MEDIA MONDAY
What have you been watching, listening to, reading?

Royalties
Patrick Halling is a violin player, and he is pissed. Why? Because a few sessions he played *more than 40 years ago* still generate "thousands of dollars" in yearly income, but that gravy train will dry up as soon as the 50-year mark is reached. That is the current European Union limit for "contributing musicians".

As long as recordings are going to cost as much as they do, I think it's great that hard-working non-celebrity musicians get paid for their role. A session player is a skilled professional. But really, who still gets paid for a day's work you put in back in the 1960s?

Weekend Box Office
1. Marley and Me
2. Bedtime Stories
3. Benjamin Button
4. Valkyrie
5. Yes Man

Dramatic License
I saw Frost/Nixon over the weekend. Liked it quite a bit, though not sure if all the Best Picture talk is warranted. Blogs are abuzz over whether the film takes to many liberties with the truth, considering it concerns a very specific historical event that was not all that long ago. I usually give plenty of leeway on things like that. I mean, how do you gauge the "truth" of a monumental development in just 2 hours? If a made-up scene helps convey a larger reality, isn't that just as important in a depiction as the precision of detail? I usually think so, or at least that such a concern complicates the discussion. Still, even I was a little turned off by the couple of things pivotal to the film that I learned just didn't happen in real life. At this point, though, really not sure what I think about if this matters. Do we care about these things?