Magellan radar image of Wheatley crater on Venus. This 72 km diameter crater shows a radar bright ejecta pattern and a generally flat floor with some rough raised areas and faulting. The crater is located in Asteria Regio at 16.6N,267E.
Image: NASA/GSFC [high-resolution]
Caption: NASA
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – “Warm Bodies,” a romantic comedy featuring a warm-hearted zombie, lured teenage girls to the theater, collecting $ 20 million in ticket sales in the U.S. and Canada to take the box office title on a weekend dominated by Super Bowl parties and football watching.
Playing in more than 3,000 theaters, the odd-pairing of a pale-faced zombie with his breathing girlfriend faced little competition among new films and easily mauled last weekend’s winner “Hansel and Gretel,” an updated version of the classic fairy tale with witch-hunting siblings. The film collected $ 9.2 million this weekend, according to studio estimates.
The weekend’s other widely released newcomer, Warner Brothers’ “Bullet to the Head,” starring 66-year old Sylvester Stallone as a tattooed hitman, collected $ 4.5 million for sixth place.
Two weeks earlier, another aging action star, Arnold Schwarzenegger had a feeble opening in his own shoot-em-up, “The Last Stand.”
Based on a first time novel by Seattle writer Isaac Marion, “Warm Bodies” was produced for a little more than $ 30 million by Lionsgate’s Summit Entertainment, the studio that also produced the mega-blockbuster “Twilight” series.
The film stars 24-year-old British actor Marcus Brewer as the pale, stiff-walking zombie R, one of the few zombies capable of thought in a plaque ravaged world.
“We were above expectations going into the holiday weekend,” says David Spitz, Lionsgate’s executive vice president and general sales manager.
Spitz predicted that the film, which he referred to as a “rom-zom-com” would benefit from the upcoming long weekend in the U.S. that coincides with Valentine’s Day and Presidents’ Day.
Benefiting from the buzz following Oscar nominations for each of its four stars, “Silver Linings Playbook” was third with $ 8.1 million as it continued to open in more theaters and is now showing at more than 2,600 locations, according to the movie site Hollywood.com
Universal’s Pictures’ low-budget horror film “Mama”, starring Jessica Chastain, continued its improbable ticket-selling run, with $ 6.7 million to rank fourth. It grossed more than $ 58 million in the two weeks since its release.
Also benefiting from its Oscar buzz, the Osama Bin Laden hunt movie “Zero Dark Thirty,” had ticket sales of $ 5.3 million and has now surpassed $ 77 million domestically, according to the box office division of Hollywood.com. The film was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actress for Jessica Chastain‘s starring role.
“Django Unchained,” director Quentin Tarantino‘s western starring Jamie Foxx has a bounty-hunting former slave, passed $ 150 million in overall ticket sales and collected $ 3 million during the weekend. It was also nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture and for Christoph Waltz‘s supporting role.
“Warm Bodies” surpassed industry projections of $ 18 million, and benefited from an aggressive marketing campaign that started last summer and included trailers attached to “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn” and 60-second commercials on AMC channel’s cult zombie hit “The Walking Dead.”
(Reporting by Ronald Grover and Andrea Burzynski; Editing by Sandra Maler)
Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News
Before his addiction, Richard Fee was a popular college class president and aspiring medical student. "You keep giving Adderall to my son, you're going to kill him," said Rick Fee, Richard's father, to one of his son's doctors.
VIRGINIA BEACH — Every morning on her way to work, Kathy Fee holds her breath as she drives past the squat brick building that houses Dominion Psychiatric Associates.
MENTAL HEALTH CLINIC Dominion Psychiatric Associates in Virginia Beach, where Richard Fee was treated by Dr. Waldo M. Ellison. After observing Richard and hearing his complaints about concentration, Dr. Ellison diagnosed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and prescribed the stimulant Adderall.
It was there that her son, Richard, visited a doctor and received prescriptions for Adderall, an amphetamine-based medication for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. It was in the parking lot that she insisted to Richard that he did not have A.D.H.D., not as a child and not now as a 24-year-old college graduate, and that he was getting dangerously addicted to the medication. It was inside the building that her husband, Rick, implored Richard’s doctor to stop prescribing him Adderall, warning, “You’re going to kill him.”
