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Surviving Jack (2014)
More That 70's Show than $#*! My Dad Says
NOTE: This review is based solely on the pilot episode.
The basic formula for the show seems to be that you take the wistful 'looking backwards at my youth' narrator from 60's nostalgia show The Wonder Years and the family that was at the center of That 70's Show, and then set them down in the 1990's with a Top 20 period soundtrack. Then you cast Christopher Meloni (Law & Order: SVU and Oz) as Red Forman and force him to step up his parenting of his son (the narrator) and daughter while his wife goes to law school.
Surviving Jack is based on the book, I Suck at Girls, by Justin Halpern, so the titular Jack wasn't actually inspired by the character Kurtwood Smith (currently starring in Resurrection) played on That 70's Show. Of course, that wouldn't have been a bad thing, given that he was one of the best things about the show and was woefully underutilized in the early seasons. No, the character of Jack Dunlevy is based on the real life Samuel Halpern, M.D., who is Justin Halpern's father.
This is the second time that the relationship between Justin Halpern and his father has been adapted for the small screen. $#*! My Dad Says cast William Shatner (Star Trek and Boston Legal) as the father, and depicted the time when the adult Halpern was forced to move back into his father's home. Surviving Jack focuses on Halpern's high school years.
As Frankie Dunlevy, the Topher Grace role, Connor Buckley is appealing, but as with $#*! My Dad Says, it's really the father's show. Meloni's turn as Jack is closer to Smith's deadpan than Shatner's over the top hamminess, and that bodes well for the series. The writing is crisp and pretty funny. The supporting roles are all played adequately, with Rachael Harris doing an excellent job as the mother. It looks good so far, and I'm planning to watch again next week.
Cool It (2010)
A Rational Approach to a Divisive Issue
Bjørn Lomborg is an environmentalist and an economist. He accepts without reservation that global warming is occurring and that it is caused by human activity, but he makes a critical examination of the methods by which we're attempting to deal with the problem. In other words, he disagrees with those who would say that climate change is not a real and serious problem, but he is skeptical of the primary strategies to combat the problem which have been advanced by mainstream environmentalists.
He's become controversial because he's asking questions of fellow environmentalists which they would rather not have to answer.
Are climate change activists engaging in alarmist scare tactics and exaggerating the dangers involved in an attempt to motivate through fear? If we wish to invest in attempts to improve the lives of those who are most disadvantaged, what is the relative benefit of spending on climate compared to other humanitarian endeavors?
Are attempts to artificially raise the price of fossil fuels likely to be successful at lowering temperatures? Will they be sufficiently effective to justify the costs in terms of slowed economic growth and lost increases in the standard of living?
Lomborg seems to believe that the most reasonable approach is a combination of:
>engage in many relatively unobtrusive small scale activities to combat global warming in the short term while contributing more to efforts to promote global health and education
>employ geo-engineering and adaptation in the medium term to minimize the disruption of temperature increases
>make large immediate increases in funding for research and development of renewable energy and more sophisticated nuclear reactors so that in the long term alternative energy will not be more costly than fossil fuels
His arguments about what the rational approach (lacking the unreflective dogmatism of both the deniers and the alarmists) is to finding the best future for the global population certainly merit the time it takes to view this film.