Pander Dragoon

Hillary Clinton and Joe Lieberman made an important statement about violence. Allow me to summarize their position, as of December 6th of this year.

Direct American involvement in the deplorable violence decimating what was once the nation of Iraq is necessary in order to secure a lasting peace. Violence in video games must be closely and carefully monitored at great public expense, as it poisons our youth.

Do I have that correctly?

In a press conference scheduled for 3:00 P.M., Senators Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) will appear with ESA president Doug Lowenstein and ESRB president Patricia Vance to announce the launch of a nationwide television campaign to promote awareness of video game ratings.

Here's Arianna Huffington's response to the story:

The violence in Iraq is becoming more savage by the minute -- among the dead yesterday were 45 bullet-riddled corpses found in Baghdad, many of whom had been tortured before being executed -- and Hillary is worried about video game violence? Are you kidding me?

Could she be any more politically tone deaf?

Now that Arianna brings it up, I would be curious to see the polling that has led Lieberman and Clinton to conclude that propping up pointless video game ratings systems is a politically advantageous course of action.

My generation was the first to grow up with home video game systems, and now that people my age have families of their own, I'm not sure you can count on overwhelming support from parents for restrictive video game legislation. And you risk offending voters in their 20's and 30's, largely males, who play a lot of video games. This can include a lot of independant, libertarian types - engineers, scientists, the sort of free-thinking problem-solvers that don't vote out of fidelity to a party but ideologically. These are exactly the sort of people who wouldn't vote for a candidate if they found out he or she had taken a strong ideological stand against one of their favorite hobbies.

(Of course, it is only an ideological stand. This legislation, indeed the whole notion of video game rankings, is completely meaningless. This is theater, designed to make Joe Lieberman and Hillary Clinton look concerned about the morality of violent video games, and to give cover to an industry that wants to keep producing said games. That doesn't mean it won't have the potential to piss off video game fans who just wish politicians would shut up about the way they spend their free time.)

So there's the downside of standing for a Nanny State as it concerns gaming. Is it outweighed by a strong benefit? Is Joe Lieberman genuinely winning over voters with this sanctimonious stance, arguing that we should spend money to advertise the fact that a panel of video game industry experts has scrawled a letter on the box that lets you know how vicious the animated bloodshed gets?

Why spend any time on this issue? There are so many important things to do. It's like Intelligent Design. It's eventually defeated because it's so dumb, but all that time wasted on killing off that argument could have gone to figuring out one of the five hundred thousand Bush Administration fuckups that are going to get us all burned alive.

Douchetardity: A Field Manual

Of all the things I love about reality television, it's the insight into average quotidian stupidity that really resonates above all others.

Now I don't tout myself as a genius or anything. Often, when people around me are discussing philosophers, I fall back on the two-sentence summaries of their works lodged successfully in my brain by a variety of half-remembered UCLA lecturers. ("Oh, yes, Hegel...Well, he discussed synthesizing things. Fascinating stuff, really...")

But I possess at least, let's say, somewhat-above-average intelligence. I did well on my SAT, I occasionally read long books for no compelling reason other than personal pleasure, and I made it to the second round out of three on "Win Ben Stein's Money." So as a person of somewhat-above-average intelligence, it's physically impossible for me to involve myself in a conversation between stupid idiots. I can't do it. If I'm there, at least one person of somewhat-above-average intelligence is participating. So I don't know how idiots really interact with one another when no one else is around, and that's what a show like "House of Carters" provides in spades.

Anyway, tonight I had a rare opportunity to get some anthropological research in at the supermarket. I was waiting in a rather extraordinarily long line to pay for my groceries and a drunk couple got in line right behind me.

The dude was a fairly standard-issue ex-fratboy douchetard, wearing a collared shirt and sport coat with all the sleeves rolled up. Like he was just coming from the trading floor or something. I noticed right away that he was using the word "whatever" far too frequently, and that he was referring to his date on more than one occasion as "bro." His date was a moderately attractive blonde wearing far too much eyeshadow and one of those tiny nose studs, where you can't tell for a second if the girl is wearing jewelry in her nose or if a shard of glass has somehow become painlessly lodged in there, undiscovered, for the past several days. Both were around, I'd estimate, their early mid-30's.

