Push for minimum wage hike intensifies

NEW YORK — Before the recession, Amie Crawford was an interior designer, earning $50,000 a year patterning baths and cabinets for architectural firms.

Now, she's a "team member" at the Protein Bar in Chicago, where she makes $8.50 an hour, slightly more than minimum wage. It was the only job she could find after months of looking. Crawford, now 56, says she needed to take the job to stop the hemorrhaging of her retirement accounts.

In her spare time, Crawford works with a Chicago group called Action Now, which is staging protests to raise the minimum wage in a state where it hasn't been raised since 2006.

"Thousands of workers in Chicago, let alone in the rest of the country, deserve to have a livable wage, and I truly believe that when someone is given a livable wage, that is going to bolster growth in communities," she said.

If it seems that workers such as Crawford are more prevalent these days, protesting outside stores including Wal-Mart, McDonald's and Wendy's to call for higher wages, it may be because there are more workers in these jobs than there were a few years ago.

Quiz: How much do you know about the 'fiscal cliff'?

Of the 1.9 million jobs created during the recovery, 43% of them have been in the low-wage industries of retail, food services and employment services, whose workforces include temporary employees who often work part time and without benefits or health insurance, according to a study by Annette Bernhardt, policy co-director of the National Employment Law Project in New York.

At the same time, many workers such as Crawford who have been displaced from their jobs are experiencing significant earnings losses after getting a new job. About one-third of the 3 million workers displaced from their jobs from 2009 to 2011 and then reemployed said their earnings had dropped 20% or more, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

"What these protests are signaling are that working families are at breaking point after three decades of rising inequality and stagnant wages," Bernhardt said.

The rise of low-paying jobs in the recovery, experts said, has cut the spending power of workers who once worked in middle-class occupations. Construction workers who made $30 an hour, for example, during the housing boom may now find themselves working on a temporary basis.

"You see workers trading down their living standards," said Joseph Brusuelas, a senior economist for Bloomberg who studies the U.S. economy.

Now, Brusuelas said, there's an oversupply of workers and they're willing to take any job in a sluggish economy, even if they're overqualified. That includes temporary jobs without benefits, and minimum wage positions such as the one Crawford took.

Although the 2012 election might have brought the idea of income inequality to the forefront of voters' minds, efforts to increase wages for these workers are sputtering in an era of austerity when businesses say they are barely hiring, much less paying workers more.

The New Jersey state legislature handed Gov. Chris Christie a bill to raise the state's minimum wage to $8.50 an hour from the federal minimum of $7.25 this month, but he hasn't signed it and has signaled he might not. An earlier effort in New Jersey to tie the minimum wage to the consumer price index was vetoed by the governor.

Democratic lawmakers in Illinois are also trying to push a bill that would increase the minimum wage — an earlier effort this year failed. The Legislature last voted to raise its minimum wage in 2006, before the recession, and the governor agreed.

"A higher minimum wage means a person has to pay more for each worker," said Ted Dabrowski, vice president of policy at the Illinois Policy Institute, which opposes raising the minimum wage. "Companies have a few choices — increase prices, reduce the number of people they hire, cut employee hours or reduce benefits. When employees become too expensive, they have no choice but to reduce the number of workers."

The Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C., however, says there is little indication from economic research that increases in the minimum wage lead to lower employment, and, because higher wages mean workers have more money to spend, employment can actually increase.

A bill to raise the federal minimum wage was introduced to the U.S. Senate by Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) in July and referred to committee, where it has sat ever since.

"Business lobbyists are aware of the campaign and are aggressively working to stop it," said Madeline Talbott, the former lead organizer of Chicago's Action Now. "We've had a hard time getting our legislature to approve it."

But Talbott and other advocates say that the protests that have spread throughout Illinois and the country in recent weeks might force the issue to its head.

"You saw it happening 18 months ago when Occupy started — workers are now realizing that they have rights too in the workplace," said Camille Rivera, executive director of United NY, one of the groups working to raise the minimum wage in New York. "It's a good time for us to be fighting these issues, when companies are making millions of dollars in profits."

The protests are bringing out people who might not usually participate, including Marcus Rose, 33. Rose, who has worked the grill at a Wendy's for 21/2 months, was marching outside that Wendy's in Brooklyn recently on a day of protests, responding as organizers shouted lines such as "Wendy's, Wendy's, can't you see, $7.25 is not for me."

"If you don't stand up for nothing, you can't fall for anything," he said.

Talbott, the Action Now organizer, says that people such as Rose may make a difference in whether lawmakers at the state and national level will listen to the protests. The Obama victory energized the working class to believe that they could fight against big-money interests and win, she said.

"It comes down to the traditional situation — whether the power is in the hands of organized money or of organized people," she said. "The organized money side tends to win, but it doesn't have to win. The more people you are, the more chance you have against money."

alana.semuels@latimes.com

ricardo.lopez2@latimes.com

Semuels reported from New York and Lopez from Los Angeles

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Smokestack victim: 'Everything he did, he had fun doing it'

The man, 23, was trying to take a photo from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel on Michigan Avenue. (Posted Dec. 13th, 2012)

An aspiring comedian and improv actor who was taking pictures from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel on Michigan Avenue died after falling 22 feet down a smokestack, authorities said.

