Gambit gets a lot of press releases. Especially with the Saints season opener coming up, we get a lot of NFL related product pitches. For example, is this the snack chip that will make your game watching truly special? But check out this winner. (FYI, it is a media invite, not open to the public.) Apparently women love to clean and cook for their families. What could be more satisfying to a mom than having the men in her family watch NFL games in a “fresh’ environment. Wow, I heart traditional values.

The graphic makes a nod at suggesting that all this cleaning and cooking would be of interest not just to moms but to the whole family. The pitchman, Brian Cash (of MS&L Worldwide), was less PC in his email text (bold emphasis added):

“Febreze and the NFL are partnering for a second year to help moms across the country be “Game Day Ready.” With the help of the “First Lady of Football,” Olivia Manning, Febreze is getting moms ready by providing great home freshening tips and trick as well as game day recipes that the family will love. If you’re interested, Febreze and Olivia are hosting an event on September 9th to kickoff the season and the Febreze Game Day Freshness Tour. Below is the invitation, please let me know if you’d be interested in attending. Hope to hear from you soon!

Thanks,
Brian”

I did not know that Olivia Manning is the “First Lady of Football.” Or that she endorses “freshness.” But she’ll be there to share tips and recipes. I am sure a lot of women (reporters) would love the opportunity to take some hard-to-clean items down to this event and see how Olivia would tackle the challenge. Of course, some women might just like watching the Saints, or football. That’s good clean fun, too.

Pre-game festivities for the NFL season opener between the Saints and the Minnesota Vikings (7:30 p.m. Thur., Sept 9) include a Mardi Gras-style parade (with floats by Blaine Kern Studios) through the French Quarter and music by the Dave Matthews Band and Taylor Swift. The Krewe of NFL parade route starts at Esplanade and North Peters Street, proceeds along North Peters, merging on to Decatur and then back to North Peters, and then it feeds on to Tchoupitoulas Street and ends at Julia Street. The concert is at Jackson Square and the stage will be on the river side of Decatur Street facing the square. The parade however, is not a parade between Dumaine and Toulouse streets, says NOPD. For those blocks, it’s an event being orchestrated by NBC for its pregame broadcast (6:30 p.m.-7:30 p.m.). The staging is expected to intersperse songs, floats passing by the Jackson Square on-camera set and segments with Bob Costas. People who wish to be close to the stage can apply for tickets to be in the “casted audience.” An NFL spokesperson and the ticket website say tickets are first come, first serve. Also, access to Jackson Square will be restricted to ticket holders.

Photo courtesy of HBO

On a weekend full of Hurricane Katrina anniversary events and memorials, NOMA hosts screenings of the entire first season of Treme. Episode 1 begins at 10:30 a.m. Saturday and the day’s final installment is episode 7 at 4:30 p.m. The final three episodes run on Sunday morning from 10:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Admission to NOMA is free this weekend, and also featured is “Untitled [New Orleans and the Gulf Coast]: Photographs by Richard Misrach.” The show runs through Oct. 24.

In the past week, during which hysteria over the proposed Cordoba House in lower Manhattan reached new fervor and polls revealed that 18 percent of Americans falsely believe President Obama is Muslim, a couple of interesting news stories came out about China. Many newspapers reported that China had surpassed Japan and became the world’s second largest economy. And then there was an absurd story of a Chinese traffic jam that is 60 miles and an estimated 9 days long. While mainstream America has been focused on the Middle East for the past decade, it would seem that in the future, we will be more concerned with China, which has an economy enjoying three straight decades of economic growth.

A film about contemporary Chinese art and the effects of globalization, Robert Adanto’s The Rising Tide is a visually fascinating profile of the change happening there. In the relatively short period since the rise of Deng Xiaoping, China has undergone tremendous change and tremendously fast change — vis-à-vis its thousands of years of history and the shift away from Mao’s communism to an orientation toward economic development. It screens at Zeitgeist this week (7 p.m. Wed.-Thu., Sat.-Sun.), and Adanto, who is in town working on another documentary, will attend screenings.

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Restrepo is one of the best combat documentaries I have seen, and also one of the best films about U.S. involvement in Afghanistan (I would add Alex Gibney’s Taxi to the Darkside as well). What allowed Sebastian Junger (A Perfect Storm) and Tim Hetherington to make such a riveting film was the amount of time each spent with Battle Company in the Korengal Valley in eastern Afghanistan. Each spent five months with the unit, going on missions and living with the soldiers at the forward outpost Restrepo, which they named after a fellow soldier killed in action, PFC Juan Restrepo (who is on film in the opening scene, footage taken by another company member in Italy before deployment). Junger was in a Humvee that was almost destroyed by a bomb planted in the road. It was detonated prematurely, going off under the engine block. A few feet further back and it would likely have killed or critically injured men in the Humvee. The scene comes early in the film, and it sets up what the deployment was like for Battle Company: 14 months in one of the war’s deadliest combat zones; in which their unit was often attacked four or five times a day by Taliban fighters.

Junger had met some members of Battle Company while embedded with it in 2005, doing an article for Vanity Fair. He decided to return to Afghanistan with the unit in 2008 (which by then had mostly different personnel). He had no advance notice they would be deployed to Korengal. When they got there, Capt. Dan Kearney decided to push back against the heavy fire from the Taliban by creating a forward outpost on a ridge. The soldiers literally dug into a rocky mountainside ridge to build what came to be known as Outpost Restrepo. Soldiers lived there for one and two-month stretches (and Junger and Hetherington stayed with them). Over time, the soldiers accepted the two journalists as if they were company members and opened up to the cameras, offering revealing interviews about what war is like on the frontlines. There also are follow up interviews in Italy after the tour of duty.

In an interview with Gambit, Junger talked about what they were able to get on film and what was left out. More after the jump.

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