The Great New Wonderful

Post-Crash, we'll probably be seeing a lot more ensemble anthology-style dramas, in which unrelated characters conduct multiple, thematically-linked plots. Personally, I'm not a fan of the genre. For every Nashville, in which Robert Altman simultaneously tells dozens of humorous and intriguing stories, there's three or four movies like The Great New Wonderful, aimless mood pieces that impatiently flit between uninteresting half-thoughts in a desperate search for some kind of Universal Truth.

That's really the Big Lie about this kind of storytelling. Relating a string of unrelated, and unfortunately mundane, mini-stories over the course of a single film neccessarily implies that there is some kind of buried revelation to be gleaned. Watching these individuals work through their problems will lead us to an epiphany that can be applied not only to all the film's characters, but to everyday life as well.

It's the Raymond Carver school of storytelling. There's no time to delve into a lot of backstory or exposition. With five different characters to keep up with in 87 minutes, everyone's only given one basic conflict or scenario to work out. So small slices-of-life, moments taken out of context, have to stand in for the whole range of human experience. In the hands of an Altman, Michael Powell or, say, Max Ophuls, this kind of experiment can work out quite well, taking the viewer on an emotional journey of discovery in which seemingly disparate narratives congeal into one singular, and original, perspective. (Ophuls' La Ronde, regrettably not available on DVD, is one such masterpiece.)

Danny Leiner has already made one great film - Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle - so I suppose he has every reason to feel ambitious. But his direct-to-DVD disappointment The Great New Wonderful represents almost everything unpleasant and misguided about these kinds of treacly anthology dramas (TAD's). It's maudlin, undercooked, scattered and boring. That would all be bad enough, but Sam Catlin's woeful script makes the added mistake of tying his generic plot machinations to the September 11th attacks. Just as Catlin's characters must reassess their lives and find ways to evolve, so too must the city of New York heal itself from the wounds inflicted by those al-Qaida bastards.

Um, no, Danny. No. That's not gonna work for me.

Some of you may have noticed that I like Spike Lee's The 25th Hour, which does in fact do this veryt same thing (and much closer to the actual 9/11 tragedy than The Great New Wonderful), and may be thinking that I am a hypocrite. Please allow me to explain. 9/11 does not serve as a focal point for The 25th Hour. The film is set in New York, and Lee uses the remnants and evidence of 9/11 as yet another way of presenting life in his favorite city. The environment, the background, has changed slightly - now the Irish bars have tributes to dead firemen and the lavish penthouses overlook Ground Zero - but the lives of New Yorkers presses on.

The Great New Wonderful uses 9/11 to advance its rather simplistic theme. The World Trade Center is like a fucked up, confused person. Badly damaged and ready to topple over. But just like we went in and cleaned up the WTC site and are building a memorial, so too must a person pick themselves up and blah blah blah cut me a fucking break. Spike Lee's made some reductive, overly-simplistic films before (He Got Game?), but I don't think he's ever made anything that vapid.



There's just not enough time to tell five effective stories in an 87 minute movie. That's what all this boils down to. Crash, among its myriad failings, also suffered from a lack of development. 90 minutes is the average time for movies (or was before Peter Jackson lost his damn mind) for a really good reason. You need around that much time to establish characters, set an intricate plot in motion, devise a few interconnected subplots and develop a theme.

Why would anyone think that it's reasonable to try and do this five separate times all in one movie? It's a herculean task. For some reason, TAD's tend to attract first-time screenwriters. (Full disclosure: one of the first scripts I wrote, which I have never showed anyone, was a dreadful TAD set at UCLA in which one character was stuck in an elevator for the entire film). I don't know why someone who has never written a movie in which only one set of events occur would want to tackle six or more simultaneous events.

Perhaps because skipping around between stories sounds easier. You don't have to give any of the stories real depth or nuance, you don't have to come up with a full three-act strucutre for the narrative, and your characters don't have to be interesting enough to keep an audience's attention for 90 minutes. You can have mildly interesting stuff go on, but just keep everything in constant motion.

I have no idea. Anyway, it usually doesn't work, and The Great New Wonderful doesn't stand out in this regard.

The best of the stories stars Maggie Gyllenhaal as the rising star of New York's Designer Cake scene, who both resents and idolizes the Martha Stewart-esque Grand Dame of Cakery (Edie Falco). These two actresses get one scene together - a gossipy, catty run-in at a posh eatery - and it's by far the best moment in the movie. It has personality because the characters have an actual dynamic. They have so much in common and clearly enjoy one another, but they're also fiercely competitive and increasingly bitter as the excitement begins to fade from their high-stress profession. This is Falco's only scene in the film, and she brings more contradictions and intrigue to Safarah than the rest of the actors do with triple her screen time.