It took rescue crews four hours to remove Nicholas Wieme, 23, at one point cutting through the steel shaft and wedging boards inside to keep him from falling farther down.

Police and firefighters responded to the hotel at 505 N. Michigan Ave. around 1:10 a.m. after someone called and reported a person on the roof. Firefighters later learned Wieme had fallen down the smokestack, according to Fire Department spokeswoman Meg Ahlheim.

A "confined space rescue" was called, bringing 30 companies and about 125 firefighters and paramedics to the scene.

They discovered Wieme about 20 feet down the 5-foot wide smokestack, slumped on a ledge before the shaft angled down 42 floors, Ahlheim said. Crews cut into the shaft and used wood boards to block him from falling any farther, she said.

"We had to send members from the top down on ropes to assess his condition. The whole time we’re monitoring the situation for toxic gases," said Special Operations Chief Michael Fox. "We found the best way to get out him was to go about two floors below, and we had to cut the duct work for the chimney, which was made out of steel. And eventually we ended up sliding the victim down into the hole and removing him from the building.

“It turned very precarious because two feet after where we made the hole was a drop that would have went 42 floors to the basement," Fox said. "So it took us a little time to cut the hole in the right spot and shore it up, so when we brought him out, he would not fall into the basement."

Wieme was unconscious when firefighters arrived, according to District Fire Chief Kevin Krasneck, correcting earlier reports from officials that he was initially communicating by phone with a friend who was with him on the roof.

Wieme was wheeled into an ambulance inside the hotel's basement garage around 5:05 a.m. and taken to Northwestern Memorial Hospital, where he was pronounced dead, according to the Fire Department and the Cook County medical examiner's office.

Wieme and the friend had dined at Michael Jordan's restaurant inside the hotel Wednesday evening and then decided to "explore" the hotel, according to police.  Wieme and the woman took the elevator to the top floor and entered the rooftop deck, a restricted area, through an unsecured door, officials said.

Wieme began to take pictures and climbed a ladder along the chimney, police said. Moments later, the friend lost sight of him.

Wieme grew up in Pipestone, Minn., a small town near the South Dakota border, but recently lived on the North Side. He was an aspiring comedian who posted several of his routines online and worked at iO Chicago, an improv theater.

Wieme's relatives said he also wanted to be a movie director, and had edited and directed several videos. He worked on at least one video with the friend that was posted Wednesday.

Wieme's father is a morning announcer for a local radio station in Pipestone, according to Wieme's aunt, Linda Wieme of Balaton, Minn. He worked at the town's movie theater growing up and decided he wanted to make movies. "I think that's what sparked him," she said.

He started making home movies with his friends and cousins when he was around 16.

Linda Wieme said his comedy routines reflected his character. "He was a bubbly kid. I don't think I ever saw him upset. He always had some joke or something to lift your spirits. . . That's the reason he was a comedian, he was a very happy-go-lucky kid."

His brother, Jamie Wieme, said Nick "began taking up the hobby of stand-up comedy" while at Minnesota State University in Moorhead.

"Nick experienced a good deal of success in this endeavor and followed it to where it led him: Chicago," Jamie Wieme said. "Upon arriving to Chicago, his interest switched from comedy to improv. In this, he found even more success, performing at a number of improv establishments on a regular basis. Those that watched him perform often attested that Nick had a way of unintentionally stealing the show.

"Nick's amazing talents were only topped by fierce love and loyalty to his family and friends," his brother added. "Nick was truly a family man, a phenomenal friend (as literally hundreds would attest to), and would do anything to help anyone. When it came to people, Nick's as good as they come."

Matt Higbee, Wieme’s coach at iO Chicago for the last eight months, said Wieme had a "great stage presence" and was multi-talented as an actor, writer and director.

Higbee said Wieme was a natural story teller who was able to infuse his improv with skillful story telling that made his act come alive.

"He was a force to watch, he was a terrific artist," said Higbee.

Higbee said he first noticed Wieme when he was affiliated with iO as a student and saw him earn a coveted spot there as a performer.

“He had such a joyousness,” Higbee added, “and you couldn’t help but watch him.”

Kyja Nelson, an associate professor at Minnesota State Moorhead who chaired cinema arts and digital technologies instruction, had Wieme as a student in production classes and said he was “very creative and had a really sharp sense of humor.”

Nelson said Wieme was “just full of life and almost larger than life in a way. Everything he did, he had fun doing it. That’s part of his vibrancy.”

Nick Wieme is survived by his parents, two brothers, a sister-in-law and a niece.

Raymond Vermolen, general manager of the hotel, released a statement saying Intercontinental "holds the safety, comfort and well-being of our guests and employees as our top priority and concern. Our thoughts and prayers are with the family and friends of the guest at this difficult time. The hotel staff will continue to cooperate fully with authorities in their investigation. All further questions should be directed to the Chicago Police Department."

