Today's News: Bad. Bad, Bad, Bad.

Today on NRO

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Nearly 70 years ago, Lieutenant General Patton began his advance toward the German border. George Patton's Summer of 1944.

CHARLES C.W. COOKE: Thomas the Tank Engine is aimed at children, who need to rebel and to play but who also need, and crave, rules. In Defense of Thomas the Tank Engine.

JILLIAN KAY MELCHIOR: Linda Yannone says her positions weren't political — they were simply about "justice." An Ex-Navigator's Story.

MICHAEL AUSLIN: For our own safety and for global stability, we need a 21st-century Air Force. The Air Force's Vital Role.

SLIDESHOW: The Bear Is Loose.

Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty

July 24, 2014

Today's News: Bad. Bad, Bad, Bad.

Let me save you a bunch of time: All the news overseas is bad this morning. Bad, bad, bad.

Breaking news out of Algeria:

An Air Algeria-operated MD83 carrying 116 passengers and crew disappeared en route from Burkina Faso in Africa to Algiers, the aircraft's owner said.

The plane, which took off in the west African country shortly after midnight, was supposed to land at 05:10 a.m. local time, Swiftair, a charter company based in Spain said in a statement today. The plane carried 110 passengers and six crew.

"There has been no contact with the plane until now," Swiftair said. "Emergency teams and the company's personnel are working to figure out what happened and will notify people as further information is available."

Ukraine: "While Kiev made significant advances against rebels in the country's east in recent days, Ukrainian and U.S. officials say Russian weapons are continuing to pour over the border. The escalation in fighting suggests Russian President Vladimir Putin has no intention of dialing back his support for the separatists, denting Western hopes that international attention from the airliner crash would force him to change course."

Here's Mark Adomanis on Russia:

On almost any other issue you can think of, Russian views differ radically from the consensus here in America. Russians have extremely different opinions about the conflict in Syria, viewing the war in that unlucky country not as a brave struggle for freedom but as a chaotic war of all against all. They have different views about the war in Libya, where they see the overthrow of Gaddafi not as a new beginning but as the start of chaos and disorder. They have different views about 9/11, with shockingly large numbers of Russians supporting "alternate" explanations of one of history's most carefully studied and well-documented terrorist attacks. (I was recently asked what "theory" of the attacks I supported only to be told that it was "my opinion" after I noted that al-Qaeda was clearly and obviously responsible.) Even something as seemingly straightforward and non-political as a meteor strike attracted a range of bizarre theories and pseudo-scientific "explanations" like the onset of an alien invasion or the testing of a new American super weapon. These wacky ideas ("the aliens are attacking Siberia!" "The grand masons are responsible for 9/11!") would be extremely funny if they didn't represent such a tragic deficit of reason.

A tiny bit of good news in Israel:

Israel Defense Forces said it hit 35 terror targets overnight. A day earlier, the number was 187.

The Israeli military also reported a sharp fall in the number of rockets fired from Gaza in the early hours of Thursday, although as the day wore on, more rockets were lofted toward Israel, some in the direction of the international airport in Tel Aviv.

The Israeli military said it captured 150 "terrorist suspects" in Gaza Wednesday.

Another tiny bit of good news: "Under pressure from Israeli and American officials, the Federal Aviation Administration lifted a temporary ban on flights by American carriers to Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion Airport late on Wednesday night." The European airlines are reinstating flights.

Now back onto the bad news . . .

France: "Unable to reach the Grand Synagogues of Sarcelles, some of the rioters smashed shop windows in this poor suburb where tens of thousands of Jews live amid many Muslims. They torched two cars and threw a firebomb at a nearby, smaller synagogue, which was only lightly damaged. It was the ninth synagogue attack in France since Israel launched Operation Protective Edge in Gaza two weeks ago."

Belgium: "Police removed a sign from a Belgian cafe saying that Jews were not allowed following a complaint by an anti-Semitism watchdog."

Germany: "The German government reassured Jews living in Germany that they should feel safe in the face of anti-Semitic chants and threats heard at some of the protests against Israel's conflict with Hamas in Gaza, and said such behavior would not be tolerated."