Just about every other scene falls flat on its ass. Catlin's dialogue fills the movie wall-to-wall. Characters are always talking about something, often little snippets of chatty small talk such as you would engage in with co-workers or fellow Moms watching their toddlers at the playground. These conversations are either dull or irritating.

Judy Greer plays Emme, the mother of a troubled, angry, mean-spirited fat boy named Charlie. She spends the entire film in her underwear arguing with her husband about their wayward son, but the conversations never go anywhere. Charlie's behavior remains enigmatic throughout the film, and when a peculiar school principal (Stephen Colbert, apparently instructed to turn off his generally spot-on comic timing for a dull supporting role) suggests that they simply send their child "away," it's not really all that surprising. The boy is never anything more than a pest. Why not remove him?

Other stories work themselves out in similarly neat, uninspired fashion. Judie (Olympia Dukakis) hates her husband's nightly routine of eating sandwiches, watching TV and then having a cigarette outside. So she considers cheating on him with another old fart. The talkative Avi (Naseeruddin Shah) bickers with his uptight friend Satish (Sharat Saxena) while they provide security for a visiting Indian diplomat, leading to an ambiguous and quite frankly baffling conclusion.

But the film's oddest tangent concerns Tony Shalhoub as an insane psychologist and Jim Gaffigan as his perplexed new patient. The dialogue here, as well as the moody score by Brett Boyett and John Swihart, has clearly been inspired by Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman's Being John Malkovich. Shalhoub confronts Gaffigan about his out-of-control anger, despite the patient's apparent ease, calm and rationality. Scenes between these two pop up throughout the film and follow the same pattern - Shalhoub throws out some nonsensical idea about Gaffigan's behavior, Gaffigan responds with surprise - and it's eventually quite irritating. These scenes, above all, could have used some actual comedy to keep things moving. Catlin and Leiner rely largely on their cast to spontaneously generate big laughs out of unfunny material, forgetting that Louis Pasteur debunked the concept of spontaneous generation back in 1859.

To his credit, Leiner doesn't forcibly connect the dots, spelling out precisely what his movie is "all about." In that way, it's a considerable improvement on Haggis' Crash, which so explicitly laid out his every last platform and deeply held political belief, you almost thought the guy was running for City Councilman. That movie's more sanctimonious than Hugh Hewitt liveblogging an interview of Billy Graham by Rush Limbaugh in the auditorium of Bob Jones University on the subject of "Girls Gone Wild" DVD's.

So, anyway, Leiner just feel the need to spell eveything out so blatantly, which does allow for a few well-played little moments here and there. Shalhoub makes an early prediction that comes true by the end of the movie, which Leiner confirms with a single, static shot that's perfectly timed. Shah and Saxena have a very natural give-and-take relationship, and theirs is a far more realistic depiction of male friendship than generally appears in films. Too bad their story doesnt' go anywhere at all.

And as I said before, that scene with Gyllenhaal and Falco is pretty terrific. I would watch an entire film about Falco's character.

But the movie's all sum, no parts. There are some essential grounding themes and some interesting enough ideas, but most of the movie consists of uninteresting, flat conversations. There's carefully realized dialogue and then there's just dithering around, waiting for a story to develop. The Great New Wonderful has its moments, but doesn't give you any good reason to stay tuned until they arrive.

What Are You Guys Doing for Patriot Day?

George Bush doesn't call himself "The Deciderer" just because he's certifiably insane! No, no! Sometimes, he actually makes important decisions. For example, he has decided to declare September 11th to be...PATRIOT DAY! Hell yeah. Don't wear purple pants after Patriot Day, that will be the new fashion credo.

Let me just be the first to say, thank you very much, Mr. President. Here I've been, trying to think of something to call that day five years ago when our nation was attacked...And I can't come up with anything. I'm really racking my brain here. Allah-ween? D-Day Part II: The Revenge? Osamadan?

If only there were some sort of accepted designation, some common reference, perhaps indicating the date of those tragic events, that we could all come together and use to refer to it publicly. Maybe something that also, coincidentally, played on popular lingo for an emergency.

Okay, I think that's just about enough sarcasm there...Well, maybe one more sentence...Okay, now it's ready.

Patriot Day, 2006
A Proclamation by the President of the United States of America

Proclaim it, George! Testify! Can the President get a witness?

On the fifth anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001, we recall the fire and horror at the twin towers of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a Pennsylvania field. America will always remember the thousands of innocent lives taken by the enemies of freedom that morning.

"And have you seen the movie version? It totally kicks ass! I've watched the DVD like four times already."