Peter Nickeas is a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, Paul Walsh is a reporter for the Minneapolis Star Tribune

pnickeas@tribune.com
Twitter: @peternickeas

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A Minute With: Director Peter Jackson on shooting “The Hobbit”

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – After bringing J.R.R. Tolkien‘s “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy to life, filmmaker Peter Jackson is back in the world of Middle Earth with the author’s prequel, “The Hobbit.”

The three-film series is due to open in U.S. theaters on Friday with “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.”

The Oscar-winning director, 51, told Reuters about the 3D film, including the 48 frames per second (fps) format he used, which was widely debated by fans and critics.

Q: You originally intended “The Hobbit” to only be two parts. Why stretch it out to three?

A: “Back in July, we were near the end of our shoot and we started to talk about the things that we had to leave out of the movies. There’s material at the end of ‘The Return of the King’ (the final part of ‘The Lord of the Rings‘ trilogy) in the appendices that takes place around the time of ‘The Hobbit.’

“We were thinking, this is our last chance because it’s very unlikely we’re ever going to come back to Middle Earth as filmmakers. So we talked to the studio and next year we’re going to be doing another 10 to 12 weeks of shooting because we’re now adapting more of Tolkien’s material.”

Q: At what point did you decide you would direct the film yourself after originally handing it to Guillermo del Toro?

A: “At the time (we wrote the script), I was worried about repeating myself and worried that I was competing with myself. I thought it would be interesting to have another director with a fresh eye coming in and telling the story. But after Guillermo left, having worked on script and the production for well over a year at that stage, I was very emotionally attached to it. I just thought, this is an opportunity I’m not going to say no to.”

Q: You hired Gollum actor Andy Serkis to do second unit directing on the film, something he has never done before. What made you hand the task to a novice?

A: “I know how strongly Andy has been wanting to direct. One of the problems with second unit is that you tend to have conservative footage given to you by the director. They play it safe. I knew that I wouldn’t get that from Andy because he’s got such a ferocious energy. He goes for it and doesn’t hold back. I knew that if Andy was the director I would be getting some interesting material, that it would have a life and energy to it.”

Q: What inspired you to make a film in 48 fps?

A: “Four years ago I shot a six or seven minute King Kong ride for Universal Studios’ tram ride in California. The reason we used the high frame rate was that we didn’t want people to think it’s a movie. You want that sense of reality, which you get from a high frame rate, of looking in to the real world. At the time, I thought it would be so cool to make a feature film with this process.”

Q: Not everyone has embraced “The Hobbit” in 48 fps.

A: “For the last year and a half there’s been speculation, largely negative, about it and I’m so relieved to have gotten to this point. I’ve been waiting for this moment when people can actually see it for themselves. Cinephiles and serious film critics who regard 24 fps as sacred are very negative and absolutely hate it. Anybody I’ve spoken to under the age of 20 thinks it’s fantastic. I haven’t heard a single negative thing from the young people, and these are the kids that are watching films on their iPads. These are the people I want to get back in the cinema.”

Q: Why all the hoopla over a frame rate?

A: “Somehow as humans, we have a reaction to change that’s partly fear driven. But there are so many ways to look at movies now and it’s a choice that a filmmaker has. To me as a filmmaker, you’ve got to take the technology that’s available in 2012, not the technology we’ve lived with since 1927, and say how can we enhance the experience in the cinema? How can we make it more immersive, more spectacular?”

Q: George Lucas sold Lucasfilm to Disney for $ 4 billion. Do you think you will sell your New Zealand facility Weta someday?

A: “I would if I want to retire at some stage and want to have a nice easy life, which will hopefully happen one day. But in the foreseeable future, the fact that I’m an owner of my own digital effects facility is a fantastic advantage for me.”

Q: How so?

A: “When we asked the studio if we could shoot ‘The Hobbit‘ at 48 fps, we promised the budget would be the same. But it actually does have a cost implication because you’ve got to render twice as many frames and the rendering takes more time. The fact that we owned Weta and could absorb that in-house was actually part of the reason we were able to do the 48 frames.”

(Editing by Patricia Reaney)

Celebrity News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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World’s Population Living Longer, New Report Suggests

A sharp decline in deaths from malnutrition and diseases like measles and tuberculosis has caused a shift in global mortality patterns over the past 20 years, according to a new report, with far more of the world’s population now living into old age and dying from diseases more associated with rich countries, like cancer and heart disease.

The shift reflects improvements in sanitation, medical services and access to food throughout the developing world, as well as the success of broad public health efforts like vaccine programs. The results are dramatic: infant mortality has declined by more than half between 1990 and 2010, and malnutrition, the No. 1 risk factor for death and years of life lost in 1990, has fallen to No. 8.

At the same time, chronic diseases like cancer now account for about two out of every three deaths worldwide, up from just over half in 1990. Eight million people died of cancer in 2010, 38 percent more than in 1990. Diabetes claimed 1.3 million lives in 2010, double the number in 1990.

