I’m sure you’ve all heard of the movie Saved, from several years ago (here’s a good, thoughtful review from Critique).  Well, Saved is now Saved: the Musical.  Read a review here, and listen to clips of some of the “praise music” written for the film, along with a slideshow of scenes, here.

For most of Western Civilization, thinkers and artists and writers have known that the imagination is a powerful legislator of human behavior, and that what people read and watch and hear - even when what they’re reading and watching and hearing is a fiction - has some kind of bearing on how the reader and seer and hearer understands the real world.  That’s why Plato didn’t want people watching too much tragedy in the amphitheater.  Yet, for the last fifty years or so, cultural critics have been essentially saying that we can watch and see and hear music and literature and art without any real negative effect.  Hence, it’s okay to play video games where you mutilate people.  But - alas! - researchers have breaking news that, indeed, this might be a bad thing.

Jeremy Bailenson, head of the [Virtual Human Interaction Lab] and an assistant professor of communication at Stanford, studies the way self-perception affects behavior. No surprise that what we think about ourselves affects the confidence with which we approach the world. What is a surprise is that this applies in the virtual world too […] What’s more, Bailenson’s research suggests that the qualities you acquire online - whether it’s confidence or insecurity - can spill over and change your conduct in the real world, often without your awareness.

The article is about one writer’s own experience with Second Life, which some of you may know well.  The point is, what you put in your head comes out through your mouth and your hands.  Be careful.  This doesn’t mean you can’t read about violence - see The Bible - but it does mean you should be careful what kind of imaginative experiences you let yourself have.  Fill up with rich, human experiences, not cheap, inhuman ones.

I live in Savannah, Georgia, home to America’s 2nd-largest (behind New York City) and oldest (184 years) St. Patrick’s Day Parade in America.  Because the real St. Paddy’s happens this Monday, during Holy Week, Savannahians are celebrating it today.  Since I work in downtown Savannah, this means I don’t have to go to work today.  It’d be impossible to drive to work through all that beer without drinking some of it.  We’re not celebrating, though.  We’re going to the nearest zoo, two hours down the coast, so my daughter can see non-Irish tigers wearing buttons that say “Kiss me, I’m hungry and in captivity.”  So, here’s a Friday question.  If you had today off, like me, what would you do with it?

On last weekend’s Saturday Night Live, the first live show in 16 weeks, the cast lampooned the press’s fawning treatment of Barack Obama, where, in a faux debate, the reporters asked Hillary (Amy Poehler) the tough questions and asked Obama (Fred Armisen) if he felt comfortable and could they get him anything.  Last night’s debate was an imitation of that fawning treatment, even though Clinton pointed it out.

Mrs. Clinton wanted the world to understand that the press is tougher on her than on Barack Obama. And she made her case by citing a sketch on last week’s “Saturday Night Live” that showed mock debate moderators grilling her stand-in, Ms. Poehler, but fawning over the Obama character. “Well, can I just point out that in the last several debates, I seem to get the first question all the time,” Mrs. Clinton said. “I don’t mind, you know, I’ll be happy to field them. But I do find it curious. And if anybody saw ‘Saturday Night Live,’ maybe we should ask Barack if he’s comfortable and needs another pillow.” (The pillow was her own flourish; on the show, the actors playing journalists asked the faux Obama if he was comfortable.)

Perhaps he really is a Jedi.

With the film world absorbed in Sundance and the announcement of Oscar nominees, news has sort of slipped by that filmmaker Oliver Stone will be directing a biopic on the life of . . . the president.

Stone’s projected release date — around the 2008 election — seems to anticipate a return to days when he and his movies perhaps wielded greater influence. (And may also suggest a November surprise in the works?) His last two major pictures, “Alexander” and “World Trade Center,” fizzled out, depending on the critic, somewhere between flops and mediocrity.

Josh Brolin, costar in the Coen brothers’ buzzed-about “No Country for Old Men,” is Stone’s pick to portray George Bush. Having directed “JFK,” “Born on the Fourth of July” (for which he won a best-director Oscar), “Platoon” (for which he won another) and “Nixon,” Stone is seasoned in both political and controversial topics, and he promises that “Bush” — the name chosen over the other working titles, including “Misunderestimated” — won’t disappoint. It will “contain surprises for Bush supporters and his detractors,” he told Variety.

Still, no one’s quite sure how to evaluate Stone’s pledge to a “fair, true portrait” in light of his liberal, pro-Hugo Chavez, pro-Fidel Castro, often conspiracy-laced politics. Bloggers have kept the mood light with snarky japes like “Spoiler revealed: W was the second gunman on the grassy knoll.”

Stone says his interest in the biopic comes out of a singular, if slightly ahistorical, question: “How did Bush go from being an alcoholic bum to the most powerful figure in the world?” Finding and answering this is, he said, “Frank Capra territory on one hand,” but also a job that will lead him into “the demons in [Bush’s] private life, his bouts with his dad and his conversion to Christianity, which explains a lot of where he is coming from . . . [like] his belief that God personally chose him to be president of the United States.”