It was where, after becoming violently delusional and spending a week in a psychiatric hospital in 2011, Richard met with his doctor and received prescriptions for 90 more days of Adderall. He hanged himself in his bedroom closet two weeks after they expired.
The story of Richard Fee, an athletic, personable college class president and aspiring medical student, highlights widespread failings in the system through which five million Americans take medication for A.D.H.D., doctors and other experts said.
Medications like Adderall can markedly improve the lives of children and others with the disorder. But the tunnel-like focus the medicines provide has led growing numbers of teenagers and young adults to fake symptoms to obtain steady prescriptions for highly addictive medications that carry serious psychological dangers. These efforts are facilitated by a segment of doctors who skip established diagnostic procedures, renew prescriptions reflexively and spend too little time with patients to accurately monitor side effects.
Richard Fee’s experience included it all. Conversations with friends and family members and a review of detailed medical records depict an intelligent and articulate young man lying to doctor after doctor, physicians issuing hasty diagnoses, and psychiatrists continuing to prescribe medication — even increasing dosages — despite evidence of his growing addiction and psychiatric breakdown.
Very few people who misuse stimulants devolve into psychotic or suicidal addicts. But even one of Richard’s own physicians, Dr. Charles Parker, characterized his case as a virtual textbook for ways that A.D.H.D. practices can fail patients, particularly young adults. “We have a significant travesty being done in this country with how the diagnosis is being made and the meds are being administered,” said Dr. Parker, a psychiatrist in Virginia Beach. “I think it’s an abnegation of trust. The public needs to say this is totally unacceptable and walk out.”
Young adults are by far the fastest-growing segment of people taking A.D.H.D medications. Nearly 14 million monthly prescriptions for the condition were written for Americans ages 20 to 39 in 2011, two and a half times the 5.6 million just four years before, according to the data company I.M.S. Health. While this rise is generally attributed to the maturing of adolescents who have A.D.H.D. into young adults — combined with a greater recognition of adult A.D.H.D. in general — many experts caution that savvy college graduates, freed of parental oversight, can legally and easily obtain stimulant prescriptions from obliging doctors.
“Any step along the way, someone could have helped him — they were just handing out drugs,” said Richard’s father. Emphasizing that he had no intention of bringing legal action against any of the doctors involved, Mr. Fee said: “People have to know that kids are out there getting these drugs and getting addicted to them. And doctors are helping them do it.”
“...when he was in elementary school he fidgeted, daydreamed and got A’s. he has been an A-B student until mid college when he became scattered and he wandered while reading He never had to study. Presently without medication, his mind thinks most of the time, he procrastinated, he multitasks not finishing in a timely manner.”
Dr. Waldo M. Ellison
Richard Fee initial evaluation
Feb. 5, 2010
Richard began acting strangely soon after moving back home in late 2009, his parents said. He stayed up for days at a time, went from gregarious to grumpy and back, and scrawled compulsively in notebooks. His father, while trying to add Richard to his health insurance policy, learned that he was taking Vyvanse for A.D.H.D.
Richard explained to him that he had been having trouble concentrating while studying for medical school entrance exams the previous year and that he had seen a doctor and received a diagnosis. His father reacted with surprise. Richard had never shown any A.D.H.D. symptoms his entire life, from nursery school through high school, when he was awarded a full academic scholarship to Greensboro College in North Carolina. Mr. Fee also expressed concerns about the safety of his son’s taking daily amphetamines for a condition he might not have.
“The doctor wouldn’t give me anything that’s bad for me,” Mr. Fee recalled his son saying that day. “I’m not buying it on the street corner.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: February 3, 2013
An earlier version of a quote appearing with the home page presentation of this article misspelled the name of a medication. It is Adderall, not Aderall.
Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The New York Times
"Greed is not a crime. But the question is: where does greed lead?" said Olafur Hauksson, a special prosecutor in Reykjavik.
REYKJAVIK, Iceland — As chief of police in a tiny fishing town for 11 years, Olafur Hauksson developed what he thought was a basic understanding of the criminal mind. The typical lawbreaker, he said, recalling his many encounters with small-time criminals, “clearly knows that he crossed the line” and generally sees “the difference between right and wrong.”
Today, the burly, 48-year-old former policeman is struggling with a very different sort of suspect. Reassigned to Reykjavik, the Icelandic capital, to lead what has become one of the world’s most sweeping investigation into the bankers whose actions contributed to the global financial crisis in 2008, Mr. Hauksson now faces suspects who “are not aware of when they crossed the line” and “defend their actions every step of the way.”