But while developing countries made big strides – the average age of death in Brazil and Paraguay, for example, jumped to 63 in 2010, up from 28 in 1970 – the United States stagnated. American women registered the smallest gains in life expectancy of all high-income countries between 1990 and 2010. The two years of life they gained was less than in Cyprus, where women gained 2.3 years of life, and Canada, where women gained 2.4 years. The slow increase caused American women to fall to 36th place in the report’s global ranking of life expectancy, down from 22nd in 1990.

“It’s alarming just how little progress there has been for women in the United States,” said Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, a health research organization financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation at the University of Washington that coordinated the report. Rising rates of obesity among American women and the legacy of smoking, a habit women in this country formed later than men, are among the factors contributing to the stagnation, he said.

The World Health Organization issued a statement Thursday saying that some of the estimates in the report differ substantially from those done by United Nations agencies, though others are similar. All comprehensive estimates of global mortality rely heavily on statistical modeling because only 34 countries – representing about 15 percent of the world’s population – produce quality cause-of-death data.

Health experts from more than 300 institutions contributed to the report, which measured disease and mortality for populations in more than 180 countries. It was published Thursday in the Lancet, a British health publication.

The one exception to the trend was sub-Saharan Africa, where infectious diseases, childhood illnesses and maternal causes of death still account for about 70 percent of all illness. In contrast, they account for just one-third in South Asia, and less than a fifth in all other regions. Sub-Saharan Africa also lagged in mortality gains, with the average age of death there rising by fewer than 10 years from 1970 to 2010, compared with a more than 25-year increase in Latin America, Asia and North Africa.

The change means that people are living longer, an outcome that public health experts praised. But it also raises troubling questions. Behavior affects people’s risks of developing noncommunicable diseases like cancer, heart disease and diabetes, and public health experts say it is far harder to get people to change their ways than to administer a vaccine that protects children from an infectious disease like measles.

“Adult mortality is a much harder task for the public health systems in the world,” said Colin Mathers, a senior scientist at the World Health Organization in Geneva. “It’s not something that medical services can address as easily.”

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Illinois foreclosures up for 11th month

Foreclosure activity in Illinois posted the 11th straight year-over-year increase in November, but compared with a month earlier, filings are trending in the right direction, according to new data released Thursday.

RealtyTrac said the 13,520 properties within the state that received a foreclosure notice last month was a decrease of 9 percent from October but up 9 percent from November 2011. last month's activity, which equated to one out of every 392 homes in the state receiving a notice, gave Illinois the nation's third-highest state foreclosure rate, surpassed by only Florida and Nevada.

In the Chicago-area counties of Cook, DuPage, Kane, Kendall, Lake and Will, almost 11,000 homes received a foreclosure notice in November, a decrease of 10.5 percent from October's level of activity but up 1.6 percent from November 2011

Most of that activity was in Cook County, where about 2,299 homes received initial notices of default, another 2,651 homes were scheduled for court-ordered sales and 2,086 homes were repossessed by lenders.

Among the nation's metropolitan areas, Rockford and Chicago ranked 11th and 13th, respectively, in terms of their foreclosure rates.

Nationally, the number of homes that were repossessed by lenders and became bank-owned rose on a year-over-year basis for the first time  since October 2010, the company said. In November, more than 59,000 homes across the country were repossessed, an increase of 11 percent from October and 5 percent from November 2011.

"The drop in overall foreclosure activity in November was caused largely by a 71-month low in foreclosure starts for the month, more evidence that we are past the worst of the foreclosure problem brought about by the housing bubble bursting six years ago," said Daren Blomquist, a company vice president. "But foreclosures are continuing to hobble the U.S. housing market as lenders finally seize properties that started the process a year or two ago, and much longer in some cases."

mepodmolik@tribune.com | Twitter @mepodmolik

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Police: Oregon mall shooting victims identified

The gunman who killed two people and himself in a shooting rampage at an Oregon mall was 22 years old and used a stolen rifle from someone he knew, authorities said Wednesday.

Jacob Tyler Roberts had armed himself with an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle and had several fully loaded magazines when he arrived at a Portland mall on Tuesday, said Clackamas County Sheriff Craig Roberts.

The sheriff said the rifle jammed during the 22-year-old's attack, but he managed to get it working again. He later shot himself. Authorities don't yet have a motive but don't believe he was targeting specific people.

Two people — a 54-year-old woman and a 45-year-old man — were killed, and another, Kristina Shevchenko, 15, was wounded and in serious condition on Wednesday.

Roberts, wearing a hockey-style face mask, parked his 1996 green Volkswagen Jetta in front of the second-floor entrance to Macy's and walked briskly through the store, into the mall and began firing randomly, police said.

He fatally shot Steven Mathew Forsyth of West Linn and Cindy Ann Yuille of Portland, the sheriff said.

Roberts then fled along a mall corridor and into a back hallway, down stairs and into a corner where police found him dead from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot, authorities said.

People at the mall were heroic in helping get shoppers out of the building, including medical personnel who rendered aid, Roberts said.

In response to previous mass shootings elsewhere, the first arriving officers were trained to form teams and go inside instead of waiting for SWAT. Employees at the mall also received training to handle such a situation.

"This could have been much, much worse," Roberts said.