“Conversion”? Contra Stone, Bush was raised in the East Coast Episcopalianism of his parents (ironically, ditto the upbringing of the now-Buddhist Stone), before moving over to the United Methodist Church after he met Laura. Perhaps confusing Stone by his evangelical term, Bush describes his resulting God epiphany — when he realized he had to stop drinking heavily and recalibrated his life — as being “born again.” Stone’s current grasp of his subject may not bode well for a “fair, true portrait.”

Many of you know that, three months ago, the band Radiohead released an album as a digital download, inviting fans to pay for it whatever they wanted to pay.  The online digital release was three months in advance of the hard copy album launch, and everybody said, “Okay, Radiohead, you proved your point and gave the music away.  But nobody’s going to buy your actual album when it comes out in stores and people have to pay for it.  And then you’ll be poor and miserable.”  But people are paying for it.

In a twist for the music industry’s digital revolution, “In Rainbows,” the new Radiohead album that attracted wide attention when it was made available three months ago as a digital download for whatever price fans chose to pay, ranked as the top-selling album in the country this week after the CD version hit record shops and other retailers.

In other words, Radiohead gave the record away online, but people were still willing to buy an actual hard copy of the album in the store, too (and not just people without CD-burning capability).  Interesting.

So, for discussion: I used to be severely against downloading and file-sharing and anything that seemed to be stealing intellectual content, but those were in my heady days of studying philosophy as an undergraduate, when I was a self-righteous moral bandit, trolling the crises of culture to point to how someone was ruining Western Civilization.  Back in the 1990s, the idea of illegal downloading seemed more wrong than it is now.  Why is that?  And I think it’s not just me. 

World on the Web remembers influential entertainers and writers who passed away in 2007.

Ike Turner, 76, Dec. 12 | One of rock’s critical architects, a bandleader, record producer and musician.

Ingmar Bergman, 89, July 30 | internationally acclaimed Swedish director of more than 50 films (”Smiles of a Summer Night,” “The Seventh Seal”).

Art Buchwald, 81, Jan. 17 | humorist and renowned syndicated columnist for The Washington Post.

Deborah Kerr, 86, Oct. 16 | actress perhaps best remembered for her kiss with Burt Lancaster as waves crashed over them on a Hawaiian beach in the wartime drama “From Here to Eternity.”

Madeleine L’Engle, 88, Sept. 6 | author whose novel “A Wrinkle in Time” has been enjoyed by generations of schoolchildren and adults since the 1960s.

Luciano Pavarotti, 71, Sept. 6 | booming Italian “king of the high C’s” tenor, the most famous opera singer in the world whose recordings sold more than 100 million albums.

Anna Nicole Smith, 39, Feb. 8 | voluptuous former Playboy centerfold who married an octogenarian billionaire and waged a legal battle for his fortune all the way to the Supreme Court.

Jane Wyman, 90, Sept. 10 | actress who won an Oscar for her role as a deaf rape victim in the film “Johnny Belinda” but best remembered as the power-mad winery owner in TV’s “Falcon Crest” 1981-1990 and as Ronald Reagan’s first wife.

Kurt Vonnegut, 84, April 11 | best-selling satirical novelist and social critic whose works dripped with cynicism and dark humor (”Slaughterhouse-Five”).

Mstislav Rostropovich, 80, April 27 | master cellist, conductor, and music director of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C., 1977-1994, who championed artistic freedom and human rights in his Soviet homeland during the last decades of the Cold War.Norman Mailer, 84, Nov. 10 | contentious, hard-living Pulitzer Prize-winning author (”The Armies of the Night,” “The Executioner’s Song” “The Naked and the Dead”) and cofounder of The Village Voice newspaper in New York.

Jim Nesbitt, 75, Nov. 29 | country music songwriter (”Looking for More in ‘64″) and reputed “King of Country Comedy” in the 1960s.

Evel Knievel, 69, Nov. 30 | soaring motorcycle daredevil whose feats (flight across 13 buses) and failures (rocket-powered Snake River Canyon crash) made him an international icon in the 1970s.

Johnny Hart, 76, April 7 | cartoonist, creator of the comic strip, B.C., who often wove Christian themes into his work.

Merv Griffin, 82, Aug. 12 | singer, actor, and talk show host who made his fortune inventing and producing the “Jeopardy” and “Wheel of Fortune” TV game shows.

Compiled by Ed Plowman.

We’ve blogged before about the conservative-message-in-wolf’s clothing couched in films like 40-Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up.  These movies (like most comedies, actually) celebrate adulthood, maturity, responsibility, etc., but only by illustrating how difficult are those concepts to integrate into a life. 

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I don’t mean to beat the dying horse called The Golden Compass - for example, I’m pretty sure you won’t be possessed by Legion if you actually see it - but the movie does seem to provide a nice window onto the new explicity of religion and theology in the American consciousness. 

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Jeffrey Shaffer says, “Life doesn’t have to be R-rated.”  He cites the ubiquity of profanity in film, on TV, in politics, you name it:

I hope this doesn’t sound like the ranting of an uptight geezer. It just seems to me that being courteous in public makes the everyday world easier to deal with. Good manners are not a form of elitism. And when I meet people who curse casually, I wonder if they’re being crude as a form of rebellion against authority or because it’s easier than building a large vocabulary?

This is an old argument, but that doesn’t make him wrong.  The only solution is for parents to act like adults and enforce civility in the home.  The FCC has nothing on dad.