Okay, so, here's their conversation as accurately, and without embellishment, as I can reconstruct it. First, the girl picks up a magazine featuring Christina Aguilera and starts talking about how she's a whore and totally ugly and how this girl can't understand why anyone likes her. More vicious circa-2003 anti-celebrity tirades followed suit, against every woman featured on the newsstand. Did you guys know that Jessica Simpson is a bimbo? Or had you, perhaps, heard that Lindsay Lohan is a crazy party girl?

(I was a bit taken aback when this girl said that she hated Kate Winslet, because every time the actress appears on TV, "it looks like she hasnt' showered." Kate Winslet's always lookeds spic-and-span to me. There's that whole scene in Heavenly Creatures in which she's in the tub!)

After the Joan Rivers impression, these two worked their way into an equally fascinating and celebrity-themed topic - which famous people they feel that they resemble. The girl said she looks like the blonde girl from "Scrubs," formerly the replacement Becky on TV's "Roseanne." (How lame is it that I know the girl's name to be Sarah Chalke without looking it up?)

The guy then, quite hilariously, pulled out a totally lame, canned routine that he obviously has stored up for just such an occasion. See, he drops "off-handedly" that people have told him he looks like Johnny Knoxville. But the trick is, he pretends to find this insulting. "People think I look like a jackass!," was his line. The genius of this scheme is that a dim-witted but sensitive female, trying only to comfort a guy who feels slighted, will find herself in the odd position of complimenting him on looking like a really attractive guy.

This dude knows chicks dig Johnny Knoxville. But by pretending to not know this, he gets girls to say, "No, Johnny Knoxville's hot," having already made the connection between himself and Mr. Knoxville. It might actually be clever if it weren't so totally hacky. I think this guy just has really terrible delivery and can't sell the routine. In the right hands, it could be golden.

Anyway, after stroking their egos a bit in a humiliating display of vanity, the duo turned their attention (naturally) to their favorite TV shows. "Roseanne" was an early favorite, but I swear the girl actually said the following:

"That show was alright, but my favorite was always 'Home Improvement.' You wouldn't think so, but Tim Allen is hilarious."

Gentle reader, I began looking around for the camera, certain that I was being filmed for Jamie Kennedy's next miserable disgusting failure of a prank show.

So, okay...Typical mindless, shallow LA posers...Buying booze for the second half of their date...Comparing the relative comic abilities of Tim Allen, Christopher Hewitt and John Stamos...Obsessively rattling on about their favorite brands for everything (including gum!)...

What do you think these two people were purchasing? Think hard now...













If you guessed vodka and Red Bull, congratulations! You are familiar with douchetardism in its rarest and most beautiful form.

The Queen

I saw The Queen, along with a grimy, faded, near-unwatchable print of Dangerous Liasons, last week at the Aero Theater in Santa Monica with the director of both films, Stephen Frears, in attendance. (I don't know how Mr. Frears felt about seeing perhaps his most celebrated work projected in such a lamentable state. One can only hope that he made his gracious post-Q&A exit during the opening credit sequence, before the filth became too overbearing.)

It's a deft and surprising film, much more humorous than I expected, and I enjoyed it very much. So I'm not quite sure why it has taken me four days to actually write up a review...Laziness, I guess.

Frears had made a docu-drama for the BBC about the early political career of Tony Blair starring a man named Michael Sheen, who in addition to possessing a great deal of charisma and a natural presence on screen also happens to look very much like the real Prime Minister. The original project having been such a success, it was decided that Sheen would reprise his role as Blair in another film, one chronicling the week following the Parisian car crash that killed Lady Diana, ex-wife to the Prince of Wales.

So though it is titled The Queen and features an assured, sharp and rightly celebrated performance by Helen Mirren as Her Royal Highness Queen Elizabeth II, Frears' film isn't character study about one of the world's most famous monarchs. Rather, Frears and writer Peter Morgan mine human comedy from the relationship between an anxious upstart politician and the outdated relic to whom he's regrettably saddled.