I don't get why this is "Patriot Day". Who's the titular patriot? Veterans Day honors veterans, Arbor Day honors trees, St. Lucifer's Day honors the Devil...Are we saying those that died in the September 11th attacks are "patriots"? They're victims, sure. I'm willing to go so far as to say "innocent victims." But patriots? Some of them weren't even Americans!

There is nothing inherently patriotic about being killed as part of a terrorist action. I'm not trying to say anything negative about the victims of the attack on the WTC or Flight 93 or anyone else who died that day. Horrible, tragic stuff. Slaughter. But if we're going to set aside a day to honor those we lost on 9/11, shouldn't that be clear in the name? Like by calling it...you know...9/11?

In the face of these unspeakable attacks, we were reminded that the great strength of America is found in the hearts and souls of our citizens. We witnessed firefighters, police officers, other public safety officials, and ordinary Americans demonstrate extraordinary courage, risking their lives to save innocent victims. We saw our country united in compassion as Americans came together to provide relief and bring hope to others.

It's rare that I'll read a paragraph nominally credited to our President and think, "yeah, I agree with that."

Today, America is fighting a war that is testing our Nation's resolve. We are once again answering history's call with confidence, and we know that freedom will prevail. Our brave men and women in uniform have stepped forward to fight our enemies abroad so that we do not have to face them here at home, and we are grateful for the courageous individuals bringing terrorists to justice around the world.

Man, V for Vendetta was spot-on. Have you guys all seen that yet? Want to have some fun? Replace the words "America" and "freedom" with "England" and you can make your own version of the insane propagandist from the film. It's like Christopher Hitchens Mad Libs!

We are also confronting the extremists in the great ideological struggle of the 21st century.

It's totally premature to start declaring any conflict "the great ideological struggle of the 21st Century." We're only a few years into the century. Maybe the greatest ideological struggle of this century will be between people who think sex robots are great and people who want to get rid of all the sex robots. Or between artificially-intelligent sex robots bent on world conquest that want exterminate the human race and artificially-intelligent sex robots bent on world conquest that want to keep humans alive as slaves, pets and potential hunting trophies.

Aside from the semantic argument, this quote does let you know essentially where George Bush's head is at in terms of the "War on Terrorism." He expects this thing to last the better part of the next 100 years. It's the great struggle of the next century! I mean, wow. That's quite a struggle. That's, like, the first stirrings of Communism to the fall of the Soviet Union kind of time there. And I, for one, salute our President's desire to drag us into an endless clash of civilizations.

Cause, you know, when Europe had that 100 Years' War, it worked out really well for all of them. And that was just the English and the French. They were already right next to each other! (Actually, that war lasted a bit longer than 100 years, which is exactly the kind of wiggle room George continually requests in his speeches. "We really turned a corner after that Battle of Azincourt. Trust me on this one.")

No, sir, no real end in sight for the War on Terra. And, you know, as long as we're at war, you know, Supreme Executive Power and all that...

September the 11th made clear that, in the long run, the only way to secure our Nation is to advance liberty and democracy as the great alternatives to repression and radicalism. By working together with our friends and allies, we are helping spread the blessings of freedom and laying the foundations of peace for generations to come.

Okay, this one's a bit harder to translate than that other paragraph, where all you had to do was replace a few works. This time, use this handy Bushian->English guide:

"secure our Nation" = "kick serious raghead ass"
"advance liberty" = "drop lots of bombs"
"democracy" = "ignore Israel while they drop lots of bombs"
"working together with our friends and allies" = "insulting the French"
"spread the blessings" = "torture"
"of freedom" = "potentially innocent guys"
"laying the foundations" = "preventing"
"of peace" = "any kind of progress"

It's a little tricky to pick up some of the idioms, but you can get the hang of Bush->English translation quickly if you pay attention. For example, if the President were to say,

"Isn't it a lovely afternoon? Would you join me for a glass of iced tea?"

...what he'd really be saying is...

"God told me to kill."

Actually, if you're ever in doubt as to what Bush is really trying to say, you should probably just assume it's some variation on "God told me to kill."

By a joint resolution approved December 18, 2001 (Public Law 107-89), the Congress has designated September 11 of each year as "Patriot Day."

But, wait...September 11th is already Moby's Birthday! It can't be two days! We'll just have to agree to make Patriot Day on September the 12th or something.