With the global economy still struggling to recover from the financial maelstrom five years ago, governments around the world have been criticized for largely failing to punish the bankers who were responsible for the calamity. But even here in Iceland, a country of just 320,000 that has gone after financiers with far more vigor than the United States and other countries hit by the crisis, obtaining criminal convictions has proved devilishly difficult.
Public hostility toward bankers is so strong in Iceland that “it is easier to say you are dealing drugs than to say you’re a banker,” said Thorvaldur Sigurjonsson, the former head of trading for Kaupthing, a once high-flying bank that crumbled. He has been called in for questioning by Mr. Hauksson’s office but has not been charged with any wrongdoing.
Yet, in the four years since the Icelandic Parliament passed a law ordering the appointment of an unnamed special prosecutor to investigate those blamed for the country’s spectacular meltdown in 2008, only a handful of bankers have been convicted.
Ministers in a left-leaning coalition government elected after the crash agree that the wheels of justice have ground slowly, but they call for patience, explaining that the process must follow the law, not vengeful passions.
“We are not going after people just to satisfy public anger,” said Steingrimur J. Sigfusson, Iceland’s minister of industry, a former finance minister and leader of the Left-Green Movement that is part of the governing coalition.
Hordur Torfa, a popular singer-songwriter who helped organize protests that forced the previous conservative government to resign, acknowledged that “people are getting impatient” but said they needed to accept that “this is not the French Revolution. I don’t believe in taking bankers out and hanging them or shooting them.”
Others are less patient. “The whole process is far too slow,” said Thorarinn Einarsson, a left-wing activist. “It only shows that ‘banksters’ can get away with doing whatever they want.”
Mr. Hauksson, the special prosecutor, said he was frustrated by the slow pace but thought it vital that his office scrupulously follow legal procedure. “Revenge is not something we want as our main driver in this process. Our work must be proper today and be seen as proper in the future,” he said.
Part of the difficulty in prosecuting bankers, he said, is that the law is often unclear on what constitutes a criminal offense in high finance. “Greed is not a crime,” he noted. “But the question is: where does greed lead?”
Mr. Hauksson said it was often easy to show that bankers violated their own internal rules for lending and other activities, but “as in all cases involving theft or fraud, the most difficult thing is proving intent.”
And there are the bankers themselves. Those who have been brought in for questioning often bristle at being asked to account for their actions. “They are not used to being questioned. These people are not used to finding themselves in this situation,” Mr. Hauksson said. They also hire expensive lawyers.
The special prosecutor’s office initially had only five staff members but now has more than 100 investigators, lawyers and financial experts, and it has relocated to a big new office. It has opened about 100 cases, with more than 120 people now under investigation for possible crimes relating to an Icelandic financial sector that grew so big it dwarfed the rest of the economy.
To help ease Mr. Hauksson’s task, legislators amended the law to allow investigators easy access to confidential bank information, something that previously required a court order.
Parliament also voted to put the country’s prime minister at the time of the banking debacle on trial for negligence before a special tribunal. (A proposal to try his cabinet failed.) Mr. Hauksson was not involved in the case against the former leader, Geir H. Haarde, who last year was found guilty of failing to keep ministers properly informed about the 2008 crisis but was acquitted on more serious charges that could have resulted in a prison sentence.
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Sad news for a former Lakers All-Star. Nickey Maxwell Van Exel, the son of Nick Van Exel, was sentenced to 60 years in prison for murder in Texas on Friday.
The 22-year-old was found guilty Thursday of shooting Bradley Bassey Eyo in 2010.
Nick Van Exel was selected by the Lakers with the 37th overall pick in the 1993 NBA draft.
Before the arrival of Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant in 1996, Van Exel was the team's leader and go-to player.
Van Exel played with the Lakers until 1998, then was traded after an All-Star season for Tony Battie and the draft rights to Tyronn Lue.
He is currently on staff with the Atlanta Hawks in player development.
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Email Eric Pincus at eric.pincus@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @EricPincus.
LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Chinese censors temporarily blocked CNN International’s broadcasting signal Thursday night, during a segment about Chinese hackers infiltrating the New York Times’ computer network, a CNN spokeswoman told TheWrap.