In the Q&A session that followed the film last Saturday, Frears postulated that the monarchy itself may fade out after the death of Queen Elizabeth. The Queen is beloved of her subjects, but the same cannot necessarily be said for the institution she represents. It's an untenable situation, a self-fulfilling prophecy. If everyone thinks that the monarchy has no real power, and there's no Constitution giving the monarchy any official power, then the monarchy has no power. It's almost as if Brits have decided to just let these people continue to act like royalty in order to be polite, which is a very British thing to do. After all, it would be rude to ask them to move off of their 40,000 acres now. They're old!

Frears' film cuts right to the heart of this barely-concealed tension. Blair seems to know the Queen's opinion matters as he practices the various handshakes and salutory rituals one needs to make her acquaintance, but he also knows all this pomp has no deep significance. The Queen stands for tradition, but most of her subjects seem to desire change. The Queen hates celebrities, yet stripped of powers of state, she's little more than a celebrity herself. It would be tragic if it wasn't so amusing.



Frears' insightful, craftily satirical film pivots on one central concept: the notion of an old-fashioned European monarchy co-existing with a modern representational government is stupid and ridiculous. The film opens with Tony Blair's government ascending to power in a crucial election. In accordance with tradition, the first duty of an incoming Prime Minister is to visit The Queen and ask (or, more accurately, beg) for permission to form a new government.

Blair's a modern, casual kind of guy who asks everyone he works with to call him "Tony," but he's patriotic and enthusiastic enough to accept this rather awkward, humiliating ordeal with a smile. His wife Cherie (Helen McCrory), whom the Queen's advisor (Roger Allam) calls a "staunch anti-monarchist," finds the whole affair offensive, and makes it known with her fits of giggly schoolgirl laughter and her "shallow courtsy."

Frears and Morgan eventually come down on Cherie's side of this argument, taking umbrage at the idea of nobles, elevated by nothing other than birthright, lording over civil society with their antiquated rules and petty family squabbles. Accordingly, they depict all the royals as ludicrous characters in many ways.

As the petty, strangely hostile Prince Philip, James Cromwell gets the film's biggest laughs and even works in some physical comedy. I've rarely enjoyed him more on screen. A guy I've never seen in a movie before, Alex Jennings, gives a truly brilliant performance as Prince Charles, turning him into a mawkish, weepy caricature that's somehow more human than the real Prince Charles. Sylvia Syms plays Her Majesty the Queen Mother like a boozy old broad on a sitcom, gingerly tossing out rotten advice and backhanded compliments in between healthy slugs of bourbon. They're a fun group.

Still, despite Frears' sarcastic contempt for the Royal Family and the history of oppression and elitist disdain they represent, he can't quite give himself fully over to the idea of hating them. Using mostly archival footage from the immediate aftermath of Diana's death, Frears depicts the very real and very emotional grief of the English people over the loss of an ex-royal they saw as one of their own. Surely the royals still mean something to the British people if they are capable of eliciting this kind of sadness and anger.

In fact, the negative public response to Queen Elizabeth that provides most of the conflict in The Queen comes not out of resentment or hatred for the Royal Family, but bitter disappointment. Diana, whom Tony Blair called "The People's Princess" in a press conference following her death, had clearly won the PR battle following her divorce from Prince Charles. The Royals were seen as cruel and exclusionary. Diana was not one of them, she was too "common," so they kicked her out.

When the news arrived of her death in a car crash, along with new boyfriend Dodi Al-Fayed, it seemed the entire world looked to Queen Elizabeth for some sort of public statement of grief. The problem is that such a thing is simply not done. HRH takes her position very seriously. She determines her public behavior based on strict guidelines, adhering always to decorum and tradition. Kings and Queens do not make emotional public statements of grief. Loss is personal and should be handled discreetly, out of the public eye. Therefore, Diana would be mourned in a private ceremony hosted by the Spencer family, and not honored officially by her former in-laws in any way.