Well, if nothing else, at least now we'll get another three day weekend each year.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim September 11, 2006, as Patriot Day. I call upon the Governors of the United States and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, as well as appropriate officials of all units of government, to direct that the flag be flown at half staff on Patriot Day. I also call upon the people of the United States to observe Patriot Day with appropriate ceremonies, activities, and remembrance services, to display the flag at half staff from their homes on that day, and to observe a moment of silence beginning at 8:46 a.m. eastern daylight time to honor the innocent Americans and people from around the world who lost their lives as a result of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Wait, what? No long weekend? We just fly flags at half staff? That's it? That's your new holiday? I never thought I'd say this, but George Bush isn't thinking big enough. I mean, they fly flags at half staff at the schools when the janitor dies. This is almost 3,000 people here. I think, at the very least, we should have a half-day and an annual parade.

Or, failing that, some kind of fun new tradition. Like bobbing for apples, only something not already associated with Halloween. Oh, what about three legged racing! That's always fun. Each Patriot Day, families take a half day from work or school, go out on picnics and have traditional three-legged races to commemorate the Patriots who bravely crashed planes into buildings on September 11th.

No! Reverse that! To commemorate the Patriots who got crashed into by planes on September 11th. Yeah, that's the ticket.

Finally, I'd like to point out that it was very rude of the terrorists to attack America when it was still so early on the West Coast. How am I supposed to schedule a moment of silence before 6 a.m.? I mean, I'll be sleeping, so that's fairly silent (though I'm told I kind of snore.) But waking up to then just sit silently seems counter-productive. Would the victims of September 11th really want me to wake up and then sit silently in my bed, just to roll over a minute later and fall back to sleep? I'd like to think they'd just as soon have me sleep, so long as I promise to dream about blowing up Arabs.

Lucky Number Slevin

This is the second film star Josh Hartnett and director Paul McGuigan have made together. McGuigan, who broke on to the scene in Britain with the stylish dark comedy Gangster #1, made his American debut with a Chicago-set thriller named Wicker Park that no one, myself included, bothered to see. Lucky Number Slevin hopefully marks the end of the Hartnett-McGuigan collaborative efforts, not only because it is a bad film but because star and director seem perplexed, at times making totally different movies.

McGuigan's trying to turn in a mix between David Mamet, Tony Scott and Guy Ritchie, a sexy violent comedy-drama playing around with gangster movie cliches. Hartnett's performance just doesn't make any sense at all in this context. At first, his behavior just seems out of character. After a while, though, he actually begins to violate the entire concept behind the movie. He forgets he's playing the patsy in a "mistaken identity" thriller and starts to act like he's the heavy in a mean-spirited revenge film. Like a lot of story elements throughout Lucky Number Slevin, it makes no sense.



But I am getting ahead of myself. Hartnett's confused and confusing performance is a big problem, but not really the film's biggest problem. Really, I think two things just kill any chance Lucky Number Sleven would have as a viable piece of entertainment within the first 10 minutes:

(1) The script by Jason Smilovic is not particularly clever yet seems to find itself intensely clever.

We open with the mysterious Mr. Goodkat (a barely-there Bruce Willis) telling a story about a con known as the "Kansas City Shuffle." Now, all the "Kansas City Shuffle" really refers to is misdirection. Make a guy look one way, you look the other way.

Now, that is not exciting or insightful. Okay, any movie about any kind of con is going to, in some way, include misdirection. In fact, any kind of movie involving even a magic trick will involve misdirection. That's how you fool people, by making them look away at the crucial moment. Duh.

The movie, however, seems to treat Willis' insight as if it's the Holy Grail of all Criminal Insights. Smilovic's narrative is well-structured enough. He knows where the cool little flourishes and snappy bits of dialogue ought to go. He just can't actually come up with any. The dialogue reminded me of "Dawson's Creek." People talk fast and they seem to be "quipping" or doing some kind of repartee, but if you actually listen to their comments, nothing is particularly funny or droll. The best Smilovic can come up with in terms of clever little noir-isms is when Hartnett refers to a policeman on the beat as a "pigtail." Get it? A pig who's tailing him! Har!

Beyond just the quality of the writing, all of the details Smilovic has clearly included to make the movie memorable and fun just fall totally flat. The whole movie has an out-of-step, tone deaf feel to it, as if writer and director and actors just couldn't get together on what story they wanted to tell. Because the films various "bits" are not funny, and therefore don't work as jokes, they only serve to remove any sort of intensity or believability from the film's central narrative. Rather than an anarchic, zany good time, he's authored a grim, mean-spirited pseudo-noir that's burdened by a reliance on ludicrous cartoon logic. Which brings me to...

(2) The film hopes to get by on creativity while ignoring common sense.

Again, if the movie were funny, I'd be willing to overlook the fact that it's stupid and, eventually, completely pointless. But it's not funny. Strange, yes. Hard to believe, sure. But not funny.