On Wednesday night, the Times reported that it had suffered four months of persistent cyber attacks after publishing a front-page story about the wealth amassed by Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao‘s family.
CNNI reporter Hala Gorani aired a segment on her show about the hacking on Thursday. Her entire six-minute segment was blacked out in China.
It wasn’t the first time CNN faced the wrath of Beijing’s censors. Last May, Anderson Cooper‘s report on a blind dissident was blocked in the country.
Nor is it the first time CNN has been shunned by the Chinese.
In 2009, a 23-year-old student name Rao Jin started a website called Anti-CNN.com, on which he skewered the network and other Western media outlets for critical coverage of the Chinese government’s actions in Tibet.
TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News
Ferrol Sams, a country doctor who started writing fiction in his late 50s and went on to win critical praise and a devoted readership for his humorous and perceptive novels and stories that drew on his medical practice and his rural Southern roots, died on Tuesday at his home in Fayetteville, Ga. He was 90.
The cause, said his son Ferrol Sams III, also a doctor, was that he was “slap wore out.”
“He lived a full life,” his son said. “He didn’t leave anything in the tank.”
Dr. Sams grew up on a farm in the rural Piedmont area of Georgia, seven mud-road miles from the nearest town. He was a boy during the Depression; books meant escape and discovery. He read “Robinson Crusoe,” then Mark Twain and Charles Dickens. One of his English professors at Mercer University, in Macon, suggested he consider a career in writing, but he chose another route to examining the human condition: medical school.
When he was 58 — after he had served in World War II, started a medical practice with his wife, raised his four children and stopped devoting so much of his mornings to preparing lessons for Sunday school at the Methodist church — he began writing “Run With the Horsemen,” a novel based on his youth. It was published in 1982.
“In the beginning was the land,” the book begins. “Shortly thereafter was the father.”
In The New York Times Book Review, the novelist Robert Miner wrote, “Mr. Sams’s approach to his hero’s experiences is nicely signaled in these two opening sentences.”
He added: “I couldn’t help associating the gentility, good-humored common sense and pace of this novel with my image of a country doctor spinning yarns. The writing is elegant, reflective and amused. Mr. Sams is a storyteller sure of his audience, in no particular hurry, and gifted with perfect timing.”
Dr. Sams modeled the lead character in “Run With the Horsemen,” Porter Osborne Jr., on himself, and featured him in two more novels, “The Whisper of the River” and “When All the World Was Young,” which followed him into World War II.
Dr. Sams also wrote thinly disguised stories about his life as a physician. In “Epiphany,” he captures the friendship that develops between a literary-minded doctor frustrated by bureaucracy and a patient angry over past racism and injustice.
Ferrol Sams Jr. was born Sept. 26, 1922, in Woolsey, Ga. He received a bachelor’s degree from Mercer in 1942 and his medical degree from Emory University in 1949. In his addition to his namesake, survivors include his wife, Dr. Helen Fletcher Sams; his sons Jim and Fletcher; a daughter, Ellen Nichol; eight grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.
Some critics tired of what they called the “folksiness” in Dr. Sams’s books. But he did not write for the critics, he said. In an interview with the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, Dr. Sams was asked what audience he wrote for. Himself, he said.
“If you lose your sense of awe, or if you lose your sense of the ridiculous, you’ve fallen into a terrible pit,” he added. “The only thing that’s worse is never to have had either.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: February 2, 2013
An earlier version of this obituary misstated the town in which Mr. Sams died. It was Fayetteville, Ga., not Lafayette, Ga.
David Maxwell for The New York Times
Susan Zimmerman, 62, has three part-time jobs.
Arynita Armstrong, 60, at her home in Willis, Tex. She last worked five years ago. “When you’re older, they just see gray hair and they write you off,” she says.
In the current listless economy, every generation has a claim to having been most injured. But the Labor Department’s latest jobs snapshot and other recent data reports present a strong case for crowning baby boomers as the greatest victims of the recession and its grim aftermath.
These Americans in their 50s and early 60s — those near retirement age who do not yet have access to Medicare and Social Security — have lost the most earnings power of any age group, with their household incomes 10 percent below what they made when the recovery began three years ago, according to Sentier Research, a data analysis company.