Unfortunately, to the British public, the total lack of response from Buckingham Palace didn't feel like traditional British stoicism ("stiff upper lip and all that..."). It felt like venom. It felt like the response of a bunch of stuck-up old crones who always hated Diana and were happy now that she was dead. (Of course, it's entirely possible that Queen Elizabeth's response is rooted in her intense personal distaste for Diana. The film makes it clear that there was no love lost between the two, even as it keeps The Queen's ultimate motivations intentionally vague.) Regardless, it appeared to the public like hatred towards Diana, which they then interpreted as hatred towards all of them. And this caused significant popularity problems for the Royal Family.

Much of the film finds Sheen's Blair making the case to Mirren's monarch for breaking tradition by allowing Diana's many fans to grieve along with the royal family in a public funeral. Fortunately, the two actors have a natural chemistry and give the various machinations and power struggles realism while still making them exaggerated for comic effect.

In their first scene, with Blair taking a knee in order to formally ask for his sovereign's blessing in forming a government, the Queen intimidates him by noting the many other Prime Ministers whom she has overseen. (She lets slip that her first PM was Winston Churchill.) Later, during a phone conversation, Blair turns the tables on HRH, strongarming her over a decision not to fly the flag at half-mast over Buckingham Palace despite a public outcry. Sheen exudes certainty with his voice, assuring the Queen that this is a compromise that must be made for the sake of the monarchy, while indicating his intense anxiety only with his eyebrows.

The central metaphor of the film comes soon after, as Philip decides to distract his newly-motherless grandsons by stalking a deer that has wandered on to their property. The buck, an aging but nonetheless majestic creature, wanders near where the Queen's Land Rover has broken down on the property. They share a knowing, quiet moment before she shoos it away to save its life, and immediately you kind of get where the whole movie's going. The Queen is that deer, still running along but growing tired. But moreso, the notion of having a Queen is the deer. It had a good run, and managed some impressive feats, and certainly had a lot of fascinating tradition and pageanty and history. But the concept of royalty's time is over, like the buck, and it no longer makes a lot of sense.

Frears kind of lays this all on a bit thick, particularly towards the end of the subplot (which I won't spoil here.) It's a bit obvious and self-important, while the rest of the film is a pithy delight. Fortunately, he really doesn't make too many more missteps.

Though retelling a story from less than a decade ago, concerning people who are mostly still alive and in the public eye, Frears uses admirable restraint in connecting the events of the movie to the present day. It's a bit uncanny and odd to see a fictional movie about events of the recent past like this, but once the shock of the new wears off, the iconic and famous individuals being interpreted start to come alive in their own right, as movie characters.

I suppose the case could be made that merely by representing Blair as something of a sycophant and proxy, as someone easily dazzled and willing to be pressed into service by those in a higher station, Frears is making a contemporary political commentary. There are shadows of Blair's later PR assist to our President in his advisory role to the Queen in this film.

Frears only confronts this notion head-on once, towards the end, allowing the Queen to get in a quick dig at Tony Blair's hypothetical political fortunes in the year 2006. I think it's telling that the one time the movie sort of steps outside itself and addresses the present, it's a line of dialogue given to the Queen. She may head an organization that's no longer exactly relevant, but that doesn't mean she doesn't have any cards left to play.

Gore on the Floor

Of all the potential candidates for President in '08, there's really no one I'd rather vote for than Al Gore. (I had to throw that "potential candidates" line in there, because there's quite a few people I'd prefer to vote for in a general Presidential election than Al Gore. I just don't think Hugo Chavez or Stephen Colbert have any chance of winning.)

To get an inkling of why I feel like Gore's the ideal Democratic candidate, aside from the fact that he once appeared on a "Saturday Night Live" sketch in which he exchanged pot jokes with the guys from Phish, look no further than this interview from GQ. (Surely a first for Crushed by Inertia linkage!) It's brought to you courtesy of The Carpetbagger Report.

First off, let's get the obligatory denial out of the way.

So if you decide to run, do you think we would see the Al Gore from the movie? Or the Al Gore from 2000?

Well, I don’t plan to run. I don’t plan to run. And I don’t expect to run.