Slevin (Hartnett) arrives at Nick's New York apartment to find his old friend inexplicably missing. Next door neighbor Lindsey (Lucy Liu) hasn't seen him in a few days. As it turns out, Nick's being pursued by not one but two different yet equally powerful underworld figures. The Boss (Morgan Freeman) and The Rabbi (Ben Kingsley) once were partners, but have since become enemies. Now, they occupy two identical buildings located on opposite sides of the same street, afraid to leave their penthouse enclaves for fear of what the other will do to them.

See what I mean about cartoon logic? In a hilarious satire of crime films, perhaps an audience could buy this scenario, with two crime lords facing one another across a street, terrified to move beyond the safety of their bullet-proof windows. But it's hard to take that situation seriously at face value. These two guys don't come off as imposing. They come off as wimps. A real tough guy crime boss would just send his goons across the street to take everyone out.

Anyway, both The Boss and The Rabbi think Slevin is Nick, and because Nick owes them money, therefore Slevin owes them money. He becomes an unwilling pawn in this somewhat deadly game of cat and mouse, all the while trying to solve the mystery of Nick's disappearance with the help of the chatty, ditzy Lindsey.

It's not funny, but I think it was supposed to be. Lots of scenes feature "banter," dialogue that exists for no other reason than to entertain but which generally doesn't make a lot of sense. For example, Freeman has a long monologue in his first scene about an old comic strip character named The Shmoo. Here's part of his actual speech, taken from an old description of the Shmoo from a Lil Abner comic:

The Shmoo first appeared in the strip in August 1948. According to Shmoo legend, the lovable creature laid eggs, gave milk and died of sheer esctasy when looked at with hunger. The Shmoo loved to be eaten and tasted like any food desired. Anything that delighted people delighted a Shmoo. Fry a Shmoo and it came out chicken. Broil it and it came out steak. Shmoo eyes made terrific suspender buttons. The hide of the Shmoo if cut thin made fine leather and if cut thick made the best lumber. Shmoo whiskers made splendid toothpicks. The Shmoo satisfied all the world's wants. You could never run out of Shmoon (plural of Shmoo) because they multiplied at such an incredible rate.

I'm guessing this is Smilovic's attempt to imitate Quentin Tarantino. A tough guy makes an abstract analogy to an old comic strip. That kind of mashing together of nerdy underground culture and gritty revenge film theatrics obviously recalls movies like Pulp Fiction or True Romance. Tarantino will sometimes throw in a cultural reference just for kicks (as in his added scene in Crimson Tide where Denzel discusses Silver Surfer comics with his men), but if he's writing an entire speech about some old character, there's probably a reason. Some kind of connection to what's really going on.

Now, I have thought about this for probably longer than I should, and I can't tell why the hell The Boss would be talking about The Shmoo. It makes no goddamn sense at all. If it were really funny, I would give it a pass. But it's not funny at all. Mainly, he's just quoting the original text description of The Shmoo from the comic book itself. Later on, Slevin will bring up the topic again, recalling the reference as if it now has significance in the story. But what significance does it have? How did this make it into the movie?

There's lots of incidental information like this, details that are thrown out but have no relevance to the main story and are entirely inscrutible. Early discussions about a horse race from 20 years before so clearly telescope the film's climax that I genuinely can't believe a veteran of several previous films like McGuigan didn't realize this during editing. Veteran actors like Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, Ben Kingsley and Stanley Tucci are shockingly wasted in dull, drab parts that are entirely beneath them. In fact, Lucy Liu's character is here only to provide a last-second twist switcheroo that might work as a cheap surprise if it were not so completely impossible.

SPOILER ALERT: I'm pretty much done the non-spoiler section of this review. Don't bother seeing this movie, it's lame. However, if you have already seen the movie, you may continue reading the part where I talk about what happens at the end.

In fact, the entire final 20 minutes of the movie makes no sense. It's not overly complicated, just in violation of all that we have seen in the opening hour of the film. We see Josh Hartnett's girlfriend cheating on him. We see him get on a plane to New York. We see him call his friend Nick and announce his intentions to stay with him for a while.

But then at the end of the film, it appears that the entire adventure has been a set-up, planned by Hartnett, from the very beginning. So he planned to find his girlfriend cheating on him? How did he do that? And why would he "call" his friend Nick? He doesn't really have a friend Nick! That's the whole idea at the end. So, I guess that scene didn't really happen? McGuigan's just showing us BS that's not real to keep us guessing? That's not actually a good way to build up any suspense. It's just a formula for making people feel cheated.

As for the Lucy Liu stuff, that's even more ridiculous. Even if you got her in a bulletproof vest on the right day that she was going to get shot, how could you be sure the killer wouldn't shoot her in the head? And how did they manage to achieve realistic blood spray? She had squibs set up with fake blood, ready to go, and just walked around like that the whole day? I mean, why even include this scene if you can't come up with a way to make it work?