The first 911 call came at 3:29 p.m. Tuesday and officers arrived a minute later. By 3:51 p.m., all the victims and the gunman and rifle had been found. Four SWAT teams spent hours clearing the 1.4 million square-foot mall, leaving shoppers and workers to hide in fear.

Roberts rented a basement room in a modest, single-story Portland home and hadn't lived there long, said a neighbor, Bobbi Bates. Bates said she saw Roberts leave at 1:30 p.m. Tuesday wearing a dark jacket and jeans, carrying a guitar case. An occupant at the house declined to comment.

The mall Santa, Brance Wilson, was waiting for the next child's Christmas wish when shots rang out, causing the mall to erupt into chaos.

About to invite a child to hop onto his lap, Wilson instead dove for the floor and kept his head down as he heard shots being fired upstairs in the mall.

"I heard two shots and got out of the chair. I thought a red suit was a pretty good target," said Wilson, 68. Families waiting for Santa scattered. More shots followed, and Wilson crept away for better cover.

Witnesses heard the gunman saying, "I am the shooter," as he fired rounds from a semi-automatic rifle inside the Clackamas Town Center, a popular suburban mall several miles from downtown Portland.

Some were close enough to the shooter to feel the percussion of his gun.

Kayla Sprint, 18, was interviewing for a job at a clothing store when she heard shots.

"We heard people running back here screaming, yelling '911,'" she told The Associated Press.

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‘The Hobbit’: Like One Bad Video Game

Perhaps the most exciting thing about Peter Jackson‘s landmark, blockbuster Lord of the Rings films was that they made fans, through a combination of stunning landscapes and intricate special effects and soaring music and dramatic spectacle, feel as though we were seeing an almost impossible elevation of the potential size and scope of movies. Here was a rich, dense, sprawling series of films that thundered like myths, that were breathtaking in their realization of some pretty huge ambitions. Sure, they were massive corporate projects that earned lots of people millions of dollars, but to the regular moviegoer they were feats that proved the majesty of the movies, the potential to tell enthralling stories that also played like art. And so it’s hugely disappointing, if not all that surprising, that Jackson’s first foray back into the land of Middle Earth, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, is such a sullenly, basely commercial and junky affair, a movie that feels not crafted with Jackson’s seemingly divine inspiration but by the hands of studio executives. Perhaps the reason that Warner Bros. is forgoing the usual console video-game tie-ins for simple mobile games is because the damn movie already looks like a video game, and not a very fun one at that.

RELATED: ‘The Hobbit’ Trailer Needs to Get Out of the Shire

The Lord of the Rings series succeeded aesthetically because it was such an elegant, painting-like wonder to behold. The textures and palettes all had the look of a particularly vibrant illustrated story book, the kind of immersive vision that exists somewhere between imagination and the real world. For The Hobbit, though, Jackson chose to film at a high frame rate and with Real 3D technology in mind — because 3D movies are doing well these days and, hell, doesn’t hurt that the tickets cost more — but the results are frequently hideous. Those among us who have bought shiny new flatscreen TVs over the past few years are likely familiar with the dreaded “Soap Opera Effect,” which turns what should be stunning, glossy images into cheap-looking messes, all strange movement and lighting, like any network soap or cheap British show. (Think Children of Men looking like Torchwood.) It’s the problem of technology over-thinking or over-performing, and it is on startling, gruesome display in The Hobbit. When you’re wearing the 3D glasses (and admittedly sitting a little off to the side), this hugely expensive movie looks like it was shot on a nice handheld digital camera on the cheap. Actors stand in strange contrast to the digital backgrounds behind them, motion looks too slick or unnatural. Gone are the somber vistas and rugged terrain, replaced by eye-aching shine and plastic-y smoothness. The most special effects-heavy sequences look very much like the non-playable parts of modern video games — the exposition bits that can amp up the graphics a bit because they don’t have to worry about the randomness of play, the stuff you see in the commercials, right before the “rated T for teen” part. I don’t know if I just had a bad projector or what, but I spent the bulk of this long movie distracted by how dreadful everything looked. With a few small exceptions — The Shire glows with lovely green, a mountain cave fight/chase sequence is bracingly rich — this is a dismally unattractive movie, featuring too many shots that I’m sure were lovely at some point but are too often ruined and chintzified by the terrible technology monster.

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So on its aesthetic merits, The Hobbit comes up more than short. The trouble is, it’s not rescued by many narrative successes. Jackson has taken largely from the first third of J.R.R. Tolkien‘s novel — about an expedition to reclaim a lost dwarf kingdom from a dragon — but he’s also added in some elements found in appendices detailing an expanded universe that Tolkien included in an edition of The Lord of the Rings. This is partly to flesh out the story as Jackson believes Tolkien meant it to be, but it’s also meant to satisfy the needs of a supersize film trilogy based on one mere book. And so we get several pointless and uninteresting diversions, mostly about dwarves and their bitter enemies the orcs, that read exactly like the filler they are. Jackson is trying to flesh out dwarf mythology, because we spend so much of our time with these little guys, but it feels tediously synthetic, as if there are two movies competing for attention with neither one getting its due. We go to the goblin caves of The Hobbit and then, upon deliverance from that dark place, are thrust right into some kind of honor-and-revenge-based conflict with a snarling, giant, one-armed orc. It’s all very crowded and strangely hurried for a movie that, all told, takes its sweet time.