Yeah, right. He's just doing this interview to sell a few extra DVD's. Al Gore frequently goes on publicity tours to hawk merch. Remember the epic 30-state summer tour promoting Sane Planning, Sensible Future?

How many times a day does somebody ask you this?

Well, I’m doing a lot of interviews and it’s on the list of questions. For every one of them. And I appreciate that. I appreciate that people think enough of me still in that world to ask that question. It’s true that I haven’t, uh, gotten to the point where I am willing to completely rule it out for all time. But, that is really more a matter of the internal shifting of gears. I’m not making plans to run again.

But you’re not ruling it out?

Uh… no. [smiles]

If you truly don't expect to run for president and some journalist asks you if you're going to run for president, you say "What? Oh hell no." You don't say, "Well, at this present time, I'm tempted to say that I can't see myself potentially expecting to run any time in the immediate future."

Do you know if President Bush has seen the movie yet?

Well, he claimed that would not see it. That’s why I wrote the book. He’s a reader.

Face.

What page do you think he’s on?

I would encourage him to see the movie and read the book. I wish that he would.

Don’t you find it appalling that he won’t?

Well, you know, he’s probably no more objective about me than I am about him.

Is that...Was that just a double-face? Did Al Gore just doubly-face the President?

Do you feel that we would be safer today if you had been president on that day?

Well, no one can say that the 9-11 attack wouldn’t have occurred whoever was president.

Okay, so he's still thinking politically and says the diplomatic thing here, but check out what happens when the reporter presses him just a little bit.

Really? How about all the warnings?

That’s a separate question. And it’s almost too easy to say, “I would have heeded the warnings.” In fact, I think I would have, I know I would have. We had several instances when the CIA’s alarm bells went off, and what we did when that happened was, we had emergency meetings and called everybody together and made sure that all systems were go and every agency was hitting on all cylinders, and we made them bring more information, and go into the second and third and fourth level of detail. And made suggestions on how we could respond in a more coordinated, more effective way. It is inconceivable to me that Bush would read a warning as stark and as clear [voice angry now] as the one he received on August 6th of 2001, and, according to some of the new histories, he turned to the briefer and said, “Well, you’ve covered your ass.” And never called a follow up meeting. Never made an inquiry. Never asked a single question. To this day, I don’t understand it. And, I think it’s fair to say that he personally does in fact bear a measure of blame for not doing his job at a time when we really needed him to do his job. And now the Woodward book has this episode that has been confirmed by the record that George Tenet, who was much abused by this administration, went over to the White House for the purpose of calling an emergency meeting and warning as clearly as possible about the extremely dangerous situation with Osama bin Laden, and was brushed off! And I don’t know why—honestly—I mean, I understand how horrible this Congressman Foley situation with the instant messaging is, okay? I understand that. But, why didn’t these kinds of things produce a similar outrage? And you know, I’m even reluctant to talk about it in these terms because it’s so easy for people to hear this or read this as sort of cheap political game-playing. I understand how it could sound that way. [Practically screaming now] But dammit, whatever happened to the concept of accountability for catastrophic failure? This administration has been by far the most incompetent, inept, and with more moral cowardice, and obsequiousness to their wealthy contributors, and obliviousness to the public interest of any administration in modern history, and probably in the entire history of the country!

Um, yeah. Exactly. Can we just elect this guy right now, in some sort of elaborate Schwarzeneggerean recall election? Get me Scalia on the phone. He's not busy worrying about the environment, he has time to talk to me for a few minutes...

(The best part of California electing this goony movie star doofus to public office, by the way, is that it birthed the neologism 'Scwarzeneggerean'. I suppose it could have already existed: "a manner of behavior composed of or indicating a childish bratty chauvanism; of or relating to something large and obnoxious." But now that he's genuinely a politician, the word has clear and definitive meaning.)

Back to Al Gore:

But how do you really feel?

(cracks up)

What’s the nicest thing you can say about George Bush?

He made a terrific appointment of Ben Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Ok, Is there a second best thing?

I can’t think of another one, actually.

There you have it...The elusive triple-face.