In LA

Sleeper Cell was nominated for a Golden Globe Award by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. I hope this will help the show get picked up for another season, and if so I hope Henri Lubatti’s character Ilija will survive season 1 and be an important part of season 2.

One of the fun things about Sleeper Cell so far has been that comparing the work these would-be terrorists do to the sort of work us non-terrorists do every day. Each of the cell members has strengths, skills, and weaknesses, and their leader Farik functions as a manager, praising, criticizing, motivating, and coordinating their work. Because they all have to work together Farik has had to swallow his disgust at some of the actions and opinions of members of his cell, and it has been fun to watch Oded Fehr emote these conflicted feelings as his character tries to keep everything moving forward. Ilija, as the most competent and serious cell member, with the biggest axe to grind, seems to spend a lot of time glaring at his fellow cell members when they don’t measure up. It’d be fun to see his character become more fleshed-out and have to learn some management skills — glaring at coworkers only goes so far as a motivating force. It’s just a thought. I’m very curious what they’ll do with any of the cell members who survive this season.

There’s some interesting discussions between Muslims on the net about Sleeper Cell. One of the common threads is over positive and negative portrayals of Islam.

I’ve been watching the show with some Persian friends (Jewish and Muslim), and we’ve had some small discussions, but unfortunately it’s late enough when each episode ends that we’re all too tired to spend much energy chatting. There is some concern that portraying identifiably Muslim terrorists on TV along with the message that they could be your “Friends. Neighbors. Husbands.” is already feeding American fears that don’t need additional feeding. But beyond that issue, the show is thematically more complex on this issue in particular than the average Hollywood production.

We all really liked episode 4, which is the least patronizing positive portrayal of Islam I’ve ever seen in the mainstream media. Many Hollywood movies and shows have thrown in a minor Muslim good guy to intone that “Islam is a religion of peace” (amusingly, Grant Heslov, who plays a terrorist in Sleeper Cell had that token role as an Arab-American computer geek in the James Cameron film True Lies). But in episode 4 of Sleeper Cell, entitled “Scholar”, the character of a Yemeni scholar bearing a peaceful message, and the difference between the extremists’ theology and that of more mainstream Islam, is not treated a token or minor message but is the episode’s central focus, and it is fascinating. A ton of Muslim scholars have condemned terrorism, and it is my impression that this is not something that seems to get nearly as much play on American TV as the opposite message, in part because it’s not a very entertaining message — the traditionally polarized good-and-evil shows and movies need their villains. A shout out to the episode’s writer Kamran Pasha is in order for making this all work so well in episode 4.

Sleeper Cell is definitely designed to entertain, hence the doses of violence and sex riddling each episode while the day-to-day operations of a real sleeper cell would probably be a bit more banal. But the show is also crafted with more political sophistication than shows like 24 (I mean this not as a put-down of 24– I really liked season one and look forward to catching up on the rest of it).

This is a nice photostory about a few benches in Tiananmen square and the people who use them.

Comcast was running a special, and I subscribed to be able to watch the Showtime series Sleeper Cell, and in HD no less. The show looks spectacular in HD, but the ads for it and other Showtimes series that are played before and after it in SD (standard definition) look terrible.

I’ve calibrated the black level of my display by eye to the Showtime HD material (I don’t know of a way to get the motorola cable box/dvr to output suitable test patterns). When Showtime plays its ads in SD the black levels are much higher than those of the HD video. Maybe they’re broadcasting HD at 0 IRE and SD at the U.S. standard of 7.5 IRE? That’s a possible cause of the problem, although the difference looks much worse than that. The SD stuff just looks like foggy crud.

I was just reading up on Sammy Davis Jr., and thought it was interesting that when he married Swedish actress and melanin-deficient woman May Britt in 1960, interracial marriages were against the law in 31 US States. It wasn’t until the 1967 case of Loving v. Virginia that the US Supreme Court ruled such laws unconstitutional. That is just insanely recent.

It would be nice to relax and think that racism is a problem of the past. I’ve run into people of my generation who actually think the playing field is level in this country. How tenable is that fantasy when there were such clearly racist laws in place as recently as 1967. Not very.

A digression: Race is such a disputed concept that it’s difficult to even type related words without feeling a little odd. What exactly constitutes race and makes the term “interracial” possible? –would the pairing of a Lithuanian and a Pole seem interracial to people in that region? How about matching up someone from the Carribean and someone from Uganda? To me, race is still more than meaningless but less than clear. I just wanted to acknowledge that before going ahead and using the term “interracial” once again.

Here’s a nice interactive map that shows the legal status of interracial marriage in each US State over the last couple hundred years. Neato. Scary.

I wonder how the Lovings are doing?