Fanjayas Unite!

Oh, man, Sanjaya is totally going to win "American Idol" and it's going to be ridiculously awesome. It's not that the guy has absolutely no talent. It's that the guy has absolutely no talent and is incredibly creepy.

I think it was that hula dance. There was something genuinely unsettling about this entire sequence. His total lack of self-awareness, his willingness to be exploited and made to look ridiculous in front of literally millions of people. It was almost inhuman, that performance, and therefore compelling. You keep thinking, what's going on in his head? Doesn't he realize how poorly this is coming across? How lame he will be made to appear?



Sweet...

What's even more incredible than Sanjaya's combination of talentlessness and determination to go on television weekly to prove said talentlessness is the fact that some people out there genuinely like him! For reals! There's an actual community of people online who believe that Sanjaya haters like Simon Cowell dislike the guy because they are racist homophobes! (Trust me, none of it's worth linking to.)

I'm not sure who's more sad...The Sanjaya-lovers, either be deaf or abnormally attracted to shit-eating grins, or the Sanjaya-haters who are actually emotionally invested in the outcome of "American Idol."

Take the woman who has promised to fast until Sanjaya is kicked off the show. Wow, really? Doesn't she realize that she could do herself serious harm before next week's results come in? Maybe she's Jew-fasting, which is really more like having a late lunch when you get right down to it.

We're Taking Your Favorite Song Out of the Jukebox

Ready to stare into the face of comic genius?



HA HA HA! Oh, man, that is perfect...

Insert "Spinal Tap" Reference Here

Some guy in Flint, Michigan may have figured out how Stonehenge was built. His technique is so thuddingly obvious, it's hard to believe no one had pieced it all together before. I mean...as a species, we can design the microchip, but no one had ever determined that you can spin a very heavy stone around on a rock?



Perhaps it's not that Wally is so much more CLEVER than anyone else for figuring this out, but that people who aren't Druids don't bother to test out elaborate theories like this in their backyard. I mean, I get that the guy is retired, but where does one find the hours in the day to slowly adjust heavy stones atop rocks in the hopes of reverse engineering British tourist attractions? I can barely manage two loads of laundry and a haircut in a whole weekend.

Tinseltown Torquemadas

Driving home from work a few days ago, I saw a billboard on Santa Monica Blvd. featuring a bound Elisha Cuthbert being tortured. Risque movie advertisements are nothing terribly original around Los Angeles, but this one struck even my seasoned, jaded eyes as a touch extreme.

The film, Captivity, comes out in June, and presumably featured Ms. Cuthbert and a cadre of similarly-toned young people being tormented by a faceless, half-obscured foe with some kind of elaborate-yet-flashback-friendly backstory explaining his insatiable craving for innards or screams or what have you. Hey, at least they're not murderous puppets, okay?

It turns out, the ads were disturbing enough to get pulled only days after being released. Bear in mind, we're perfectly alright with the posters for Hostel 2, which feature a nude Bijou Phillips seductively displaying on to her own severed head...

Here's the Hollywood Reporter:

In the wake of a public outcry against Los Angeles billboards and New York taxicab tops advertising the upcoming movie "Captivity" with images of the abduction, torture and death of a young woman, After Dark Films said it will take down the offending ads by 2 p.m. today.

After Dark, its theatrical distribution partner Lionsgate Films and the MPAA received a barrage of phone calls objecting to the gratuitous depiction of the film's star Elisha Cuthbert being tortured and killed.

In all fairness, they did name their company "Dark Films." So it's not like they have anything to hide. It would be much more outrageous if this film came courtesy of "Jasmine-Scented Baby Chocolate Kitten Films."

The billboards, first posted March 13, feature four frames with captions above each one. "Abduction" shows Cuthbert with a gloved hand over her face; "Confinement" features the actress behind a chain-link fence with a bloody finger poking through; "Torture" depicts Cuthbert's face, covered in white gauze, with tubes shoved up her nose; and "Termination" shows her with her head thrown back, seemingly dead.

The ads appeared on 30 Los Angeles-area billboards and 1,400 New York taxi tops. After Dark is paying to have them removed -- and while some billboards in the Hollywood area were still visible Monday, others already had come down.

The "torture" panel is the one that's really disturbing. It's genuinely a shocking image - a woman being suffocated - writ large on the city's skyline. You sense this will be one of those fascinating historical footnotes that students will read about our civilization hundreds of years from now, should we miraculously live out the reign of King Shrub.

"The American culture was so violent, they would hang photos of their most beautiful girls being brutally tortured in the public square for amusement." Hey, I like horror movies, but even I can admit this makes us look bad.

Even worse is the fact that the film studio won't own up to the fact that their producing a torture movie.

Lionsgate said Monday that it had no involvement with the ads, which were produced by Art Machine Digital, and that all the marketing for the movie had been handled solely by After Dark.

"This film was done in association with After Dark Films. The nature of the association allows After Dark autonomy over their marketing materials, and therefore we neither saw nor approved this billboard before it was posted," said Peter Wilkes, head of Lionsgate investor relations. "Once aware of the materials and the reaction to them, we immediately asked After Dark to remove the billboards, to which they immediately and cooperatively responded."

So, in short, Lionsgate position is as follows:

"Yes, we financed and agreed to distribute a film called Captivity focused on the kidnapping and torture of a young girl. But we had no intention of actually advertising this film to the general public. That's all on you guys!"

I mean, yes, the ad was a bit excessive and graphic, but the real issue is that there are now several American films being produced each year about torture. Not even involving torture, necessarily, but about torture. The Hills Have Eyes remake, which has a sequel opening soon, was about nothing but torture. The opening half hour was the most standard, boring, rote retelling of the classic horror set-up imaginable. You sensed the actors and director's boredom with the scenario.

Then, the family gets to the desert, and it's just 75 or so minutes of vivisection. I don't have a problem with movie violence, per se, and it has to be considerably extreme to get any kind of genuine rise out of me, but I just get bored with a film like Hills Have Eyes. Repeated shots of gory mayhem are not entertaining in and of themselves. The film has to build its own tension, comic or otherwise, and then release this tension through the creative use of shocking violence. (As in David Cronenberg's A History of Violence or even, to use a more extreme example, Peter Jackson's Dead Alive).

The first Hostel film is often cited as the cornerstone of this new American genre (the Japanese have been fans of the torture film for several decades now), and it definitely has some outrageous money shots, but it's at least a real film with a real storyline (and even comedy). Take out the drills and third degree burns and you'd still have a movie, albeit a generic and largely uninteresting one.

The Hills Have Eyes, these new Texas Chainsaw remakes, these direct-to-DVD wretches with names like Rest Stop, they try to out-gross and out-butcher one another, but they're worn down by the Law of Diminishing Returns. The audience has already been shocked about as much as they'll be shocked by gruesome imagery, and now we're just dulling the severity and affect of the word "torture."

I'll say again for the record, I have no real problem with movies that feature torture. In fact, I like a lot of movies that include a good deal of torture, like Three Kings or Casino Royale or even Hostel and Oldboy and Ichi the Killer. That last one's 98% torture scenes! I even like that awful Showtime "Masters of Horror" series, in which noted film directors like John Carpenter, Tobe Hooper and Dario Argento take turns making stupid hour-long horror films full to bursting with as many unsheathed nipples and exploding duodenums as can be purchased with a $438.93 budget.

I just think it's stupid and hypocritical for a studio to get defensive about an advertisement for a torture film when they have actually made a torture film.

After Dark said the posting of the billboards was an accident. CEO Courtney Solomon said the wrong files were sent to the printer, who then passed them on to the billboard company without approval from any executives at After Dark. Execs from the indie production company were attending ShoWest in Las Vegas last week and had no idea the wrong billboards were posted until they returned from the convention Thursday to a flood of e-mails and phone calls from angry parents and offended women.

"Personally, I wasn't going to go with this campaign. I thought it was OTP (over the top)," Solomon said. "Nothing like this can ever happen again."

I mean, shit, that is so lame. This guy's the CEO of an entertainment company, and this is the best lie he can come up with? The wrong files were sent to the printer? That's a fucking high school lie. "Joe, this book report is terrible." "Oh, I must have printed out the rough draft! I'll get you the real one tomorrow!"

I like as well that it's assumed the only ones who would be offended are parents and women. I'm male and I was initially surprised to see that image floating above a busy intersection. It's a picture of someone being held against their will, tortured, suffocated and murdered. Naturally, only concerned parents or fragile ladies with their delicate, Victorian sensibilities could possibly be offended.

Having said that, I feel the criticism of the poster, though initially understandable, is still not particularly logical.

He added that the images on the billboard are not an accurate representation of the film, which stars Cuthbert as a woman who awakens to find herself being held in a cellar. "This movie is certainly a horror movie and it's about abduction, but it's also about female empowerment," Solomon said. "We reshot the ending so the main character ends up in as much of a positive situation as the situation could allow. There is no rape or nudity in it, though it should be an R-rated movie. For the audience it's made for, it's satisfying to that audience. I'm sure that's not the same audience that's complaining about the billboards."

The "female empowerment" line is lame, but still...I basically agree with what Solomon is saying here. These movies come at torture scenarios from the perspective of the victim, pretty much always. Like the Freddy or Jason films of the '80s, they have found a way to have fun with the idea of twisted, senseless murder while essentially remaining on the side of goodness and light. Whether or not they reshot the ending, Cuthbert will be the hero of this story. We in the audience will feel frightened because we imagine ourselves held captive in a basement.

The other side would be something like "24," which places the audience in the perspective of a torturer. We don't feel afraid, but oddly empowered, because our hero is a man who is willing to break any rule or defy any convention in order to win the day for motherfuckin' Amurica, bitches!

I find that much more distressing than the idea of Elisha Cuthbert being buried alive.




















Well, that does look empowering...

Another reason I'm inclined to believe Solomon about this movie, by the way? It's directed by Roland Joffe, of The Killing Fields and The Mission fame. Most of Joffe's films aren't as good as those two, but he's hardly some post-Eli Roth genre hack.