END SPOILERS

Anyway, this one's pretty much a disaster from beginning to end. One of those movies that obviously just didn't click, but because everyone had already cashed those advance checks, the project just developed its own momentum. Better luck next time, McGuigan. Only, maybe forget about the Hartnett collaborations next time. He's just not up to it.

Best. Article. Ever.

Oh, God, I'm going to be late for work now because I have to post something about this article. I found it thanks to Attaturk at Rising Hegemon.

Here's the headline. It's unfortunate:

'Idol' singer Clay Aiken may serve Bush

Tee hee...

Clay Aiken is in line to be named to the President's Committee for People with Intellectual Disabilities, the White House said Wednesday.

Wait, does he have...Is he...I always thought he was just kind of slow.

Oh, wait, he's going to be on the Committee. He'll be helping out others with the intellectual and the disabilities. I must have misunderstood. Anyway, I can't think of anyone more qualified for an important position with the government than the King of bad dinner theater musicals, that Gay Guy who came in Second on "American Idol." Behind the Velvet Teddy Bear.

Aiken, a Raleigh native who gained fame as a runner-up on "American Idol," once worked as a YMCA counselor.

Hang on...That's not even fair...It's like the article's doing the jokes for me. Screw you, Associated Press, this is my bit...

The committee's Web site said it advises the president on issues pertaining to people with intellectual disabilities. The committee was established in 1961 by President John Kennedy as the President's Panel on Mental Retardation.
Can you imagine a meeting between Clay Aiken and President George W. Bush. Just think about it for a second. "American Idol" runner-up Clay Aiken...Illiterate cowboy doofus George W. Bush...Okay, now, do you want your brain to explode? Are you sure? Okay, so, imagine that there's a meeting between Clay Aiken and President George W. Bush and they're discussing...what to do about Mental Retardation!

Okay, okay...calm down...Is your mind still alright? No popped blood vessels. That's a near-fatal dose of irony you've just been administered. You may feel a little weak for a while, but you're going to be alright.

A White House press release said President Bush intends to make the appointment. Officials did not say when.

Hmm...When might this notable press-saturated event go down? I wonder...

The singer's new album, "A Thousand Different Ways," is due out later this month.

Oh. Probably then.

Anyway, I'd say this is definitely a President who has his priorities straight. Awarding meaningless ceremonial positions involving those with mental disabilities to pop singers as a way of promoting their new album/conferring upon you some measure of likability by proxy. Karl Rove, you is a genius!

If the Prez is looking to give some of Aiken's chart-toppers a listen before the big meeting (I'm sure he's super-duper-excited), might I recommend a little track called "If I Was Invisible." Mr. President, there's a secret message in this song...just for you...Can you guess what it is?

As for His Clayness, I mean, what can I say...Bravo, man...I wouldn't have thought it possible to be any more of a tool to the Establishment than being a runner-up on American Idol. But, congrats, man. You found a way...

Unintelligent Designs

I actually really honestly believe with the Krazy Kristians for once. Really. I can't believe it either.

Americans who question evolution are testing a new tactic in Ohio, arguing that schools should be required to discuss all controversial issues from creation to stem cell research and global warming.

In what critics on Wednesday called a new attempt to bring religion into the classroom, the Ohio State Board of Education will consider a proposal next week that would oblige schools to teach critical thinking in all subjects.

I noticed this article on Digby's blog, where blogger Poputonian referred to it witheringly as "lovely." I have to say, though it's obvious that these idiotic theocrats want to inject their silly, decidedly unscientific interpretation of Da Bible into our nation's classrooms, I dont' think the idea itself is so horrible.

I've been arguing on this blog for years about teaching "media literacy" to kids in school. All I really mean is "critical thinking" skills, the ability to look at information in context as a way to interpret it or judge its merit. We're all inundated by information constantly, particularly corporate media. I recently got into a conversation/argument with an old college friend on this very issue. I argued that everything we do in America today, every action we take, interfaces in some way with a corporation or corporate product. I think I'm right.

He offered having a bowel movement as something he does, on his own, independantly of corporate interference. While it's a bit gross, I went ahead with the thought experiment - the food he's, erm, "passing" was more than likely mass produced. My friend's not a vegan who only eats organic pesticide-free vegetables or anything. He'd been drinking domestic beer and eating, like, hot dogs and burgers all day.

