WE CAN BE HEROES JUST FOR ONE DAY: Part of the plan for Heroes this season is that the show will wrap up early and end the year with a spinoff called Heroes: Origins, which will be an anthology-type show, allowing a group of writers and directors to develop their own Heroes, who may be added to the main show as regulars or even become their own spinoffs. Half the writer/directors have now been announced, apparently, and they include:

• Eli Roth (Hostel, Cabin Fever)
• Kevin Smith
• John August (Charlie's Angels, Big Fish, Charlie & The Chocolate Factory)
• Michael Dougherty (co-writer of Superman Returns and X2)

Any of these intrigue you?

AIDS, CRACK, BERNIE GOETZ: The Brave One is generally (and unsurprisingly) a well-made and well-acted film, which turns out to be a strong portrayal of PTSD and one of the ways it can impact people. However, what bugged was not in the film itself, but rather the audience's reaction to the film. I think the film is intended to provoke the sort of reactions I had to Foster's acts of vigilantism--at best, ambiguous, and at times, revulsion. Instead, most of the audience responded to her blowing away "bad guys" with a very positive response. This isn't Death Wish, much as some audience members seemed to want it to be.

(Interestingly, it's also an appropriate companion to Jennifer Westfeldt's Ira & Abby, which I saw last weekend, and which demonstrates a decidedly different, yet ultimately equally effective, way of dealing with a subway mugging.)

BECAUSE I CAN GET A QUICKER RESPONSE FROM YOU THAN FROM RANDY COHEN: Street parking can be difficult for those of us who live in the city, and folks who have garages as part of their homes enjoy a true luxury. What secures that privilege, of course, is that when someone parks in front of the garage without consent, they can get towed.

The question arises, however, as to parking in front of a garage with the homeowner's consent. Can the owner of the house let friends park in that otherwise-unavailable spot for fifteen minutes? For a few hours while visiting for dinner? For longer? Or with the right to keep that space clear for one's own garage access, is there a corollary responsibility to not let anyone else park there for any reason?

A TIME TO MOURN: It appears my old reliable standard def TiVo has finally collapsed in a blaze of glory. No big deal, since I've been substantially completely dependent on the cable company DVR (which, unlike my old TiVo, has dual tuners, records in HD, and allows me to hear surround sound) for the last several months. Given the circumstance, and that Amazon appears to be running an incredible special, I'm thinking of moving to the TiVo HD product. A few questions for the ALOTT5MAsphere's expertise in this area:

• Does anyone have experience with doing the setup of the system with dual CableCards and/or the difficulty or ease of getting CableCards from the cable company and getting them working (particularly with Time Warner NYC)? It seems that to record the HD/digital stuff, I'm really going to need them.
• I like the TiVo software and interface (not to mention side features like unbox, remote scheduling, and transfer to computer) enough that I'm willing to pay a couple of dollars more for it than the current setup. Anyone have experience with the pricing comparison? As I calculate it, I save $9 (DVR rate) plus $9 (set top box rate), but incur costs of $4 (two CableCards) and $12 (prepaying for two years, averaged out) as a result, which might make it cheaper. (Might also take advantage of the chance to reshuffle some other service and try and get a promo rate.)

BIG BANG BABY, CRASH CRASH CRASH: I have watched much mediocre to bad television in my life. ALF, Small Wonder, Emily's Reasons Why Not. Indeed, at one point, I even attempted to watch episodes of the competiting torture game shows The Chair and The Chamber. That said, I don't know if I've ever disliked a show as much as I disliked the pilot of The Big Bang Theory (available for free on iTunes, and not a good bargain even at that price). What works? Um, Kaley Cuoco is pretty, there's a nice Barenaked Ladies theme song, and, well, that's about it. The shows lacks a high concept (hot girl moves in across the hall from science dorks), sharp writing (the best joke involves a Stephen Hawking impression), or interesting acting (it's like Cuoco was directed contantly with "same thing, only dumber!" and the dorks with "same thing, only more nervous and awkward"). An overbearing laugh track doesn't help matters in the least, but, if anything, draws attention to how aggressively unfunny many of the jokes are. Sad that this is HIMYM's leadout. Sadder still that it and Cane appear to be getting most of CBS's new show promotion this year. To be avoided.

THE EXHIBITION OF MOVING PICTURES IS A BUSINESS, PURE AND SIMPLE: As I tried to argue in our last class, the arrival of an entirely new medium, such as sound recording, always marks a pivotal moment in pop-culture history. Unfortunately, it's often hard for us to appreciate just how pivotal such moments were -- since we cannot even imagine our popular culture without or before those media. The same imaginative challenge surfaces when we talk about the birth of motion pictures: just think how astonishing it must have been to see photographic images actually appear to move across a screen! (Though exactly why those images appear to move is still a matter of some dispute.)

The technological developments behind movies proceeded pretty rapidly. Thomas Edison's 1891 kinetoscope allowed viewers to look into a "peep hole" and watch a short film unspooling inside. While kinetscopes proved an amusing novelty, inventors soon realized that the real commercial potential lay in projectors for public exhibition: the Vitascope, the Cinematographe, the Biograph. By the turn of the century, movies had become featured attractions in vaudeville halls and traveling shows, and in 1905 films got their own dedicated theaters with the rise of the nickelodeon. (No, Dora had nothing to do with it.)

Within a couple of years, American cities were in the grip of "nickel madness." Movies especially appealed to immigrant and working-class audiences. After all, silent films were cheap, exciting, and understandable to anyone regardless of education or language. Many of these early movies appear unremarkable and innocuous to us today: from a kissing couple to a traveling train, from assorted vaudeville acts to re-enactments of the Spanish-American War. But the wonder of moving pictures in itself was enough to draw huge crowds, and the development of narrative "story films," like Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery (1903), introduced new subjects and additional techniques (such as cross-cutting, stunt work, and special effects) that made the movies even more compelling.

But as Daniel Czitrom explains in Media and the American Mind (excerpted in our textbook), critics increasingly worried about the possible dangers of motion pictures -- the dark, unhealthy theaters; the uneducated, impressionable audiences; and especially the morally questionable content of the films themselves. Too many movies, critics said, featured outlaw heroes, loose women, and a whole menu of vices. Civic groups, religious leaders, and politicians called for local review boards to censor motion pictures; film producers, distributors, and exhibitors, on the other hand, claimed "freedom of expression." In 1915, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that motion pictures were not covered by the First Amendment -- in part because movies were not "organs of public opinion" but "a business, pure and simple," but also because movies' extraordinary "power" over their viewers made them "capable of evil" and therefore a potential threat to civil order.

So, ThingThrowers, let's try to put ourselves in the seats of those old nickelodeons. Leave aside today's complaints about audience members on cell phones and lousy customer service, and focus purely on film-as-medium. Do movies still hold a sense of wonder for you? Do they still possess the "power" that the Court worried about in 1915? Is the experience of sitting in a darkened theater watching larger-than-life images flicker across your retinas still something special, something powerful? If so, why? If not, why not?

Next week: Birth of a Nation, the rise of the movie star, and the New Woman.

SOMETHING SUDDENLY CAME UP: Wow!