(Photo courtesy of What Would Tyler Durden Do)

Why Kwame Sucks

I would never tell Kwame Brown that he sucks to his face. The guy's 6'11". A friendly back slap from this guy would put me in the hospital for weeks.

Yet tonight, I felt perfectly comfortable lobbing this insult towards him from not very far away. (He was also informed that his perpetual sloth and lackadaisical attitude towards his occupation resembles a co-worker of mine named Rupak, though I'm thinking that sort of inside reference would go right over his head. If such a thing were possible.)

Through a benevolent act, 20 co-workers and I managed to get into one of those luxury boxes at Staples Center to see the hometown Lakers (sometimes known as the "Gay-kers" to those who insist upon hating on popular basketball franchises AND homosexuals simultaneously) take on the Portland Trail Blazers. It was, in a word, awesome. In two words, it was "totally awesome."

I am not a basketball fan in any sense of the word. In fact, going into the Staples Center tonight, I realized (to myself, of course) that I could only NAME two active Lakers. Kobe Bryant, who is a celebrity icon and alleged rapist first and a famous athlete second, and Lamar Odom. I have no idea how it is that I have come to know of Lamar Odom, and not only to recognize and remember his name but to know his team affiliation. It must be some kind of holdover from my days of living with rabid sportsman Matt, who would take advantage of my perpetually stoned collegiate inertia and dominate the television for weeks at a time.

Matt's theory went something like this...All I wanted to watch were old TV shows like "The Simpsons," most of which I had seen and all of which would surely be re-run at some future date. He, on the other hand, wanted to watch live sporting events or sports recaps, programs that could only be seen and enjoyed at that exact moment in time. (Recall, these were those horrible, dark days before the advent of TiVO and the DVR. How did people manage to entertain themselves?) Most of the time, I was too spaced out or lazy to argue.

I thought I had forced all of that "SportsCenter" information out of my head and replaced it with rock songs, film theory and shrill anti-Bush blog posts, but some random scraps have remained.

For what it's worth, I also remember that this guy looks creepy:

...and that this guy...

...was arrested in 2001 with 213 pounds of marijuana in his van.

Which is hilarious on many levels. Who breaks traffic laws when they're driving around with 213 pounds of marijuana? Who even needs 213 pounds of marijuana? I mean, obviously it wasn't for personal use. Even Nate couldn't be that many tokes over the line. But being an NFL player, you're already making a lot of money and, even worse, you're extremely visible. Which is the last thing you want to be if, you know, you're a fucking drug dealer!

Anyway, despite the above references being pretty much the extent of my sporting knowledge (okay, I also know that Barry Bonds is a dick and that Ice Cube can get a triple-double, even when he's just messing around), I had a great time at Staples tonight.

And it wasn't only the free booze and food and the kickass suite, although that stuff never hurts. A fridge full of Heineken keg cans, some garlic french fries, pulled pork sandwiches and Snickers Pie will, in fact, buy you several hours of my time and not a small amount of loyalty. But beyond the sybaritic delights, I actually enjoyed just watching the basketball game. Perhaps all this time, I have been bored by basketball because it is on television, which consistantly renders live events as flat and uninteresting, or because of bad views in horrible seats. Really, I'm not sure I've ever attended a sporting event before and had what anyone would reasonably consider a good seat. So, like, of course I've always found them boring.

Well, not baseball. That's genuinely boring. I mean...come on...There's a liesurely game and then there's a bunch of dirtbags spitting and scratching themselves and sometimes trotting around in a circle. It's not even a particularly fine line. The only people capable of really getting into baseball are seriously confused nerds. See, they should be focusing all that energy on exciting careers in accountancy or in the high-growth field of Star Trek memorabilia collection, but instead, they have become obsessively focused on compiling and arranging meaningless statistics. Reading an intense baseball fan blog is pretty much identical to reading an advanced academic paper on String Theroy. Except in the latter case, brilliant minds are struggling to answer the grandest, most significant questions our species has ever posed about the universe, and in the former case, a bunch of douchebags are trying to figure out which left-handed sluggers are the most consistant in windy conditions. Otherwise, though...it's uncanny...

In fact, I think there's very very little chance I could ever become a fan in any way, shape or form of any sport aside from basketball. I prefer it to all other sports because it is well-paced, the games and seasons are short enough to remain interesting all the way through (though the Playoffs take too long) and because it is not baseball.

My infrequent opportunities to watch and enjoy basketball is no one's fault but my own, of course. I don't like sports and would never set aside any resources of my own to attend a sporting event. If I go, I go because someone else invites me, and why would they shell out hundreds of dollars on my non-sports-caring-about ass?

Think of it in these terms. If you had only ever seen Lawrence of Arabia on a video iPod, or projected on a bedsheet 100 yards away, you probably wouldn't think it was a terrifically interesting movie. But check it out in 70mm widescreen some time.

I'm bringing up this theory as a remote but intriguing possibility, not because I firmly believe it to be true. I mean, I know that one reason (among many) that I can't get into hockey is because it's too taxing to follow a tiny little puck as it races between the legs of hulking guys wearing body armor around a big white rink for several hours at a time.

No, it's far more likely that the beer, the chicken fingers and the lively, enthusiastic company made the game compelling. That and the newness of the experience. (I had only been to Staples once before, and it was for a Crosby Stills Nash and Young concert, and I was in a normal bleacher seat. I believe the last time I watched a professional basketball game was when I was 8 or 9 years old, back in Philadelphia, checking out a Sixers game at the Spectrum. I could be mistaken about that, but I don't think that I am.)

That and the fact that it was an abnormally involving match-up, fairly close almost the entire night and notable for a startling, barely-human feat of strength from Kobe Bryant. Probably all of the above.

Funny, She Doesn't Look Simlish

I usually don't like directly posting corporate propaganda here, but this is just too strange to pass up. Lily Allen has re-recorded her hit "Smile" entirely in Simlish, the language of Electronic Arts' incredibly boring Sims game. I tried playing Sims, in which you simulate the life of an individual or couple living in a bland suburban enclave. But before I had a chance to do anything, my characters kept pissing themselves. I'm serious. Your characters have to pee all the time, but there's only one bathroom, so if one character needs to shower to go to work, the others all wind up pissing themselves. This would happen pretty much every time I played, until I decided that such a thing was simply undignified, and gave up on the experience entirely.

Admittedly, I'm not very good at video games, but you shouldn't have to be The Wizard, starring Fred Savage, in order to avoid urinating on yourself in a game. I hadn't installed the Crohn's Disease Expansion Pack or anything...

So, anyway, long story long, I'm not into The Sims. But I did enjoy this music video, created entirely within the game and spoken in its eerie, gibberish language.

300

Is Zach Snyder's adaptation of the Frank Miller graphic novel 300 an ode to George W. Bush and his doctrine of pre-emptive war in the Middle East, or is it merely a cartoonish depiction of one of history's most famous battles? It certainly feels like a statement on the need for aggression in foreign policy and the inherent weakness of compromise or capitulation.

Certain sequences seem to directly respond to contemporary American politics. When the Queen (Lena Headey) pleads with the Council to send more troops to the front lines, her rhetoric rather directly echoes our Congress' recent debates on a similar matter. When King Leonidas (Gerard Butler) argues about the need for war to protect "freedom" from "tyranny," one can't help but by reminded of America in the Spring of 2003, the pressing need to "fight them over there" so we won't have to face our enemy here. And, of course, the depiction of said enemy as diabolically evil, sexually perverse and physically malformed recalls the blatherings of every right-wing scumbag from Michael Savage to Michelle Malkin to Ann Coulter, who insist that there can be no settlement with our present-day Arabian and Persian foes. Only slaughter.

A common counter-argument to this view, that 300 the film has been designed as propaganda for Bush's war, is that it's based on a book written well before the Bush regime came to power. What utter nonsense. Certainly, the decision to make a film out of the book occured post-Bush. As did the decision to write this particular version of the script and film it in this particular style with this particular perspective. Not to mention that I have read the novel and the film is considerably different. (That scene I mentioned with the Queen isn't in the book at all, if I recall correctly). You heard the same bullshit when V for Vendetta came out. Sure, the book was about Thatcher's England. But the book is not the movie...Done. Care to try again?

So it's entirely possible that the film was meant as an argument in favor of Bush's Iraq Adventure (and possibly an Iranian one to come). But I don't really think this is the case. 300 represents something much older than George Bushism. Snyder's film and Miller's book have tapped into a regrettable sub-genre that runs underneath much of our culture - war porn.

300 may be the most offensive piece of war porn I have ever seen. Seriously, if you screened this film for Leni Riefenstahl, she'd say..."It's really good, but could you make it a bit more subtle? I just feel like we're hammering people over the head with this thing."

300 fetishizes violence in a way that is not at all reasonable, or even entertaining; it magically transforms sadistic cruelty into heroism and fascism into freedom right before your eyes. If Generalissimo Franco had a nightmare that was guest-directed by Mel Gibson after a 10-day coke binge, 300 would be the likely result. Warner Bros. must have hired some expert sound editors, because otherwise I swear you could hear Snyder and Miller jacking it during some of the rousing speeches and frequent beheadings. I left 300 a bit disgusted, but more than that, exasperated. How could you reason with someone who thought that this ugly, gruesome spectacle has any merit, as popcorn entertainment or otherwise? Certainly, it goes without saying that I would do my best to avoid anyone who shares its worldview, which is pretty much universally hateful, hostile and an affront to thinking, sophisticated, modern people everywhere.

It's also incredibly boring and repetitive.

The armies of Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro), god-king of the mighty Persian Empire, coalesce outside the Greek city-state of Sparta. They have come because the Spartan king, Leonidas, refused to bow before Xerxes and, in a show of pride, murdered a Persian messenger. Unfortunately, the corrupt Ephors and Councilman who control the Spartan army have refused to aid in the city's defense, so it's up to 300 brave Spartan warriors to defend all that they hold dear against the largest army in all of Asia.