From now on, no Europeans are allowed to brag about how sophisticated they are.

So, let's move on to topics more enjoyable to talk about . . .

Hollywood's Miserable Summer and the Hard Lessons of Storytelling

The phenomenon is not surprising, but the scale is:

Less than six weeks before Labor Day, hopes for recovery at the North American summer box office have evaporated. The season is expected to finish down 15 to 20 percent compared with 2013, the worst year-over-year decline in three decades, and revenue will struggle to crack $4 billion, which hasn't happened in eight years. As a result, analysts predict that the full year is facing a deficit of 4 to 5 percent.

Comparisons in North America are tough, considering revenue hit a record $4.75 billion in summer 2013. It didn't help that Fast & Furious 7 was pushed from July to April 2015 following the death of Paul Walker or that Captain America: The Winter Soldier opened in early April. But even bullish observers are grim. "Moviegoing begets moviegoing, and we have lost our momentum," says Rentrak's Paul Dergarabedian. "People aren't seeing trailers and marketing materials. They still want to go to the movies -- they just want to go to really good movies."

Well, there's your problem, Hollywood! You should try to make really good movies!

The article notes there was no big Pixar movie this summer. Last week Planes: Fire and Rescue hit theaters, a sequel to the first Planes, which was sort-of a sequel to the Cars movies, and the first Pixar movie that really felt like the studio was phoning it in. In fact, now that I'm in the "what movies are okay for the kids" demographic, I can report this summer offered particularly slim pickings.

I'm reading and mostly enjoying former Pixar executive Ed Catmull's autobiography/management book Creativity Inc., about the rise of Pixar. What's kind of remarkable is how Pixar built this unparalleled hit factory, a level of critical raves and runaway box-office success that is the envy of the industry, and yet no other studio in Hollywood has yet successfully emulated their formula. Think about the movies that built Pixar's reputation: the Toy Story series, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Brave . . . even the ones that aren't necessarily their biggest hits, Monsters Inc. and its sequel, Wall-E, Ratatouille, Up -- they're all built to appeal to a wide audience; kids can enjoy them, but there's some sort of humor or subtle references for adults. Most of all, they've got heart. Catmull's book has a fantastic phrase, "the emotional load-bearing sequences of a film."

He offers a great little anecdote about how they ran into trouble early on in the making of Toy Story 2. After telling themselves that the process was going fine, they finally acknowledged they had written a chase story that had little dramatic tension: everybody knew that Woody the cowboy doll was always going to end up going back to Andy, the boy who loved him. It was predictable. "What the film needed were reasons to believe that Woody was facing a real dilemma, and one that viewers could relate to. What it needed, in other words, was drama."

Catmull describes how the creative team beefed up the parts of two toys who had been tossed aside by their owners -- Wheezy the penguin and Jessie the Cowgirl:

With the addition of Wheezy and Jessie, Woody's choice became more fraught: He could stay with someone he loves, knowing that he will eventually be discarded, or he could flee to a world where he could be pampered forever, but without the love he was built for. That is a real choice, a real question. The way the creative team phrased it to each other was: Would you choose to live forever without love? When you can feel the agony of that choice, you have a movie.

While Woody would choose Andy in the end, he would make that choice with the awareness that doing so guaranteed future sadness. "I can't stop Andy from growing up," he tells Stinky Pete the Prospector. "But I wouldn't miss it for the world."

Think about how many movies don't feature a key moment of decision for the protagonist. If the character's decisions aren't hard, where's the consequence? Where's the trade-off?

One aspect of story that Marvel got right in its most recent batch of sequels is that in each one, something big and permanent happens to illustrate the stakes of the story. (SPOILER ALERTS) In Iron Man 3, Tony Stark's home is destroyed, he self-destructs all of his armor suits, and appears to be retired from superheroics. In Thor: The Dark World, Thor's mother dies. In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the international spy agency SHIELD is disbanded. We're used to seeing happy endings, so audiences need to see at some point in the story that an unhappy ending is a possibility. Our heroes can still triumph, but that triumph comes at a certain cost.

ADDENDA: It's National Tequila Day, and perhaps we need some.

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