RELATED: No One Likes Peter Jackson’s New ‘Hobbit’ Footage

I suspect that another of Jackson’s reasons for including all this extra dramatic battling is that, on its own, The Hobbit is something of a children’s book. We’ve got wacky, food-crazed dwarves, a mean old dragon, and a funny little guy to take us along on the journey. Jackson doesn’t deny his movie the kiddie flourishes — there’s snot humor and butt jokes and lots of other goofy stuff involving some trolls, plus two little musical numbers involving all the dwarves — but he then tries to complement them with the big, booming faith and honor stuff and it never properly congeals. One moment we’re on a sprightly children’s adventure, the next we’re talking in big fashion about all that warlike serious business. It’s a discordant mix, and I’d imagine it will leave both kids and adults out in the cold.

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The film is not without its bright spots, rare as they may be. Ian McKellen is a feisty, spirited, mysterious Gandalf as ever before, and Martin Freeman nicely and genially projects everyday hobbit-ness, even if he’s a tad underused in the film. (Yeah, in the movie called The Hobbit, there’s barely any time to focus on the darn Hobbit.) Cate Blanchett turns up once more as the ethereal elf Galadriel, lending the movie a cool classiness and a welcome dose of feminine energy. And, of course, we’re back, for one mesmerizing scene, with our beloved Gollum, so winningly and creepily played by Andy Serkis, and here yet another marvel of computer innovation. In some ways Gollum’s innate cartoonishness works better now than it did in the original trilogy, which is probably the only time that can be said of this movie. There are one or two moments in Gollum’s pivotal scene where he’s given a bit too much modern humor to play, but all told he’s the most welcome sight in the film. Maybe that’s just the newfound purist in me, yearning for the old days, but I suspect it has more to do with Gollum being the only genuinely realized character we’ve so far encountered in this new trio of films. Everyone else is a snoozy lesser version of someone else, especially the ridiculous bloodthirsty orc leader, who snarls and growls like something out of the Underworld movies. Sometimes, in the jumble of the The Hobbit‘s many cluttered and dull action scenes, the frantic blur looks like any sequence from one of those schlocky ’00s B-movies; all roughly hewn CGI clashing around nonsensically, with this orc fellow leading the charge.

RELATED: ‘The Hobbit’ Might Be Three Movies Now?

Despite all the technical advancements, if we can call them that, most moments in The Hobbit feel like Peter Jackson is sadly trying to make all those familiar LOTR elements work for him once more, without ever really being able to reignite the old flame. The supposedly awe-inducing visit to the elf city of Rivendell is a ho-hum experience in this new frame-rate-ruined world. A silly battle sequence involving a wizard, a silly Radagast the Brown, riding around pell-mell on a rabbit-drawn sled looks like an interstitial from late-era Super Mario. Even Elijah Wood, appearing briefly as Frodo, looks strange — a pale ghost of himself, as if stitched in from another movie by some forlorn and desperate hand. The film is inevitably resonant with memories of the original trilogy, and little about it can hold up to the comparison. There’s too much effort in the wrong places — action instead of story, technical tricks instead of actual design — and the constant rhythm of arbitrary event after arbitrary event becomes tiresome well before the film’s two hours and forty minutes have lurched to a halt. I’m sure there are kids who will like this wan, distracted effort — they might not yet have anything else to compare it to, depending on their age — but as a human who remembers what came before, I’m afraid The Hobbit left me nothing but frustrated, sad, and tired. Frustrated that these big-budget visionaries seem to consistently feel they have to taint their earlier masterpieces with techno-junk followups, sad that once magical lands now flicker cheap and garish in my head, and tired at the prospect of two more of these things. I exited the theater trying to remind myself that Attack of the Clones was way better than Phantom Menace and that Revenge of the Sith was better still. I then realized how depressing it was that I was making that comparison. Oh, Middle Earth. What has become of you?

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How “Life of Pi” animators visualized Ang Lee’s blank slate

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – “Life of Pi” is a movie that has the proverbial cast of thousands… of animals, that is. In one shot set on the ocean, there are 40,000 flying fish. In another one set on a floating island, there are 60,000 meerkats. And not one of them was living and breathing, of course.

“No real meerkats were used,” senior animation supervisor Erik-Jan De Boer told the audience at an effects-themed Q&A following TheWrap’s screening of the movie at the Landmark Theatre on Monday night. “Except of course we went to meerkat sanctuaries and zoos to shoot a lot of reference footage…”

“And the two of us watched every episode of ‘Meerkat Manor,’” interrupted visual effects supervisor Bill Westenhofer. “We were gonna watch one, but it gets addictive.”

That was about all the time these two had to indulge in reality TV during the long gestation and post-production of Pi, which establishes a new benchmark for awe-inspiring digital trickery – particularly in 3D, or “stereo,” as Westenhofer and De Boer refer to the effects-complicating process.