Eventually.

First, they spend what feels like hours stalking around the countryside in underoos, showing off their grased-up abdominal muscles and celebrating their imminant martyrdom. In voice-over, Dilios (David Wenham) goes on and on about the "warrior code" of the Spartans, how they never surrender, how they begin learning to fight at the age of 7, how they detest any sign of weakness and respect only stoicism and on and on and on. We see Leonidas kill a wolf as a child, just in case we didn't get the message that he's a badass who don't take shit off no one, even Mother Nature.

(This isn't really a fault, but 300 is also one of the gayest movies I can recall. Not terribly surprising, I guess, for a movie about Ancient Sparta, even though the movie would never admit that all its leading male characters have, at one time or another, dabbled in the homoerotic arts. At one point, a character mocks the Athenians as "boy-lovers," a clear attempt to distract audiences from the fact that they are watching a film set in Ancient Greece starring a cast of naked men pledging their undying devotion to an oily Gerard Butler while a narrator emphasizes repeatedly that they are "hard and strong, strong and hard." It's like Logjamming on steroids.)

300 was shot much like the previous Miller adaptation, Sin City, with the live actors set inside a digitally-created background. Director Robert Rodriguez used the technique in that film to simulate Miller's black and white comics, bringing an antiquated panel style to new life on the screen. I thought it was largely successful, visually innovative and a lot of fun. Zach Snyder comes up with a few nice-looking sequences in 300, my favorite being the shot of Leonidas and his men as they watch Xerxes' ships get knocked about in a storm, but the film overall looks pretty awful.

Daylight is always brown, nighttime is always blue, and they both look washed-out and muddy. Though there's lots of fighting, there are very few establishing shots to give you any real physical sense of the action that's taking place in the big picture. What remains may be brutal and gory but it's not terribly cinematic.

What's more, Snyder seems to be developing a case of latent Peter Jacksonism in terms of the use of slow motion. Action scenes that should whip past are slowed down, dulling their intensity, making what should be some of the movie's most striking moments and images feel overblown and silly. (A shot of one of the Spartan heroes dying at the hands of a Persian on horseback is a perfect example. Like Jackson's King Kong falling off the Empire State, it would have more impact if it didn't take 10 fucking hours to go down.)

Evidence of Snyder's affection for Peter Jackson is evident as well in the Persian army's "creatures," many of which do not appear in the book and look ridiculous. An oversized troll, really just a misplaced Middle Earth troll, has an dreary, predictable back and forth with Leonidas. A hunchback named Ephialtes (Andrew Tiernan) looks entirely fraudulent. I can't tell if the character was digitally retouched at all; it looks like a man wearing a silly rubber costume. How did Snyder even think he could get away with this, post-Gollum?

I mean, I went in expecting the politics to bother me, and they did, but at least I thought the film might be aesthetically pleasing. No such luck.

As I said, the film's not really all about Bush, as some online liberals have argued. You'd have to be delusional to conflate the buff, heroic Leonidas, who bravely rushes into battle 10 feet in front of his men, with Commander Codpiece. Bush is more like Xerxes, anxiously awaiting news of the battle from atop his golden slave-drawn chariot. The film's just about the glory of war, how great it is when attractive nude men attack one another for sport and to bring glory to their leaders (particularly if you get to watch it from the comfort of a movie theater).

It's designed specifically to delight those odd authoritarian military junkies who are in our midst and always have been, even before Bush. You know who I'm talking about...Nerdy loners, usually men, who hang around in the Borders "Military History" section, post comments on the Free Republic forums, frequently turn the conversation around to martial arts they know or weapons they own, and can't wait for some dirty brown foreigner to start talking smart so we have an excuse to drop some bombs. War is what gives them their sense of self, I suppose, or what sets them apart from the loathed intellectuals and hippies living off in their elite urban enclaves.

Regardless, I'd expect some will savor every stab wound, every slash of the sword and arrow to the eyeball. Insecure white men, those who feel threatened by the unknown, by women and minorities, will see a film like 300 as confirmation that their suspicions were always correct. Their manlitude is a gift from the gods, they represent the greatest single development in the whole of Creation, and history calls upon them to fight any and all comers. Remember, it's okay to root for deplorable violence, provided it's delivered upon a person representing a foreign, decadent culture.

300 is very very big on the notion of Western supremacy. The Greeks of the film aren't just defending their long-ago destroyed city (how many modern Americans are even aware of the past existance of a place called "Sparta"?), they're defending all us good, civilized Whites against the Foreign Hordes. They fight to save Us from Them. The "beasts," the "brutes," the "barbarians," as they are repeatedly called. When we get a look inside the court of Xerxes, everyone's naked and writhing around. There are monsters, freaks and, of course, lesbians. No lesbians in Sparta, no sirree. They're not allowed because they aren't strong and hard, hard and strong.

Watching this movie is like spending 2 hours inside Charles Krauthammer's head and it made me decidedly uncomfortable. That is, when I wasn't laughing at the cheesy ludicrousness of it all.

[UPDATE: I forgot to mention the reprehensible use of nu-metal on the soundtrack during some of the battle scenes. Honestly, it's shocking that any filmmaker would actually use this kind of lazy Korn knock off during a battle scene any more. That is so ridiculously overdone. All this "Let the Bodies Hit the Flooooooooooooooooooooooooooor" shit went out in, like, 2002, dude.]

It's Fitzmas in March!

HA HA HA!

Former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby was convicted Tuesday of obstruction, perjury and lying to the FBI in an investigation into the leak of a CIA operative's identity.

Libby had little reaction to the verdict. He stood expressionless as the jury left the room. The verdict was read on the 10th day of deliberations. Libby faces up to 30 years in prison, though under federal sentencing guidelines likely will receive far less.

One proto-fascist down, eleventy billion to go.

The Lives of Others and Black Book

The Lives of Others

There was a video floating around the Net a few months back of a UCLA student being violently Tasered by Campus Police Officers, for the serious offense of not showing them his student ID in the library. I wrote about it, along with some other issues, here. What was so shocking was not just the brutality of Tasering a young person for the crime of not having a proper ID, but the fact that the cops continued to shock the guy long after he was clearly incapacitated. Other students are crying out, begging for them to stop, but they do not.

If I had to guess why, I'd say it's the same reason that Police Departments across the nation have been having trouble with Taser-happy officers. It's human nature. Give one group of individuals supreme, unchecked power over another group of individuals, and they will use it. Now that police are being issued Tasers in greater numbers, they are using them more. Because they can.

It's a pretty simple principle, one of the best arguments against the sort of invasive, aggressive Executive Power to which Dick Cheney and George W. Bush aspire. Those in power, I suppose, will always want to increase the level of control they can exert over as many other individuals as possible, which is why no single person or small group should ever be given unrestricted, unmonitored access to our nation's terrifying intelligence-gathering infrastructure. It's an Orwell novel waiting to happen (or, depending on your view, already past the prologue and well into its introductory chapter).

Which, in a roundabout way, brings me to the recent Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film of 2006) The Lives of Others, the story of a committed socialist and Stasi (East German Secret Police) officer who slowly discovers he's devoted his life to a sham. In the East Berlin of the '80s, Hauptmann Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe) takes his surveillance job too seriously, running into an essential paradox. To excel at watching, he must pay attention, but the system of which he is a part cannot stand up to scrutiny. In serving his nation, he becomes compelled to destroy it.



Wiesler's been assigned by the odious Cabinet Minister Hempf (Thomas Thieme) to make trouble for the State's favorite playwright, Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch). As an artist, Dreyman associates with a few subversives, but he's not much of a radical himself, contenting himself with writing safe, pro-Socialist plays starring his beautiful actress wife, Christa-Maria (Martina Gedeck). Hempf doesn't want him taken down because he's a genuine threat; he just wants Dreyman out of the picture so he can pursue the man's wife.

At first, Wiesler doesn't let this information bother him. He's a good follower and a devoted Stasi officer. Muhe does a terrific job of combining a fierce intelligence with a learned obedience. Wiesler's clearly a man that could have excelled in a real job, doing something more important than spying on strangers in the hopes of ruining their lives. But over time, watching Hempf and the cruel beurocratic apparatus at his disposal destroy Dreyman becomes too much to bear. (It's also hinted at that Wiesler's a lonely man who fantasizes about relationships with Christa-Maria and Dreyman to fill a void in his own life, but let's see it's the cruel beurocratic apparatus for the purposes of this review).

At about the halfway point, the film shifts from a thoughtful historical drama into a full-blown Hitchcockian thriller. Wiesler winds up taking some incredible risks, concealing the nature of his surveillance from Dreyman and Christa-Maria while keeping the majority of his findings out of the hands of his superiors at the Stasi. Tightly-wound, perfectly shot and edited suspense sequences pepper the film's entire second half, culminating in a fevered search for a hidden typewriter that's reminiscent of the Master's work in Rope.

Writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (making his audacious debut with this film) cleverly uses Wiesler's dilemma to mirror the paranoid duplicity in which all East Germans have been forced to exist. His applied scrutiny has placed countless other people into this very situation, watching as someone methodically and pointlessly condemns you to a life in prison or even execution, and now it is Wiesler's turn to sweat.

One brilliant scene has Wielser sharing an elevator with a precocious child, who asks if he's really a member of the Secret Police. When the child lets slip that his father has sternly warned him about speaking to the Stasi, going so far as to pepper the entire organization with insults, Wiesler is tempted to ask for the father's name. He holds back, but we sense that, just as easily, he could have the man reported, questioned and potentially destroyed. Over a child's mistake.

The final 20 minutes or so of the film is taken up with a largely unnecessary epilogue. To his credit, Von Donnersmarck closes the film on an emotional beat that feels significant, with a nice freeze-frame profile of his hero in a rare moment of happiness. But he could have ended the film without all of this last-minute business and it would have been as effective, if not more so. I'm just not a big fan of ending a film with a "Four Years Later" or whatever, unless it's really really urgent to do so. (Another, significantly worse, film that annoyed me with its epilogue was Matchstick Men. What the hell do we need that endless little scene in the carpet store for? Just end that sucker already, Rid!)

