” uses Nazi concentration camps as scenic backdrops for a nonsensical embrace of Intelligent Design, is nominated for a Malkin Award at Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish, for saying the following in an interview aired on the Trinity Broadcasting Network:

When we just saw that man, I think it was Mr. Myers [i.e. biologist P.Z. Myers], talking about how great scientists were, I was thinking to myself the last time any of my relatives saw scientists telling them what to do they were telling them to go to the showers to get gassed … that was horrifying beyond words, and that’s where science — in my opinion, this is just an opinion — that’s where science leads you… Love of God and compassion and empathy leads you to a very glorious place, and science leads you to killing people.

Right. Just an opinion he picked up somewhere. I mean, when you think about it, what have those murderous scientists (Darwinists!) done about the leading causes of death in the world before the mid-20th Century: tuberculosis, cholera, influenza, pneumonia… ?

The Malkin Award, named after the blogger Michelle Malkin, is given annually for “shrill, hyperbolic, divisive and intemperate right-wing rhetoric. A[–] C[——] is ineligible — to give others a chance.” You can vote for Stein, or one of his ignominious fellow nominees, here.

But, really, check that reasoning: God Love = Compassion therefore Science = Murder. That’s gotta win some sort of a prize.

Above: Ben Stein on location at Dachau.

UPDATE: He won! And the scientist he was hating on won the equally nasty [Michael] Moore Award.

The return of ‘Bloody Mary’

Jim Emerson

View image: “Only women bleed, only women bleed…” — Alice Cooper (1975)

View image: The Super Best Friends in 2001.

Readers responding to the news that the banned “South Park” episode “Trapped in the Closet” is scheduled (again) for its first repeat showing since November of 2005 have also tipped me off (in Comments — thanks, DVC) that the “Super Best Friends” episode was rebroadcast this week, and the world failed to end. In this 2001 show, various religious figures (including Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, Joseph Smith, Krishna, Moses and Lao Tsu) were depicted as superheroes who team up to fight the evil David Blaine, except for Buddha who doesn’t believe in evil. According to Wikipedia, it was also repeated in syndication in April 2006 — despite Comedy Central apparently refusing to show a cartoon depiction of Muhammad in “Cartoon Wars, Part II,” which premiered the same month. (Sorry, Danish cartoonists. Next season I would like to see Trey and Matt actually incorporate those Muhammad cartoons into the show: “Cartoon Wars, Part III”?) And the “Bloody Mary” episode, which was withheld from re-airing after protests from the Catholic League (see “Vile ‘South Park’ Episode Pulled,” the League’s own take on the matter) is now scheduled for repeat August 2. C’mon folks, this is a show that began as a cartoon Christmas card about Jesus duking it out with Santa. Could the other kind of “market pressures” (i.e., audiences that actually want to see these shows — and will endure the ads that accompany them as the price of doing so, unless they have DVRs and can zip through them) emerge triumphant at last? Hail, freedom!