“In total,” De Boer told TheWrap’s editor-in-chief Sharon Waxman, “we animated 580 animals in about 290 shots for the movie, which includes a giraffe, a fox, a fish, and of course the hyena and orangutan.” Not to mention the little matter of the tiger, “Richard Parker,” whose appearances as one of the movie’s co-leads are 15 percent real, 85 percent digital.

That’s not including the aforementioned meerkat and flying fish extras, brought to life via a software program appropriately titled Massive. (If only it had been around in Cecil B. DeMille‘s day.)

“The flying fish sequence is where we start to take some artistic liberties, since Pi’s telling you a tale,” said Westenhofer. “Maybe there were a thousand flying fish in reality, or even a hundred, but you’re seeing his mind’s eye, which saw this multitude, so we have 40,000 in one particular spot. The Massive software is almost artificial intelligence, where you write a little program that’s the brain for each individual fish, and it decides if it’s going to hop out of the water, and how long it’s going to fly; if it sees someone in its path, it does avoidance.”

But before any of that was animated, there was the live-action filming that took place on a 70 meter-by-30 meter wave tank that director Ang Lee had specially built for the film. And there, said Westenhofer, “you had (star) Suraj Sharma on a boat with two guys in rubber rafts just chucking rubber fish at him as hard as they possibly can. It’s a good mixture of the low-tech and the high-tech.”

Of course, it wasn’t fish but previous experience with big cats that got Rhythm & Hues the assignment from Lee to go from lions to tigers and Pi. “He knew we had done the lion in the first Narnia movie. He asked, ‘Does a digital character look more or less real in 3D?’ We looked at each other and thought that was a pretty good question.”

As well as a leading one, since Lee had already made the decision at that point, in 2009, to shoot in 3D. “We took one of the shots and rendered it in stereo and said ‘Yeah, it gives it a little more presence and makes it more real.’” Good answer! “That was the start of our relationship with him.”

Although “Life of Pi” doesn’t exactly go for documentary-style realism, every effort was made to keep the tiger’s actions and reactions to what experts and trainers told them a creature would really do in those situations. Not having him spout any Aslan-style aphorisms was a nice start on that de-anthropomorphizing.

“We always strive for photorealism,” said De Boer – even when they’re working on a Narnia or Cats and Dogs. “Motion-wise we strive for perfect physicality and try to get that animal to behave as characteristically as possible – and then we always have to make them talk or dance or do something really weird, and the realism goes out the window and everybody knows that we were there. For me what was really cool about this movie is not only do we stick with the real animal but we also have to intercut it with a live-action animal, so that made the challenge for us that much bigger.”

Added Westenhofer, “We told the crew we wanted to work ourselves out of any recognition by making it look as real as possible.”

It was at least as big of a challenge, as far as Westenhofer was concerned, to make the digital waves match or amplify the real tank waves – and to create the film’s skies completely from scratch. “There’s not many films where we spend this much time on the water. I think ‘Old Man and the Sea’ harkens back! But even with ‘Titanic,’ you’ll see the water and then go inside.” For much of “Life of Pi,” “inside” amounts to a few furtive peeks under a tarp.

Hence what, on a project like this, becomes a fine line where digital effects providers are also, to some extent, taking over the role of cinematography and art direction. Going to work on filling up these blue-screen shots, the Rhythm & Hues people might well have been humming Bruce Springsteen’s “Empty Sky” to themselves.

“What I’m absolutely most proud of is with these visual effects is that we were given a blank slate for a lot of these shots,” Westenhofer told the audience. “We were given a boat in front of a blue screen, and it was the visual effects team who really were a lot of the creative innovators on the movie. Certainly it was Ang’s vision we were creating. But we’d start a shot, and though Ang absolutely knows what he wants, his communication is sometimes not as specific as you want. Instead of saying ‘I want a three-quarters cloudy sky with yellow over here and some blue,’ he’d say ‘I want a pensive sky.’

Or, ‘I want it to be operatic.’ So it would be our job to go translate that, and the team did a great job of supplying that.

“And Claudio Miranda did an awesome, awesome job on the cinematography, but a lot of the cinematography on the ocean is digital effects.”

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Fed adds another $45B per month in stimulus

The Federal Reserve ramped up its stimulus to the economy on Wednesday, expressing disappointment with the pace of recovery in employment as contentious U.S. budget talks heighten uncertainty about the outlook.

The central bank replaced a more modest stimulus program due to expire at year-end with a fresh round of Treasury purchases that will increase its balance sheet. It committed to monthly purchases of $45 billion in Treasuries on top of the $40 billion per month in mortgage-backed bonds it started buying in September.

In a surprise move, the Fed also adopted numerical thresholds for policy, a step that had not been expected until early next year. In particular, the Fed said it will likely keep official rates near zero for as long as unemployment remains above 6.5 percent, inflation between one and two years ahead is projected to be no more than 2.5 percent, and long-term inflation expectations remain contained.

The Fed noted unemployment remains elevated and that inflation is running somewhat below policymakers' 2 percent objective.