But this is a nitpick. Lives of Others deserved its Oscar (way more than Pan's Labyrinth), and it's a fairly remarkable debut for Von Donnersmarck with a lot of resonance at this moment in history.

Black Book

Lots of similarities between these two films. Both European films from 2006, produced or co-produced by Germany. Both feature Sebastian Koch in significant roles. Both include what, for me, felt like unnecessary epilogues. And both deal with dying totalitarian systems, pressing down on the main characters with greater and greater force as its last glimmers of hope fade out.
Set in Occupied Holland during the waning days of the Third Reich (several mentions are made of Russian troops positioning outside Berlin), Paul Verhoeven's brutal, pulpy WWII adventure Black Book tells a remarkable (and mostly fictional) story about a remarkable woman who quite simply refuses to die, despite considerable efforts to bring this about.

Combining the bleak desperation of Resistance classics like Army of Shadows with the high-flying '60s war/action genre, Verhoeven has made an extraordinarily entertaining, even brisk, epic. It's historically accurate, bold and intelligent, sure, but it's real strength is watchability. The film's 150 minutes absolutely flew by.



Rachel Stein (Carice van Houton) fully expects to wait out the war in her attic hiding spot until its blown up by a passing German plane. Setting out with her family in tow for asylum in Belgium, she is ambushed by Nazi soldiers. Though Rachel escapes with her life, everyone she cared about has died.

Eventually, she finds her way into the Dutch Resistance, who want her to seduce a high-ranking Gestapo official, Ludwig Muntze (Koch again) and bug his office. She agrees. The remainder of the film is a war film, a detective story, a romance and a thriller all wrapped into one blood-soaked, delirious little Verhoeven package of joy. This guy's films are just alive, bursting with energy and surprises.

He spoke at the Aero Theater after the film last night, and confessed at one point that he doesn't consider how an audience will react when making a film. He thinks about what works on him, and simply assumes that some in his audience will feel the same way. All I can say is, PV and I are on the same wavelength.

There are so many double-crosses, close calls and unexpected turns, I wouldn't even know how to ruin the movie for you if I wanted to. It opens in April and you should just go see it for yourself.

Van Houten does an amazing job as Rachel (who goes by Ellis de Vries for most of the film), who like every other character is essentially a mass of contradictions posing as a confident individual. She has recently watched Nazis gun down an entire family, yet finds a way to feel compassion for Muntze. And though she's sleeping with this man out of duty and not for pleasure, Van Houten brings an unexpected playfulness to the love scenes. Could she be enjoying the very transgressiveness of the act of fucking a Nazi? Or is it the inherent thrill of espionage, the opportunity to not only lie but to live within a false identity?

When Rachel/Ellis reveals her true identity to fellow Nazi girlfriend Ronnie (Halina Reijn), the reaction she finds is not anger or shock but curiosity. "You're a spy? How exciting? What's that like, then?"

The cinematography by Karl Walter Lindenlaub is also stellar. Verhoeven discussed how they attempted to give the film kind of an Old Hollywood, '40s vibe to match the period in which the film is set. I felt, as I said before, that it more closely resembled the gritty '60s WWII action film. Movies like Where Eagles Dare and The Great Escape introduce noble characters fighting small-scale but extremely significant battles against massive, nearly-unstoppable and thoroughly evil regimes, and that's what we have here. Minus the nobility. Verhoeven and co-writer Gerard Soeteman (who first devised this story when they were working on Soldier of Orange some 25 years ago) have fashioned several mini-missions of his characters, each progressively more difficult and of more dire importance, and the result is just one propulsive, edgy sequence after another.

In place of those older film's relatively straightforward good-vs-evil dichotomy, Verhoeven refuses to oversimplify. Some Nazis are incredibly evil, sure, but they're all human as well. Some of them don't seem to take the whole Nazi thing all that seriously, even. Likewise, the Dutch Resistance are not, to a man, likable and noble and impressive of character. Dolf de Vries in particular does great work as a lawyer who never seems totally trustworthy, but who gives no reason to doubt his sincere intentions.

Even the happy ending isn't really all that happy. Without blowing the final sequence, it ends on a decidedly ambiguous note, implying that even if Rachel can escape the horrors of the Nazi Occupation, neither she nor anyone else can ever really find real safety in this world of violence. It's one of a few truly chilling, immediate moments in the film, another being a torture sequence in which Nazis hold a man underwater to simulate the sensation of drowning. That Verhoeven dares to jolt an audience in this fashion, to introduce remarkably pointed social commentary in the midst of what's ostensibly a period adventure film, to me speaks to his bravery and confidence as a filmmaker.

Here's the somewhat NSFW international trailer, with relatively poor but somewhat amusing English subtitles:

The Good, The Bad, The Queen and The Mouse

Check out this video for a slowed-down version of Okkervil River's "No Key No Plan," from the Black Sheep Boy Appendix EP. The video itself is just shots of lead singer Will Scheff traveling through an airport and some city too blurry for me to identify, but I really dug this rendition of the song.

I've also been listening to the new Modest Mouse album, We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, all week. The one with Johnny Marr. It's coming in anywhere between strong and quite strong. I'm pretty sure I like it significantly more than Good News For People Who Love Bad News.

First single, "Dashboard," comin' at ya:



As you can probably tell from this song, the addition of Marr hasn't significantly changed The Mouse's sound. Naturally, the guitars are emphasized this time around, but not once was I reminded of "Boy With the Thorn In His Side." In fact, it feels very much like a follow up to Good News, although the songs are a bit looser and more dynamic this time around. Less tight little pop songs like "Float On" and one-off Tom Waits-inspired oddities, more intensely spacey rock songs. My favorite track, to which I can't seem to find a legitimate link, is "Parting of the Sensory," which definitely has a "Cowboy Dan" kind of vibe. And "Cowboy Dan" remains one of my favorite Modest Mouse tracks.

Having said all that, I think the above video is pretty stupid. I also didn't really like the "Float On" video. Oh well...

I'm kind of split on The Good, The Bad and The Queen, the latest weird side project from Damon Albarn, aka The Dude From Blur.

On the one hand, it's kind of a cool concept album. Low-key songs about quotidian London life with an occasionally sinister, even supernatural, undertone, performed by Albarn, Clash bassist Paul Simonon, the guitarist from The Verve and drummer Tony Allen. According to Wikipedia, Albarn said the album's actually a mystery play in interviews. Also according to Wikipedia, and contrary to what I had been told, the album was apparently not co-produced with DJ Danger Mouse, thus preventing this post from having a cool rodent theme.

I've found that it's pretty good background music for when I'm working on the computer. But to just sit down and give it a complete listen...well, I get kind of bored.

It's the sort of thing that might very well grow on me over time. My iTunes does inform me, now that I'm checking, that I've listened to lead-off single "Herculean" and the first track, "History Song," a significant number of times. What I'm saying is, I reserve the right to reverse this opinion at any time, and you should probably give the thing a listen to judge for yourself if you have any interest in Albarn's music or contemporary British rock.

Here's the video for the album's most Blurry track, "Kingdom of Doom." Watch this video while squinting and it's almost like Albarn and Graham Coxon have gotten back together!



The last thing I want to talk about music-wise is the big Police reunion. They're playing in LA, but it's at Dodger Stadium. Who the hell wants to go see live music at Dodger Stadium?

I HATE DODGER STADIUM! And not only because I hate baseball, although that's part of it. It's just inconveniently located and uncomfortable and gross and the parking lot ranks among the most ungainly and difficult to navigate I have ever utilized. It takes hours to get your car out of Dodger Stadium, even following a typical, poorly-attended Dodger game. Imagine after a sold-out concert! With everyone leaving at once, unlike the crowds that begin to trickle out at the bottom of the Fifth when they realize they are at a Dodger game.

And sitting way the hell up in the nosebleed seats trying to enjoy a band's performance? No thanks. Not to mention, I'm certain decent seats will only cost several hundred thousand dollars by the time WMA's finished buying up the entire loge section for its preening millionaire client roster.

So, I won't bother to see The Police this summer, even though it would be awesome to see all those old songs again. I mean, I saw Sting play at what was then Irvine Meadows several years back with my parents (who are massive fans of Sting solo albums for some reason), and he did a lot of Police songs, and that was cool. But it's not the same as seeing the complete old band getting back together.

Sigh...

It Is An Honor Just to be Dominated

Now, I know San Francisco has a reputation as something of a haven for gay living, but this may be going too far.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom's administration will change its policy on issuing laudatory proclamations after a gay porn studio was honored last week without the mayor's knowledge, city officials said Friday.

Conservative activists and pundits nationwide belittled the city after Newsom's office declared Feb. 23 to be Colt Studio Day, honoring the 40th anniversary of a San Francisco movie company whose Web site invites visitors to "come inside to experience the hottest man-on-man action."

I don't know what's more unbelievable. That the mayor wouldn't be aware that his staff members are issuing laudatory proclamations in honor of the local gay porn factory...or that any politician would knowingly do such a thing. Now, I'm not saying that this is the wrong move because it's gay porn specifically. A mayor honoring any producer of fine pornographics, be they gay, fetish, scheisse, mature or nun-themed, would be equally ill-advised.

The official document, bearing Newsom's name, was presented by a representative of the Mayor's Office of Neighborhood Services to the company during its anniversary party. It said Colt Studio "has produced movies that have entertained the gay community over the past 40 years" and has contributed to the city by bringing in "hundreds of millions of dollars in business" and "stimulating the job market and the local economy in general."

Oh, the local job market was stimulated alright. In fact...

Nah, you know what? Never mind. That joke is beneath me.

Newsom's office issues nearly 2,000 proclamations a year, most covering such innocuous topics as Australian Heritage Day and Graffiti Watch Day. They are typically issued by the Neighborhood Services Office without the mayor or his top aides reviewing their content, which was the case with the document honoring the gay porn studio, Newsom's spokesman said Friday.