You see my point. But people get lazy about paying attention to this stuff on a day-to-day level. We assume we hear things through the grapevine because they are true or because they represent what other random people without agendas think. I get customers in the store all the time asking me what movies to trent. Sometimes, they'll ask me what I personally liked, but just as often, they will say: "What's supposed to be good?" It's this whole notion of buzz...But where does that buzz come from? Movie magazines! Studio advertising! Websites paid for exclusively via movie advertisements!

I think we'd have a much calmer, saner populace that made more informed, measured decisions if only people understood how 21st Century communication technology functions and how information can be disseminated to the masses. And why anyone would have reason to do so. All of these ridiculous memes are just floating around out there - from "there's no such thing as global warming" to "socialized medicine doesn't work" to "unions are all corrupt and evil" to Iran poses an immediate threat to our national security" to "racial profiling works" - and they have no relation to reality. People just hear them and think, yeah, that must be right!

So, anyway, back to this article. The Krazy Kristians want to teach critical thinking skills, which works out really really poorly for them in the long run. It would, if taught correctly, encourage kids to consider the sources of information. So, let's take, just as an example, the evolution "debate." Entire world scientific community on the one hand, Krazy Kristians on the other. Guess what, guys? You lose that argument!

I don't think they really want kids to learn critical thinking skills at school. Let's face it, they want them to believe in Noah's Ark and dinosaurs living alongside human beings. Critical thinking skills are the last thing you want to foster. More like "continual drinking" skills. That would be helpful.

John West, senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, which promotes the teaching of intelligent design, said the proposed new policy was "good pedagogy and good for students" because it would teach them how to sift and analyze evidence."

Students don't like to be told that there are some questions they don't have the right to raise."

Is this guy insane? Unless every teacher promises to teach this "class" with a strong pro-Bible bias, how will these kids come up with the conclusion that there's no evolution? Kids are kind of dumb, but they're not that dumb.

I get it, I get it, I really do. This will in an underhanded way force teachers to mention Creationism. Because how can you bring up this point, that you should analyze where the message comes from, without mentioning that there is this entirely alternative message that comes from a different source. That's just...say it with me now...strong cirtical thinking skills and media literacy.

But I still think it's the wrong approach if you want to teach kids that evolution is wrong. You don't want to encourage them to actually weigh evidence, you want to teach them to ignore evidence when it suits them. That's why I think it would be better to force kids to write essays about topics they know are wrong. See if they can contruct arguments for obvious crap by leaving out all the contradictory sources.

Kind of like a reverse book report. Like, "Johnny, I want you to discuss how Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird argues strongly for harsher punishments on black men convicted of touching white women. Be sure to include examples from the book that reflect Atticus Finch's deep-seated racism and justify the community's prejudce towards Boo Radley. Try to bring in other, like-minded examples, like Uncle Tom's Cabin and the works of Richard Wright."

"In 1984, George Orwell subverts expectations by telling the story entirely from the perspective of the heroic Big Brother, nobly sniffing out opposition and quashing it so as not to disrupt the peaceful serenity of day-to-day urban life. Support this contention using examples and quotations from the text."

"Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States introduced a new kind of American historiography. Finally, the perspective of rich white men was taken into account, with their particular struggles highlighted for the first time. Describe Zinn's depiction of hapless, put-upon whites, paying particular attention to the role of reverse-racism in keeping the Cracker Man down."

Write a couple of those papers, then you're ready to defend Creationism against all comers!

Clintoniana

Growing up as a child in the '80s, I had an extremely vague awareness of politics and current events. There was a show called "the news" and my parents would watch it from time to time, and typically very serious men were discussing something called "Iran Contra." I had no idea what this meant. I knew "contra" meant "against," so I figured Iran must be against something? But what? Us?

And if it just meant that Iran was against us, well, wasn't that kind of expected? I knew Libya was against us (from Back to the Future). I knew Russia was against us. And Iran was run by that insane-looking guy in the turban. Why not them, too?

Anyway, the point is, kids develop a kind of hazy understanding of what's going on in the world around them, but it's really up to parents or teachers or siblings or other adults to guide this understanding and form it into a worldview. I knew, for example, that Iran Contra was important, because it somehow meant that the President was a "bad guy," which is what my family clearly believed. Not a lot of big Gipper fans in my house growing up.

I found Reagan to be kind of a ridiculous character as a kid. This little old guy always going off about Star Wars and some Wall somewhere and claiming not to remember things. And when he was younger, he had co-starred in black and white movies with a chimp. But by the time his Vice President took over and I had started to think for myself, it was interesting to go back and take another look at those half-understood events of my childhood.

This is a roundabout way of getting to this fascinating conversation I had while tutoring yesterday. My student and I were going over SAT Essay prompts. These are always extremely vague because the emphasis is less about making strong arguments and more about having a well-written, organized impromptu essay. In fact, if a student can't come up with a really good example to back up his argument within the essay, we usually recommend that they just make stuff up.