Their retirement savings and home values fell sharply at the worst possible time: just before they needed to cash out. They are supporting both aged parents and unemployed young-adult children, earning them the inauspicious nickname “Generation Squeeze.”
New research suggests that they may die sooner, because their health, income security and mental well-being were battered by recession at a crucial time in their lives. A recent study by economists at Wellesley College found that people who lost their jobs in the few years before becoming eligible for Social Security lost up to three years from their life expectancy, largely because they no longer had access to affordable health care.
“If I break my wrist, I lose my house,” said Susan Zimmerman, 62, a freelance writer in Cleveland, of the distress that a medical emergency would wreak upon her finances and her quality of life. None of the three part-time jobs she has cobbled together pay benefits, and she says she is counting the days until she becomes eligible for Medicare.
In the meantime, Ms. Zimmerman has fashioned her own regimen of home remedies — including eating blue cheese instead of taking penicillin and consuming plenty of orange juice, red wine, coffee and whatever else the latest longevity studies recommend — to maintain her health, which she must do if she wants to continue paying the bills.
“I will probably be working until I’m 100,” she said.
As common as that sentiment is, the job market has been especially unkind to older workers.
Unemployment rates for Americans nearing retirement are far lower than those for young people, who are recently out of school, with fewer skills and a shorter work history. But once out of a job, older workers have a much harder time finding another one. Over the last year, the average duration of unemployment for older people was 53 weeks, compared with 19 weeks for teenagers, according to the Labor Department’s jobs report released on Friday.
The lengthy process is partly because older workers are more likely to have been laid off from industries that are downsizing, like manufacturing. Compared with the rest of the population, older people are also more likely to own their own homes and be less mobile than renters, who can move to new job markets.
Older workers are more likely to have a disability of some sort, perhaps limiting the range of jobs that offer realistic choices. They may also be less inclined, at least initially, to take jobs that pay far less than their old positions.
Displaced boomers also believe they are victims of age discrimination, because employers can easily find a young, energetic worker who will accept lower pay and who can potentially stick around for decades rather than a few years.
“When you’re older, they just see gray hair and they write you off,” said Arynita Armstrong, 60, of Willis, Tex. She has been looking for work for five years since losing her job at a mortgage company. “They’re afraid to hire you, because they think you’re a health risk. You know, you might make their premiums go up. They think it’ll cost more money to invest in training you than it’s worth it because you might retire in five years.
“Not that they say any of this to your face,” she added.
When older workers do find re-employment, the compensation is usually not up to the level of their previous jobs, according to data from the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University.
In a survey by the center of older workers who were laid off during the recession, just one in six had found another job, and half of that group had accepted pay cuts. Fourteen percent of the re-employed said the pay in their new job was less than half what they earned in their previous job.
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NEW YORK -- The Dow Jones industrial average closed above 14,000 for the first time since October 2007, as stocks continue a rally this year.
The Dow gained 149.21 points, or 1.08%, to close at 14,009.79 in trading Friday.
Stocks were lifted Friday by a host of data pointing to a continued recovery in the U.S. economy.
The federal government reported early Friday the economy added 157,000 jobs in January, as the unemployment rate ticked up to 7.9%. Manufacturing, consumer confidence and construction data also boosted optimism.
Investors have found more reasons this year to get back into equities. President Obama and Congress helped defuse potentially drastic tax increases and spending cuts threatened by the so-called fiscal cliff. Economists warned the cliff, if left unaddressed, could push the economy back into recession.
The Federal Reserve has also been keeping interest rates to historic lows with multiple rounds of monetary stimulus. That has pushed investors into riskier investments like stocks.
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It’s hard to imagine the happiness at Netflix when they realized that House of Cards — the company’s much-heralded premiere of self-produced original programming – would debut its complete 13-episode run on the same week that the U.S. Senate held hearing to confirm John Kerry as Secretary of State. After all, the updated American version of the 1990s BBC political drama launches with Kevin Spacey’s character, Congressman Frank Underwood, learning he won’t be nominated for that very position, a devastating insult that inspires his secret campaign to undermine the newly elected administration he pretends to serve. The show, it seemed, couldn’t be any more topical.