Oh, man. Someone is so fired.

What I wouldn't give for some kind of clandestine recording of this brainstorming session.

"Hey, you know? We really ought to honor Colt Studios! They've been making quality gay porn for over 40 years!"

"Well, normally I'd say that sounds like a pointless gesture sure to do nothing but generate hate mail and faux-outrage from conservative evangelical assholes. But the studio's remarkable masterpiece Beary Lyndon simply cries out for recognition."

But in the wake of attacks by conservative media figures such as talk show host Bill O'Reilly -- who said the proclamation reinforced San Francisco's reputation as the nation's "Sodom and Gomorrah" -- Newsom has decided to change the policy and have any potentially controversial proclamation cleared by either his chief of staff or director of government affairs.

"If there are any questions about proclamations, they will be reviewed," said Newsom spokesman Nathan Ballard. "There's just going to be a stricter review process from now on."

Totally wrong move here by Newsom. You don't cave to pressure from Billy O. That just makes him feel vital and relevant. Sure, it was probably a mistake to officially recognize a gay porn studio, but now that you have done it, you have no choice but to stick by the decision. In fact, forget sticking by it. Embrace it! That'll throw Bill for a loop. As to be permitted on his program with the founder of Colt to discuss what a positive influence it has had on the community.

Conservative evangelical assholes are always going to think of San Francisco as a modern "Sodom and Gomorrah," mainly because most of them don't understand that Bible story beyond the observative that those two places were "bad" and full of citizens with what Ann Coulter might term "John Edwards-like tendencies" in her usual charming, effervescent manner. There's nothing Newsom or anyone else can do about that.

My hope is that you could push their outrage so far as to make it look ridiculous. Because it is ridiculous. Hey, I'm not saying the mayor's office needs to honor pornography producers, but I have no problem with the notion of gay porno, unlike Bill and his loathsome audience. Their agenda's all about hatred, and maybe by attaching one's self to a position on another extreme, one could tease this reality out.

Newsom should shower Colt Studios with praise at every opportunity. Speak at length about their high production values, about their talented stable of performers, about how they really pay attention to things like narrative structure and mise-en-scene while other homosexual pornographic purveyors focus exclusively on the sex and, depending on the sub-genre, the costumes.

How could Bill respond to something like that?

"Your city government is essentially supporting gay pornography."

"We sure are, Bill."

"But doesn't that violate the rights of the families and innocent children who live in your city."

"I want to educate our children, so that when they grow up and have to make their own choices about gay pornography, they make the right ones."

"But...but..."

"To me, there's nothing more beautiful or arousing than the sight of a cock ring gently grazing the backside of a well-maniured pair of testicles. And I want to share that with my city's future generations."

He'd guarantee a classic bit of YouTubery, I can tell you that much.

LA Whinin'

This is my eleventh year living in Los Angeles. Traffic has always been a problem. It's the number one complaint of just about every LA resident, except maybe those unfortunate individuals who reside in the direct flight path of LAX. Or Van Nuys. For some reason, I have known, like, eight different people who have personally related horror stories of life in Van Nuys. I have no idea what's going on over there in the Porn Capital, but if you can manage to avoid settling there, I would highly recommend doing so.

Anyway, I know that it's difficult to be impartial when gauging such things, but I think LA's traffic problem has grown considerably worse in the past year or so. It used to take 45 minutes to an hour in heavy traffic to get across town. I can distinctly recall, as a UCLA student, leaving Westwood at 5 pm to get to a 6:30 screening at the Paramount lot in Hollywood, and having enough time upon arriving to get through the front gate, park and walk to the screening room. If I were making that same drive today, I would leave no later than 4 pm to make sure I had adequate time.

Don't believe me? The other day, I had to travel from my new office (all part of the SMPWCNBN, which I'll actually be able to de-M-ify here in a few weeks) in Santa Monica to the Arclight in Hollywood for the Zodiac screening. 1 hour, 45 minutes it took. The 10 was completely shut down and every single surface street I tried (large and small) was at a standstill. There was no way to go North, South or East.

Lewis Black does a comedy routine about visiting Los Angeles. Eventually, he predicts, the traffic will be so bad, the roads will simply shut down. You will just sit stationary in your driveway forever waiting for nonexistent space to clear for your automobile. He's joking, but it's actually not that far off. It's 6 pm right now and I'm essentially locked in my immediate neighborhood until 8. It's not that it would take a long time or be generally irritating to try and venture any further. It's simply not possible. I would just sit, essentially stationary, in my car on Venice or Overland or the 405 or the 10 until around 7:30.

Last night, my father and brother went to go see the Mighty Ducks play in Orange County. (Don't ask me why, but they're both quite taken with the spectacle of large, toothless Canucks slamming into one another at high speeds in frigid, tightly-packed arenas.) My brother left Santa Monica (I may work there now, but I'll never use the familiar form, San Mo) at 4 in order to make a 7 o'clock hockey game. Now, bear in mind, that's 3 hours. To go less than 50 miles. 3 hours, folks. With open roads, you can get to Vegas in around 4. He was still considerably late to the game, by the way.

My question is...what's the flaw in Black's humorous logic? If the population continues to explode, not only in Los Angeles but every major US city, will we not eventually reach a point where there's just no more room for the excess people? And I don't mean figuratively, like we'll all get a bit more crowded and it will be noisier and more unpleasant and living conditions will worsen. I mean, won't we physically run out of room soon? Will we all just have to start sharing rooms? Is now a good time to invest in bunk bed futures?

And before anyone tries to twist this into a lame right-wing anti-immigration thing, I don't blame an influx of Mexicans into California for this problem. They have as much a right to be here as anybody, and this is a problem all LA residents are facing, not just the poor and disenfranchised.

So here's what I suggest. We have to be practical about this thing. Why do so many people move to Los Angeles? Here are my theories:

(1) The entertainment industry

Not only to talentless morons hoping to be the next Gwen Stefani move to LA, but so do all the Business School and Management assholes hoping to be the next Ari Emanuel or Sherry Lansing. It's fucking scary out there. You can usually tell these people immediately because they will only discuss workout routines or film industry gossip. Often at the same time.

The solution? Legally mandate 1/2 of all entertainment-related companies to Holbrook, Arizona. I've been to Holbrook, and I can tell you, that is a charming little community. While there, I ate at a small diner and met a desert dweller breathing out of an oxygen tank who had come inside to escape the dust storm that had completely shut down the only road out of town!

Anyway, what with Blackberriess and such, all these industry assholes don't need to occupy the same 10 square blocks any more (plus the unwashed masses who have been banished to Burbank). Why not ship half of them to lovely, sparsely populated AZ? let them video conference about the first-weekend grosses of Primeval instead of meeting for six-hour lunches at The Counter?

(2) The beautiful weather

Give climate change a few years and this isn't even going to matter any more. For forward looking investors, might I recommend Duluth and Fargo? A decade or two from now, they'll be downright balmy.

(3) The vibrant culture and sense of community

Nah, I'm just kidding

(4) Scientology

Let's face it...Hollywood is not an appropriate headquarters for a major world religion. If the Hubbardites want us to take them more seriously, they should relocate to somewhere that feels more sacred and holy. Jerusalem, perhaps? Medina? I'm just throwing ideas out there.

(5) UCLA and USC

This is what brought me to Los Angeles (though I grew up just south of here in Irvine). I had a great time at UCLA, and I learned a few things I suppose, but I couldn't in good conscience recommend the school now to an incoming freshman. UCLA (and, to a lesser extent, USC) are simply too crowded.

And not even in a "you'll get lost in the shuffle" kind of way. I sort of think that the need to make a mark in order to separate myself from the teeming crowds drove me to do more with my time at UCLA than I might have otherwise. Right away after arriving there, I joined the school paper, just out of a need to meet some people and develop some kind of stable, familiar strucutre for my life in that chaotic maelstrom.

No, I just mean that it's too goddamn crowded. When I was a student there, approximately one-third of my waking life was spent parking my car, walking back to my dorm from parking my car or worrying about where I was going to park. The student population has exploded since I graduated in 2000, so I can only imagine how much worse it must be now. Likewise, I can recall many days in which I would be unable to find a seat in a common area or student union during a break between classes. Morning walks to class, that might otherwise be pleasant strolls, instead become grim mass marches, with thousands of students proceeding down the same narrow paths in lockstep. Forget finding the library book you need, or even any space to study in the library. And students live absolutely on top of one another. When I was a student, over a decade ago, the school ran out of dorm rooms and forced groups of students to live in open, common rooms that had been set aside for socializing. Six, eight people, squatting in what is essentially a den.

The solution? These schools should accept less kids. Hey, I'm sorry, I know lots of kids want UCLA diplomas and want to come to Los Angeles to study. I did. But no one's getting the most out of these universities under these conditions. I'm sure UC Davis could use a little uptick in admissions. Send some of the underachievers there (particularly if they're passionate about, you know, cows).

Finally, I think it's clear that LA needs some kind of futuristic, super-mass-transit system. Perhaps the magnetic highway from Minority Report? You're telling me that shit's not possible? We've had magnets for centuries already! Or what about some kind of underground bullet train dealie? Just as long as it doesn't run under Paramount studios. That's where they keep the hideous radioactive bloodthirsty cannibal freaks.

Zodiac

Zodiac belongs in the genre known as the "police procedural," but few films take that title so literally. David Fincher's atmospheric, lengthy and complex new film looks at the infamous Zodiac Killer murders from every conceivable angle, examining every last shred of evidence. Just as the trio of protagonists - a reporter, a cartoonist and a cop - grow increasingly obsessed with the case, Fincher's film too lingers on every crime scene photo, visits and revisits every key witness, scrutinzes every connection for some minor, overlooked nuance that might shed some light on this bizarre tangle of events.