"The Committee remains concerned that, without sufficient policy accommodation, economic growth might not be strong enough to generate sustained improvement in labor market conditions," the Fed said in a statement.

Policymakers also repeated a pledge to keep buying bonds until the labor market outlook improves substantially. A drop in the jobless rate to 7.7 percent in November from 7.9 percent in October was driven by workers exiting the labor force, and therefore did not come close to satisfying that condition.

Under the "Operation Twist" program that will expire at the end of the month, the Fed was buying $45 billion in longer-term Treasuries with proceeds from the sale of short-term debt. The new round of government bond-buying it announced on Wednesday will be funded by essentially creating new money, further expanding the Fed's $2.8 trillion balance sheet.

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke will discuss the central bank's latest decision at a news conference at 2:15 p.m. (1915 GMT).

SWEATING A WEAK RECOVERY

The Fed cut overnight interest rates to near zero in December 2008 and has bought about $2.4 trillion in bonds in a further effort to push borrowing costs lower and spur a stronger recovery.

Despite the unconventional and aggressive efforts, U.S. economic growth remains tepid. GDP grew at a 2.7 percent annual rate in the third quarter, but it now appears to be slowing sharply. According to a Reuters poll published on Wednesday, economists expect the economy to expand at just a 1.2 percent pace in the current quarter.

Businesses have hunkered down, fearful of a tightening of fiscal policy as politicians in Washington wrangle over ways to avoid a $600 billion mix of spending reductions and expiring tax cuts set to take hold at the start of 2013.

Bernanke has warned that running over this "fiscal cliff" would lead the economy into a new recession.

Fed officials will release a new set of quarterly economic and interest rate projections at 2 p.m. (1900 GMT) that could show yet another round of downward revisions to future growth prospects.

Back in September, the Fed predicted the U.S. economy would expand 2.5 percent to 3 percent in 2013, but even that modest rate is looking potentially rosy. The Reuters poll showed a median U.S. growth estimate of 2.1 percent for next year on the same fourth quarter over fourth quarter basis.

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Michigan governor signs right-to-work legislation

Right to Work Protestors - Capitol Rotunda. (Posted: Dec. 11, 2012).

LANSING, Mich.—

Michigan enacted a ban on mandatory union membership on Tuesday, dealing a stunning blow to organized labor in the state that is home to U.S. automakers and the symbol of industrial labor in the United States.

As more than 12,000 unionized workers and supporters protested at the Capitol in Lansing, the Republican-led state House of Representatives gave final approval to a pair of "right-to-work" bills covering public- and private-sector unions.

Republican Governor Rick Snyder signed the bills into law as soon as they reached his desk, completing in a few days a campaign to make Michigan the 24th U.S. state to prohibit unions from requiring employees to join and contribute dues.

"I view this as an opportunity to stand up for Michigan's workers, to be pro-worker," Snyder told a news conference after he signed the bills.

The laws will take effect 90 days after the end of the legislative session, which means they will probably come into force sometime in April. Existing union contracts will not be changed until they expire, according to a provision of the laws.

In a rapid turn of events, Michigan moved from being a bastion of union influence to joining states, mostly in the South, that have weakened local protections for unions.

The Teamsters union national president, James Hoffa, whose father, Jimmy Hoffa, was one of the nation's most famous labor leaders until he disappeared in 1975 in Michigan, denounced Republican leaders in a speech to the protesters.

"Let me tell the governor and all those elected officials who vote for this shameful, divisive bill - there will be repercussions," Hoffa said, adding the Republicans could be defeated in the next election.

Unions have accused Snyder of caving in to wealthy Republican business owners and political donors such as the Koch brothers, owners of an energy and trading conglomerate, and Richard DeVos, the co-founder of Michigan-based Amway.

Snyder, a former computer company executive who had said "right-to-work" legislation was too divisive for Michigan, changed course last week and announced his support for it.

While labor leaders decried the legislation, Republican Representative Lisa Lyons said during the debate in the House that such laws were not an attack on unions.

"This is the day Michigan freed its workers," she said.

Opponents argue that the measures undermine a basic union tenet of bargaining collectively with employers for better wages, benefits and working conditions. They also allow workers to opt out of a union, potentially reducing membership.

By weakening unions, Republicans also could hurt the Democratic Party, which traditionally receives a significant portion of its funding and grass-roots support from unions.

Supporters of right-to-work measures say some unions have become too rigid and workers should be given a choice of whether to join. They also say a more flexible labor market encourages business investment, citing "right-to-work" states where some foreign automakers have put plants rather than in Michigan.

CRIES OF 'SHAME'

The measures were approved to cries of "shame" from protesters inside the Capitol building, which was closed to visitors when it reached capacity of 2,200, Michigan State Police Inspector Gene Adamczyk said.

An estimated 10,000 more people demonstrated outside in cold and snowy conditions, including members of the United Auto Workers union, and teachers, who shut down several schools in the state to attend the rally.

A few protesters were ejected from the Capitol after they chanted slogans from the gallery during the debate. Protesters tore down two tents set up for supporters of "right-to-work" on the grounds of the Capitol. Adamczyk said six people were arrested after scuffling with officers.

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