The problem for this new House of Cards is that despite this timely coincidence, the content of the show often feels curiously old-fashioned despite its innovative format. That’s squarely the fault of the writing; for every smart move that writer Beau Willimon (The Ides of March) makes in updating the basic setup and plot of the BBC original for a modern American audience, he undermines his good work with clumsy dialogue and scenes that are too on-the-nose and out-of-step with the kind of sophisticated, layered writing we’ve come to expect from shows like Mad Men, Breaking Bad or even Game of Thrones.
How does the show demonstrate that Underwood is ruthless and a man to be reckoned with? In the very first scene, he personally kills a mangled dog that’s been hit by a car, while literally reporting to the viewer that he is the kind of guy who can do what needs to be done. When Underwood’s all-too-willing partner-in-crime, reporter Zoe Barnes (Kate Mara), initially tries to get his attention with a cleavage-revealing top, Underwood sneers, “It’s a cheap ploy.” “It’s cheap,” Barnes agrees, “but effective” — the kind of exchange that would feel more at home in 1940s film noir.
Similarly retro, and seemingly unintentionally so, is Barnes’ position at the paper she works for, the fictional Washington Herald. When we first meet her, she’s arguing for her own blog, a place where she can speak truth to power and make a mark as a serious journalist. Her dismissal at the hands of her editor and her peers feels like the sort of “oh, bloggers, they’re not even real journalists” scene that we’ve seen countless times before.
Considering how prevalent the web has become in our culture, and how internet-conscious newspapers are today, it doesn’t just feel redundant; it feels anachronistic. And when Barnes finally gets her big break — thanks to an underhanded scoop from Underwood — it’s hard not to be agog at how eager her editors and bosses are to let her without asking where she’s getting the information or how real it is. In a post-Judith Miller and Jayson Blair world, it feels particularly out of place.
The actors do the best they can with the material, which turns out to be quite a lot. Although Spacey’s smarmy, know-it-all politician initially feels unconvincing, he grows on you as you keep watching. His character has a habit of breaking the fourth wall — a quirk carried over from the BBC original — and every aside to the camera makes the viewer feel complicit in his dealings. There’s a point in the second episode where Spacey doesn’t even need to speak; in the middle of a conversation, he simply raises his eyebrow to the audience as if to say, “Can you believe this?” and you realize that you’ve been won over by his insincere charm despite yourself.
As impressive as Spacey’s somewhat-campy performance is, though, Robin Wright blows him out the water as Underwood’s wife, Claire. Clearly positioned as the Lady MacBeth of this scenario, she is utterly compelling in her brittle coldness and inability to accept any potential failure of the world to bend to her will. “My husband doesn’t apologize,” she tells him after he offers her a mea culpa for his bad behavior. “Even to me.”
What shines most, though, is the direction. David Fincher (The Social Network), who helms the first two episodes of the season, brings a lot of weight to this material, mitigating the script’s melodrama with lovely cinematography and building an appropriate sense of distance and scale into proceedings. This is a surprisingly beautiful series to look at; there’s a stillness and grace to the direction that manages to ground the story in something that isn’t “realism,” but feels naturalistic nonetheless. Despite the heavy-handed script, I found myself drawn into the show, eager to find out and especially to watch what happens next.
That’s one of the wins for the format that Netflix offers. If this were a traditional television series, I would have had to wait a week between the first and second episodes, and that would’ve colored my feelings about it rather differently. Being able to watch the next installment immediately after the first made me retroactively like the premiere more; I got to the pay-off more quickly, and to a second episode with more momentum and less awkward exposition.
Also a plus for Netflix: The episodes of the show can be whatever length they need to be, and not edited down (or filled out) to fit a time slot predetermined by broadcast schedules or commercial breaks. It’s not something that is immediately perceptible, but as time goes on you start to notice it; nothing feels rushed, or stretched out of natural shape, and the story flows more naturally.
In the end, House of Cards is a victory for Netflix. It may not be the greatest show on television — how likely was that to be the case with the company’s first try? – but it is a good show, and one that benefits significantly by being freed of the time and scheduling restrictions that television typically imposes. Think of it as the continuing evolution of the television series: As the cable channel model freed dramas from the mandatory demands of 20-odd episodes a season, the Netflix model frees them from mandatory running times or artificial cliffhangers preceding commercials. Whether or not something that doesn’t actually air on television could be described as “the future of television” is perhaps debatable, but if this is the beginning of that future, it’s off to a pretty good start.
All 13 episodes of House of Cards are currently available to watch on Netflix.
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