The film can be an exhausting experience. For 150 minutes, Fincher piles on the facts, figures and details of the case, rarely coming up for air. It's a rare cop film, or any film for that matter, that's so willing to abandon all structure and storytelling conventions in the service of accurately following an investigation. James Vanderbilt's screenplay is absolutely relentless, and even brave in a way. It counts on an audience to remain actively engaged with an unsolvable mystery for nearly three hours, without ever pandering or breaking the tension. Watching Zodiac is like reading the SFPD police file on the Zodiac case - informative, grim and fascinating.

That's not to say it's dry. In fact, the film's quite funny, with some terrific dialogue and a slew of memorable, lived-in performances. And as I pointed out, this is not a film with a lot of down time. It's captivating, particularly for a film of its length, fast-forwarding through a decade's worth of strange events as succinctly as possible.

I'm just saying, horror and suspense fans looking for Seven Part 2, or anything else looking for a fun movie for a Saturday night, consider yourself warned. This film's closer to Oliver Stone's JFK than Jonathan Demme's Silence of the Lambs.

Why the fascination with catching Zodiac? Reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) notes at one point that more local citizens will lose their life commuting to work that month than were ever killed by the mysterious man in a mask. SFPD Inspector David Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) muses that 200 San Franciscans have been murdered during the time he's spent seeking out the Zodiac Killer. And yet both of these men devote years of their lives to the case.

If pressed, they'd probably give some stock response. It's their job to find the killer. He needs to be stopped before kills again. The only one who's even remotely honest with himself is cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), the San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist who hovers around Avery's desk all day absorbing clues and information. Graysmith likes puzzles and begins working out the complicated, coded messages the killer sends to the newspaper after every murder.

For him, what begins as an intellectual exercise - am I more clever than a serial killer? - soon becomes a fixation. Under the guise of writing a book about the case, Graysmith completely loses himself in the piles of forensic evidence, the tiniest details, of all the individual crimes. The positions in which the bodies were found. The pattern of phone calls made the day of the first murder. The handwriting on a promotional poster for a film screening. (In one of the film's many creative passing-of-time montages, Fincher superimposes Zodiac's scrawlings and Graysmith's handwritten notes over the newsroom walls, filling every last corner of space around him with facts, figures and data.)

Graysmith admits to his beleaguered wife Melanie (Chloe Sevigny) that his passion for the Zodiac is borne of his own vanity. A lowly cartoonist in an office full of massive egos who can't wait to remind him how little he matters, Graysmith at first sees the murders as a way to prove his own worth. He needs to conquer this man, who has made such a display of boastful superiority. The Zodiac states repeatedly that he is smarter and more capable than the police and the reporters and anyone else who could try to catch him (and what are random, motiveless murders but repeated demonstrations of ones mastery over others)?

Some of the most disturbing of his letters to the San Francisco Chronicle detail his warped personal mythology, in which his victims become his slaves in the afterlife, giving him not one but two opportunities to rule over their fate. Fincher and cinematographer Harris Savides occasionally shoot the film from what could be considered the delusional Zodiac's point of view, looking down upon the city of San Francisco from an omniscient birds-eye view. (At one point, the camera looks down from an impossible angle on the top of the Golden Gate Bridge. In another sequence, we watch the TransAmerica Pyramid being built in sped-up motion.)

So it's only natural, in a way, that others would respond to this grandiose show of dominance with equal fervor and determination. And perhaps what Vanderbilt and Fincher do best in the film is reflect just how hopeless and soul-sucking an enterprise chasing the Zodiac Killer really was. The film eventually zeroes in on one or two likely suspects, but neither of them seem quite capable of the elaborate scope and craftiness of these crimes. The Zodiac manages to commit several murders, phone the homes of witnesses and journalists, appear by voice on a TV chat show and repeatedly taunt several high-ranking SFPD detectives, all without ever coming close to being caught.

Worse yet, every piece of evidence that comes along in the multiple decades of the investigation seems to contradict all the other evidence. Avery suggests on multiple occasions that the real Zodiac Killer may be taking credit for crimes he did not commit. Was he really the sicko who threatened a mother and her baby on the road near Modesto?

These kinds of uncertainties come to haunt all three men, bringing each of them to a state of mental collapse. All three performers do solid work in the film's final stretch, but Mark Ruffalo in particular stands out. His Toschi, verbally and physically, is utterly unlike any other character the man has ever played. And though Gyllenhaal does a nice job of capturing Graysmith's manic, paranoid intensity in pursuing 10-year old leads, and Downey Jr. has a stark, knowing grace playing a fading alcoholic cokehead, this felt like Ruffalo's movie all the way. He's absolutely heartbreaking when he rejects all of Graysmith's new evidence. He wants to get reinvigorated and finally solve this thing, but knows deep down that the case will never be closed. It has, at this point, already destroyed his career and possibly his life.

Aside from these three strong central performances, Fincher has filled every minute of screen time with great character actors and familiar faces. (I wasn't kidding with those JFK comparisons). The underappreciated Elias Koteas does a nice, subtle job as a canny small town sheriff. Brian Cox is hilarious as the infamous Hollywood lawyer (and Jack Ruby's attorney) Melvin Belli, to whom the Zodiac reaches out in a time of need. Phillip Baker Hall has a few great scenes and a questionable fingerprint expert.

As potential subject Arthur Leigh Allen, John Carroll Lynch gives perhaps the film's best, and certainly most unsettling, performance. Allen's so creepy, Toschi wants to arrest him on the spot, but of course there's no crime against generally being an oddball. I recognized Lynch from his relatively small role as Norm Gunderson in the Coen Brothers' Fargo, but there's absolutely nothing folksy or sweet about Allen. His interrogation is one of the film's most startling, well-written scenes.

Rewatching Silence of the Lambs about a year ago, I noticed its corniness for the first time. The movie scared me shitless when I first saw it years ago, and I have always thought of it as an effective, chilling horror film. Rewatching it, I still admired the Jodie Foster performance and the subtle ways that Demme constantly notes the thinly-veiled sexual harrassment to which all female law enforcement officers become accustomed. But I found the Hopkins performance silly and not particularly frightening, and his increasingly gory antics ludicrous in the extreme. (The human face-mask scene didn't work for me at all. It looks incredibly fake.)

Demme's film takes the business of catching serial murderers and turns it into a cartoon for our entertainment, inspiring an entire generation of mundane TV series and cheap B-grade knockoffs. (Suspect Zero, I'm looking in your direction...) It works alright as a fantasy.

But that's not what Fincher has done here. He already played that game once with Seven, a film I enjoy for its style and performances but don't feel strongly about.

Instead, Zodiac looks at police work clinically, pausing occasionally to note the personality types drawn to this practice and the ensuing fallout on their private lives. In the first third, we see how criminals are generally caught. In the second third, we see why these methods don't work on the Zodiac, and finally, we see how resiliance and pluck and creativity may be able to overcome even his considerable preparation and unique genius. It's a turbulent but ultimately rewarding ride, and one hell of an entertaining film. Probably Fincher's best work yet, and certainly his smartest.

How Convenient!

You guys remember that "Mr. Show" sketch with the Medieval "educational science filmstrip"? If I remember correctly, all science begins when a wizard has an idea. Then, the wizard is drowned, and if he sinks, the idea becomes a theory. Then, the king is told and he consults with his menagerie of birds, and if they approve, it becomes an "old wives' tale" and science marches forward.

This is much the same process wherein dumb mudslinging bullshit travels through the magical portal of The Drudge Report and becomes "conventional wisdom." (No, I'm not linking to Matt Drudge. That asshat gets enough traffic.)

Upset that Al Gore won an Oscar last night for his documentary film while Matt Drudge has only won "Outstanding Achievement in Being a Weasely Guy in an Old-Fashioned Hat,"* today the Internet's answer to Robert Wuhl from Batman dropped a real bombshell on the world. Al Gore has a significantly higher-than-average gas bill!

OMFG SMD WTF1111! 111!!!1!!!11!!1

But he says we should conserve energy! That lying hypocritical hypocrite! Plus, I think he's gained some weight recently!

The surprisingly conservative blogger at What Would Tyler Durden Do reprints Drudge's smear, so I still don't have to link directly to the source. Which means I won't have to take that second shower today after all. (WWTDD's Headline: Al Gore is a Jackass)

Gore’s mansion consumes more electricity every month than the average American household uses in an entire year, according to the Nashville Electric Service (NES). The average household in America consumes 10,656 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year, according to the Department of Energy. In 2006, Gore devoured nearly 221,000 kWh—more than 20 times the national average. Last August alone, Gore burned through 22,619 kWh—guzzling more than twice the electricity in one month than an average American family uses in an entire year. As a result of his energy consumption, Gore’s average monthly electric bill topped $1,359. Since the release of An Inconvenient Truth, Gore’s energy consumption has increased from an average of 16,200 kWh per month in 2005, to 18,400 kWh per month in 2006. Gore’s extravagant energy use does not stop at his electric bill. Natural gas bills for Gore’s mansion and guest house averaged $1,080 per month last year … In total, Gore paid nearly $30,000 in combined electricity and natural gas bills for his Nashville estate in 2006.

Oh my gosh! It's almost as if he's a prominant statesman and former US Vice President using his celebrity and stature to raise global awareness of a dire and pressing issue to which he has dedicated a significant portion of his life!

Now, far be it from me to question the wisdom of a man who spends the better part of his day posting partial Fergie nipple slips, but I think WWTDD and all the thousands of other bloggers I viewed via the magic of Technorati are maybe not grasping the real situation here. Sure, it's easy to say that Gore uses more power than the rest of us, therefore he's leaving more of a so-called "carbon footprint" on the planet than we are, therefore he's a hypocrite for telling us to conserve energy.

