Friday Items

ABC wins its fifth straight Thursday

Averages a 4.0 in 18-49s, topping reruns on CBS

ABC won its fifth straight Thursday with ease last night, opposite a lineup of mostly reruns on CBS and Fox’s surging baseball. ● More from: Media Life Magazine

ABC tops ratings with ‘Grey’s,’ ‘Private’

Fox, CBS solid with baseball, repeats

Behind the strength of No. 1-rated “Grey’s Anatomy” and spinoff “Private Practice,” ABC took the Thursday night primetime race. Fox, which aired the fifth game of the American League Championship Series, was second, and CBS, despite airing two repeats, came in third. ● More from: Variety

Bill for Glenn Beck Day stuns Mount Vernon

Glenn Beck Day in Mount Vernon was an expensive lesson for this small town, as it found out the cost of hosting a controversial celebrity.

It’s on the hook for $17,748.85, mostly for 239 hours of police overtime. ● More from: Seattle Times Newspaper

Amazon stock surges after blowout 3Q results

Shares of Amazon surged about 25 percent Friday after the Seattle Internet retailer reported a 68 percent increase in its third-quarter profit to $199 million and issued an upbeat outlook. ● More from: Seattle Times Newspaper

Stern Says Vote on Proposed Nets Sale to Happen This Year

The proposed sale of a controlling stake in the Nets to a Russian billionaire will be put to a vote of N.B.A. owners by the end of the year, according to Commissioner David Stern, who spoke positively Thursday about the deal. ● More from: NYTimes.com

Soupy Sales, famed comedian from the Golden Age of Television, dead at 83

Soupy Sales, the rubber-faced, pie-in the-puss comic beloved by the Baby Boomer generation, died Thursday night. He was 83.

No true fan can forget the New Year’s Day 1965 live broadcast on WNEW.

Sales, miffed at having to work the holiday, signed off by encouraging his young viewers to tiptoe into their still-sleeping parents’ bedrooms and remove those “funny green pieces of paper with pictures of U.S. Presidents” from their pants and pocketbooks.

“Put them in an envelope and mail them to me,” Sales instructed. “And I’ll send you a postcard from Puerto Rico!”

He was then hit with a pie. ● More from: nydailynews.com

The Nation preps book mocking Palin

Editors from the progressive magazine The Nation are pulling together a book to be released the same day as Sarah Palin’s with a similar title and cover mocking the former Alaska governor’s memoir. ● More from: POLITICO.com

FX’s ‘Anarchy’ is first basic cable series to beat Leno

Forget broadcast, now NBC’s “The Jay Leno Show” is fighting off a challenger from basic cable.

For the first time, NBC’s Leno experiment was beaten in the ratings by a non-sports program that wasn’t airing on the Big Four networks. ● More from: THR

Fortune Magazine to Cut Number of Issues

Capping a tumultuous year for business magazines, Fortune is planning to publish about one-quarter fewer issues annually and make other changes, joining the ranks of publications scrambling to reinvent themselves in the advertising downturn. ● More from: WSJ.com

‘Amelia’ Reviews

The critics have mixed opinions of Hilary Swank’s new movie. I will be seeing it this weekend and expect a big old fashion sweeping epic with no deep of examination of Amelia Earhart’s life or motivations. Hey, it’s not documentary!  These days most critics (most of them are under 40 years of age) want to see explosions, thrilling chase scenes and raunchy blue humor.  Then there are those (I am not naming names) who have to trash any movie about a strong woman.  My complete coverage is here.

Big-screen ‘Amelia’ isn’t as compelling as the real Earhart

There’s a tiny moment in Mira Nair’s “Amelia” that has the unfortunate effect of making everything else in the movie seem overblown and sentimental: It’s a brief, undated film clip of the real Amelia Earhart, jumping out of a cockpit (really, she’s practically springing) and beaming with unselfconscious joy. Something about the looseness of her movements and the simple happiness on her face makes the moment both irresistible and poignant; she would, before too long, vanish forever. ● More from: Seattle Times Newspaper

Review: ‘Amelia’

The aviatrix loses her personality in this superficial film.

History can weigh heavily on a filmmaker, and that is what happens with “Amelia,” a disappointing rendering of the remarkable life of Amelia Earhart. The pioneering aviatrix lost in flight is a figure so iconic, and director Mira Nair so tentative with her legend, that all the reverence and tiptoeing around grounds a film that should have soared. ● More from: Review: ‘Amelia’ — latimes.com

An Adventurer Takes Flight, Blinding Smile and All

Amelia Earhart, the American aviator who disappeared somewhere over the Pacific in 1937 while trying to become the first woman to fly around the globe, didn’t wear bodices, as far as I can tell from the new biographical movie starring Hilary Swank. If Earhart had, it’s a good bet that Richard Gere, who plays her sensitive, supportive, quietly suffering husband, George Palmer Putnam (G. P.), would have ripped or, rather, politely removed an unmentionable or two amid the civilized yearning and the surging, swelling music. ● More from: Movie Review – Amelia – NYTimes.com