But this overlooks some pretty important points. Mainly, that we don't know what Gore does to counterbalance his significant energy use, we don't know what he's using all that energy for and we don't know the sum total effect he has had on the world's climate situation. I'll leave it to the Black Sun Journal, who know more about this stuff than I:

Al Gore is a global diplomat and former U.S. Vice President. He has crisscrossed the world with his message, and it’s getting through. Even while Vice-President, his use of Air Force Two raised hackles. But let’s review: The United States is the world’s leading fossil-fuel consumer, and it is an empire. The tools of statecraft are hugely expensive and polluting, but no politician can succeed without them. It’s clearly a lesser of evils situation: leaders can sit with the status quo and do nothing, or they can use the tools at their disposal to raise consciousness. Gore is clearly doing the latter. Despite all his flying and consumption, Gore’s consciousness-raising has set in motion events which have single-handedly removed more CO2 from the atmosphere than any other politician in world history.

It would be a welcome step if Gore could convert his personal electricity usage to renewable energy. But he is involved with a network of organizations who support green energy. Many of these companies deal in REC’s, a method of offsetting the CO2 effects of power consumption through support of wind projects, greenhouse gas disposal, and methane reductions from feedlots, etc.. I researched this for my own energy usage, and last year carbon-neutralized both my vehicles and all my business electricity and gas usage through a company called Terrapass for $243.90.

I’d bet my bottom dollar that Gore and his supporters also offset their energy usage this way. (It was in the credits of An Inconvenient Truth that the film was made with a zero carbon footprint.) As savvy politicians, they’d be insane not to.

I mean, I'm working temporarily out of someone's home these days, along with a few other employees, and I'm certain that our combined efforts are running up an exceptionally high energy bill. It happens. Can our relatively small operation even compare with the publicity machine that must be operating around Al Gore? He's a hugely famous celebrity who's traveling all around the world spreading what he sees as a desperately important message.

Now, of course, anyone's free to disagree with Al Gore about climate change or anything else. I might think you're kind of myopic and stupid, but it's your right to be so. But how can Americans so begrudge his efforts? Do they genuinely doubt his sincerity on this issue after all this time? Could he still just be opportunistically using the environment to get elected to some hypothetical office some time in the future? The man's been making these arguments publicly for decades now!

You know, I don't even blame Matt Drudge and his scummy Rethuglican cohorts around the Internet for hyping this story. It's what they do. Gore just had a big night, he's under consideration for a Nobel Prize this year, global warming deniers are on the brink of looking very very stupid to the few Americans silly enough to still take them seriously. Time to do what guys like Drudge do best: sling some mud, even in a frivolous, purely symbolic way, in the hopes of buying more time.

Honestly, Al Gore may be a hypocrite. I don't know enough about this situation to say one way or the other. (Although considering the sheer, naked, unbalanced enthusiasm of rightards to embrace this story, combined with the fact that the only sources on any of this information are a paid hack from Tennessee and one Mr. Matt Drudge, it's dubious). But does it matter? Does it have anything to do with the sheer tonnage of information and evidence in that movie? Doesn't it say something significant about the global warming nonbelievers that their only argument is a personal attack on the character of Al Gore?

It's just depressing in the extreme to read some of these kneejerk blog posts in response to the Drudge story. In this age where there's so much data and information out there, it's truly tragic that so few Americans have any comprehension of media literacy. You're being spoonfed these talking points, guys, and you eat it up like delicious banana pudding, stuffed with Nilla Wafers of Ignorance.

Steve's MySpace blog opens with this charming headline:

NEWS FLASH: I continue to hate Al Gore.

Hate? Hate. Steve hates Al Gore. And this story allows him to continue doing so without reservation. How convenient!

I mean, really...How dare Al Gore attempt to save all our lives! (I mean, even if you disagree about global warming, you surely must agree that Al Gore thinks he's trying to save our lives. Right? I mean, is he just a pathological liar?)

At a LiveJournal regrettably-yet-accurately titled Farewell-Sanity we find the following statement. This is actually kind of chilling.

Sometimes I want to drown people.... today that person is pathetic Mr. Gore

So it's not just a clever name!

"Guys, did you hear? Al Gore has three fridges! Let's go drown him!"

Here's the writer from Negative99 (otherwise unidentified, from what I could find) with his take on Al Gore's efforts.

This post could have also been called: Global Hysteria is Man-Made - Part Two [Inconvenient ReMiX]

Last night at the Democratic National Conven- err… I mean at the Academy Awards, Al Gore’s well-made yet scientifically shady documentary called An Inconvenient Truth won for best documentary (or something like that). I have trouble believing a guy who parades around the world on private jets to persuade people to “use less fuel”. While I’m at it why doesn’t Rosanne Barr invite me to Old Country Buffet to pitch me a low calorie diet.

I'm guessing the unnamed Mr. 99 is some kind of environmental scientist, or something like that, what with him reporting that fears of global warming are, in fact, hysterical, and that the film An Inconvenient Truth is scientifically "shady."

(I'm also going to just go ahead and assume that he's using "shady" in some elevated, scientific sense of which I am wholly unaware, and not just calling out some of the world's most respected climate experts using a term generally reserved for questionable pot dealers. Perhaps it's Latin.)

He provides no evidence of these claims, but instead links to an article about a company that wants to clean up the harmful environmental effects of your cat's farts. No, really. Cat farts. After the Roseanne Barr fat joke lead in. And they say there's no great conservative comedy any more...

*To be fair, Drudge has won "Outstanding Achievement in Being a Weasely Guy in an Old-Fashioned Hat" for the past six years running.

FINALLY!

The Ellen Show

Ellen DeGeneres? Really? I just don't see the whole "get a TV host to host the Oscars" theory. All this talk about Hollywood's Big Night, all the Glamour and whatever of the Academy Awards, and then they turn the show over to someone who's constantly blathering on TV every other night. I thought Jon Stewart did an okay job, certainly an improvement over Billy Crystal and David Letterman, but he's just out of his element on the Oscars.

I think they should give it to an old timer. Have Martin Scorsese host the Oscars. Or Warren Beatty (or Beatty and Annette Benning together). Lauren Bacall. They don't have to be goddamn comedians, after all. Some opening comedy sketch that someone else (not Bruce Vilanch) writes, a brief introduction, BOOM, right into the show. Why not give it a try? It's got to be better than a desperate, grasping Chris Rock or Steve Martin or (ugh) Whoopi Goldberg bookending each and every commercial break with painful, "improvised" one liners.

Anyway, here are all the nominees:

BEST PICTURE

The Departed
The Queen
Little Miss Sunshine
Babel
Letters From Iwo Jima

It's a rare year when I don't see all the Oscar nominees for Best Picture, usually based on hype before they're even officially nominated. But I just couldn't bring myself to watch Letters From Iwo Jima. I just don't care. I'm not even saying it's not great. Maybe it's great? But Clint Eastwood's stately earnestness has just worn me out over the course of the past few years.

I'm sure I'll catch it on DVD.

Anyway, out of the other four, my choice would be The Departed, though I wouldn't mind seeing The Queen win (it won't). I liked Little Miss Sunshine, but the suggestion that it's one of the five best pictures of the past year is ludicrous on its face. Almost as ludicrous as, I don't know, suggesting that Steve Carell is the world's foremost Proust scholar.

I mean, where's Children of Men? Where's Borat? Both films are far more interesting and had more of an impact on the culture than Babel or Little Miss Sunshine. Nevertheless, I think Babel will win.

Letters from Iwo Jima is in Japanese, featuring an all Japanese cast, and Clint Eastwood already won big two years ago. (Of course, I'm biased. If Letters From Iwo Jima wins Best Picture, its producer, Paul Haggis, will accept that award a staggering three years in a row. He wrote and produced Million Dollar Baby, wrote and directed Crash, and produced Iwo Jima. Holy shit, this cannot happen.)

Little Miss Sunshine isn't really all that great, and it's pretty slight. I don't think Academy voters would feel right about themselves in the morning if they cemented its place in the American canon with an Oscar win.

The Queen is incredibly British and unseen by almost anyone not in Britain or coastal America.

The Departed could win. It was a huge box office success, Scorsese has been denied over and over again, and pretty much everyone loves it.

Then there's the whole "it's the best movie nominated" thing. As you faithful readers know, this means absolutely nothing. In fact, I'd say the biggest strike against Departed is that it's the best film nominated, and the best film nominated never wins. I also think its frequent, gory violence will give the aging Academy voters pause.

In many ways, the Best Picture is seen as representing the Hollywood "brand" to the rest of the world. Think Titanic. That was an easy choice. That's pure 100% Hollywood escapist filmmaking entertainment. That's the brand. The Departed makes us look like psychopaths.

I guess you could say that Gladiator is a violent movie that won Best Picture, ditto Braveheart, but they give heavy spoonfuls of uplift and pomp along with their bloodletting. Departed is just a brutal, nihilistic bloodbath. I mean, a great one. But still...you get what I'm saying.

What's left? Innaritu's non-controversial, not-particularly-exciting ensemble drama. Some social commentary, but tinged with hope. Some solid performances. Some big stars. Some critical praise. And it has a diverse cast, a Latin director. I think it's the safest, surest pick, and I think it's how the voters will go. But what do I know?

ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE

Leonardo DiCaprio, Blood Diamond
Ryan Gosling, Half Nelson
Peter O'Toole, Venus
Will Smith, The Pursuit of Happyness
Forest Whitaker, The Last King of Scotland

I have not seen any of these movies. Wow. A first, definitely. Still, I think Whitaker will win.

ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE

Penelope Cruz, Volver
Judi Dench, Notes on a Scandal
Helen Mirren, The Queen
Meryl Streep, The Devil Wears Prada
Kate Winslet, Little Children

Mirren will win. I would say hers was probably the best out of the four performances I have seen (still haven't caught Volver), but Winslet and Dench were both terrific as well. Ironically, Dench is nominated all the time and won previously for a movie in which she barely appeared. (Shades of Streep's nomination this year for Prada, a film defined by her absence.) This year, she has the leading role in a great film with several nominations, and has no shot at winning.

ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE

Alan Arkin, Little Miss Sunshine
Jackie Earle Haley, Little Children
Djimon Hounsou, Blood Diamond
Eddie Murphy, Dreamgirls
Mark Wahlberg, The Departed

I'd give it to Wahlberg, who was arguably the best part of The Departed. Which means he was showing up Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jack Nicholson, Alec Baldwin, Martin Sheen and Ray Winstone. No easy task. I mean, granted, his character got all the best dialogue, but that's really Marky Mark dominating the focus whenever he's on screen. Totally unexpected and awesome.

I'm inclined to say it's going to Alan Arkin or Eddie Murphy though. This is probably the hardest category to call. Both guys have had huge careers, and Arkin was actually nomianted for his first film role ever in Norman Jewison's The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming. (It's not very good!) And though I haven't seen Dreamgirls, I understand Murphy's great. Arkin's easily the best part of Little Miss Sunshine, and they do tend to give the Supporting Actor award to the greatly loved, popular, audience favorite movie (like Jack Palance in City Slickers).

So I'm going to guess Arkin, with slight reservations.

ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE

Adriana Barraza, Babel
Cate Blanchett, Notes on a Scandal
Abigail Breslin, Little Miss Sunshine
Jennifer Hudson, Dreamgirls
Rinko Kikuchi, Babel

My favorite performance, believe it or not, was Kikuchi's in Babel. If the Japanese segments had been removed from all that other stuff (particularly the wandering, ambiguous and ultimately inscrutible Mexican oddessy), it would have been a great film. A brief one, but still. It was subtle and strange and centered entirely on Kikuchi's wordless, manic turn as the deaf and defiant Chieko.

But I think it'll go to Jennifer Hudson. Which will mean that it only took "American Idol" six years to go from silly teen sensation to an Oscar and Grammy factory. How weird. Why not just eliminate the middle man and start giving Oscars to reality TV stars? Seriously, Trishelle deserves some recognition.

ANIMATED FEATURE FILM

Cars
Happy Feet
Monster House

I'd go with Monster House, all the way. It was a really good scary movie for kids and the first time I have seen the motion capture technique used effectively as a storytelling device. These characters did not have the glassy-eyed, uncanny stiffness that plagued the evil Polar Express, which looks like a Christmas movie co-directed by Satan and Dr. Caligari. You'd better watch out, indeed.

But Happy Feet seems the obvious choice. A bonafide sleeper hit that continued the penguin's peculiar dominance of the American box office. Unfortunately, as in all his other entertainment projects, Bob Saget's Farce of the Penguins somehow failed to capitalize on this wave. He was on "Full House," though. Remember "Full House"?

ART DIRECTION

Dreamgirls
The Good Shepherd
Pan's Labyrinth
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
The Prestige

I've only seen three of these. And to be honest, Dreamgirls looks like it has awesome art direction from the trailers. I kind of wish I had gotten around to that one, but my theater-going has been off this past month.

Out of the ones I have seen, I'm inclined to go with The Prestige. I wasn't all that taken with the film, but it looked amazing, really capturing the detail of the period without romanticizing it. So many period films look upon their settings with awe; look at how wondrous and elegant everything looked back then! 2006 was a year in which many films, from The Proposition to Marie Antoinette to The Prestige kind of rejected this vision. Its late 19th-century London is a world of iron and grime. Only when the setting moves to the Rocky Mountains, and the strange experiments of Tesla, does Nolan's camera open up to find room for beauty and wonder.

Pirates looked great as well and had some truly remarkable sets. The Flying Dutchman, the fortune teller's hideout, the tropical kingdom. Great stuff.

CINEMATOGRAPHY

The Black Dahlia
Children of Men
The Illusionist
Pan's Labyrinth
The Prestige

Two period magician films in the same category? Odd.

The Illusionist is a pretty stupid film that nonetheless looks AMAZING. Time-worn and underlit and just gorgeous. I remarked when I reviewed the film that it resembled a Rembrandt come to life. I have since read that cinematographer Dick Pope used gaslights to light some scenes to get that perfect, amber effect. It works.

Black Dahlia as well was beautifully shot, and it's nice to see the movie get some recognition despite being universally reviled.

I think, however, this award should go to Children of Men. Some of these films are about magic, but Lubieski's camera in this film is legitimately magical. Alfonso Cuaron and Emanual Lubieski won't even talk about how they accomplished some of these extended shots (some appearing to last several minutes in length and filled with chaotic action and effects). This film should win in pretty much every category in which its nominated and some in which it isn't. And I think it will win, at least in this category.

COSTUME DESIGN

Curse of the Golden Flower
The Devil Wears Prada
Dreamgirls
Marie Antoinette
The Queen

Marie Antoinette probably should win (though, again, haven't seen Dreamgirls or Golden Flower), but it very well may go to Devil Wears Prada. The whole point of that movie was the clothes, anyway.

BEST DIRECTOR

Martin Scorsese, The Departed
Stephen Frears, The Queen
Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu, Babel
Paul Greengrass, United 93
Clint Eastwood, Letters from Iwo Jima

I think it's Marty's year. He deserves it, he directed the hell out of this movie. What more is there to say?

Outside chance Eastwood will get it again, because the Academy loves him, and I could even see Greengrass receiving the award as a dark horse. Man, I hope not. That would really piss me off. If only because his film seemed to scream "Give me an award! I am Paul Greengrass, the lens through which Americans view themselves and their world!" and we would be walking right into his trap. Just like George W. walked into Osama bin Laden's.

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE

Deliver Us From Evil
An Inconvenient Truth
Iraq in Fragments
Jesus Camp
My Country, My Country

I think Gore's film will probably win. It was pretty well-made, I suppose, but hardly the BEST documentary film of the year. (That's The Devil and Daniel Johnston). Perhaps the fact that it's about the most important issue and had the biggest influence on American opinion is enough. Out of these, bearing in mind that I haven't seen My Country, My Country, I'd say Deliver Us From Evil is the best film. But it'll be nice to see Gore up there getting an Oscar. Maybe if he gets the Nobel as well, he'll run for President.

FILM EDITING

Babel
Blood Diamond
Children of Men
The Departed
United 93

Children of Men, all the way. Though I could see Babel or Departed or United 93 or even Blood Diamond winning this as well. Always a hard category to pick. I think they'll give this one to Children of Men because it won't win much else and it was easily among the year's most impressive technical achievements.

FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM

After the Wedding
Days of Glory
The Lives of Others
Pan's Labyrinth
Water

Pan's Labyrinth is clearly the favorite and will almost assuredly win. I preferred Germany's entry, The Lives of Others, which I really ought to review on here in full one of these days. I know Days of Glory was also supposed to be spectacular, but I haven't had a chance to see it yet.

BEST MAKE UP

Apocalypto
Click
Pan's Labyrinth

Didn't see Apocalypto, but nothing about Click was award-worthy. I repeat, NOTHING. If they were giving an award for Best Film of 2006 About a Magic Remote Control Starring Adam Sandler, I would abstain from voting.

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE

Babel
The Good German
Notes on a Scandal
Pan's Labyrinth
The Queen

Notes on a Scandal had one of the year's worst scores, a Phillip Glass abomination that continually intruded on the main action with its droning repetition. (And, yes, I know it's supposed to be repetitive but that didn't make it less annoying). I have liked Glass scores in the past (Truman Show has a great one), but this one nearly ruins several scenes fo the film.

I thought the music in Pan's Labyrinth was effective. That's how I would probably vote. Can't say how it'll go, though, as I really have no idea which of these five is more or less likely to win.

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
Poseidon
Superman Returns

Except for Pirates, which is filled with eye-popping effects work throughout, these other two films have been nominated for specific scenes. The only part of Poseidon that was in any way enjoyable was the brief scene in which the boat sinks. Everything after that is (pun intended) a wash. Superman Returns has that one tremendous sequence where he saves the shuttle-plane, although that's such a retarded idea, to attack a launching space shuttle to a plane in flight, that you almost feel like the Man of Steel should let them crash to teach humanity a thing or two about physics and aerodynamics.

So I think you have to go with Pirates. No movie this year was bigger or had more going on visually. The entire crew of the Flying Dutchman must have required painstaking months of work. Plus, the Kraken scenes were ridiculously cool.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Babel
Letters from Iwo Jima
Little Miss Sunshine
Pan's Labyrinth
The Queen

My choice would be The Queen, a very wry, unexpectedly funny take on the clash between tradition and progress in modern England. I thought the weakest aspect of Pan's Labyrinth was Del Toro's distracted, oddly conventional screenplay, and that the script for Babel is downright incoherent, saved by Innaritu's sharp direction and the skill of his actors. And I'm sorry, I know a lot of people felt strongly about it, but Little Miss Sunshine is slight. It's a good vehicle for some very talented actors and a lot of the gags work well, but this is hardly original or award-worthy work. In spots, it's downright hacky. (Who could believe Carell runs into his ex-boyfriend and colleague on a random highway turn-off in middle America at that exact moment? That's almost insulting.)

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
Children of Men
The Departed
Little Children
Notes on a Scandal

These are all pretty strong contenders. Little Children DQ's itself for the totally unnecessary use of narration. In fact, one need only see the beautiful, perfectly-scripted narration in Notes on a Scandal to realize all that is wrong with the dry, flat narration of Little Children, in which a disembodied, kind of creepy voice, tells us what's happening, in the hopes that we don't forget this movie was based on a really excellent novel that the screenwriter also wrote.

Naturally, I'd like to see my Movie of 2006, Borat, take the prize. I will say, however, that its nomination in this category is nonsensical. The best moments in Borat were improvisational. Even though Baron Cohen created the character and obviously pre-scripted many of the character's trademark one-liners and witticisms (you don't just improvise the phrase "liquid sexytime explosion"...it takes hours of careful preparation), it's obvious that his genius lies in performance, not writing.

He should be nominated for Best Actor and he should win. I'm thinking Departed will, quite deservingly, take this category. Monahan's script was brilliant and hilarious and near-flawlessly executed. Like Batman Begins or Big Lebowski, it's one of those scripts that's, to me, kind of awe inspiring. How could any human being have the patience to concoct something so intricate and ceaselessly creative?