Jonah Goldberg would do very well on the SAT essay section for this very reason. As lon gas you sound like you might know what you're talking about, you can get away with making any fool argument, regardless of the facts.

Anyway, this one prompt we went over asked the students (essentailly) this question:

Considering that others may model their own behavior on yours, is it important to always act in a proper manner?

So, anyway, the student then just has to determine whether or not they agree with the sentence, what a good thesis might be, and then a few examples that would really back up their thesis well. My student said he thought it was very important for adults to act as role models for the sake of children.

Okay...Sounds good so far. I asked him for an example.

"Well, President Clinton."

Um....

"He's supposed to be a leader and he's a role model for children, and he's showing everyone that adultery doesn't matter." (I'm paraphrasing here but that was the gist of it.)

Dear readers, this shocked me. I was shocked.

This guy is maybe 17 years old. He was a young child when the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal went down. So, clearly, someone has been filling his head with this stuff ever since then. His parents or teachers or someone has been railing about dirty old perverted Bill Clinton and the message has stuck.

Honestly, though, I can't believe that, out of all the people he could have chosen who poison the minds of our youth, he'd come up with Bill Clinton. Now, folks, I am not and was not a huge fan of Bill Clinton. He he seems like an intelligent, rational individual, so I think he was a better choice than Chimpface McRapture. But he was far too willing to sell out the people who supported him by moving to the right. I mean, NAFTA? Decimating the social safety net? Hillary's ridiculous heath care fiasco? Don't ask, don't tell? These are the acts of a Democratic liberal president?

But, I mean...the Oval Office blowjob? 10 years later, that's what still comes to this guy's mind when we talk about public disgraces and offensive behavior? And I don't want to get into this guy's life or anything, but his family is not wealthy. He goes to an LA public school, lives in a neighborhood of this city often associated with poverty and gang violence. He does not strike me as someone who hashad a lot of opportunities presented to him or has had a lot of help from anyone except his family. Yet this guy is smart. He's going to go to college. He's going to succeed.

It's amazing to me that he would be horrified and ashamed of the President getting some oral. I mean, if you want to hold a grudge against Bill Clinton (hey, maybe they're Republicans...), do it for the right reasons. "Bill Clinton was a bad role model for our youth because he pretended to care about the poor and then screwed them over when it was politically convenient." There you go. That's an essay I'd be proud to help out with.

But "Bill Clinton is a bad role model because he cheated on Hillary"? If every man who ever cheated on his wife ceased to be a good role model...well, there wouldn't very many good role models. There was a whole generation of kids that grew up worshipping John F. Kennedy...So, they're screwed.

It's like, Bill made some mistakes, he was weak, and now there's this massive American dogpile on top of him. Like that one sin revealed him as an inherently flawed character and now we can project all of our national shame and guilt on to this one figure.

Like that Disney-ABC 9/11 TV movie that's theoretically still coming on this weekend. Classic projection. "Bill Clinton let Osama bin Laden go!" Well, now, come on. There's only one President who really let Osama bin Laden go, and it wasn't Bill Clinton. Could his administration been smarter about finding terror cells? Possibly. But it wasn't Clinton's administration that ignored the "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the U.S." Presidential Daily Briefing. It wasn't Clinton who was already on the guy's trail in Afghanistan before turning around and blowing up Baghdad instead.

At least there's a specific political reason for this ABC docudrama. It's a big wet sloppy kiss to the party in power, in the hopes for more tax breaks and corporate handouts and deregulation strategies to come.

I can't understand why our citizenry continues to fret about a man cheating on his wife. I mean, it's unfortunate, but it happens. I can't believe it still makes Billy the least likable and respected man in America. I would have thought one name would spring to the mind of every American when asked..."should you watch how you behave in public"? Mel...Freakin'...Gibson...COME ON!

[UPDATE: It occurs to me that some of you may not know all the details about ABC's planned "Path to 9/11" movie, slated to run over two nights - September 10th and 11th. Part I deals with the Clinton Administration and its anti-terrorist activities (or lack thereof). Part II focuses on the Bush Administration.

I have not seen the film. But the word is that it distorts the truth about Clinton's pursuit of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida, shifting the lion's share of the blame to his administration as opposed to Bush's. You can read more about it at any of the following excellent and CBI-approved links:

Think Progress: FBI Agent Who Consulted On Path to 9/11 Quit Halfway Through Because ‘They Were Making Things Up’

Editor & Publisher: Controversy Over 9/11 Film Hits Press

Here's the key quote from their story -

Mr. [Richard] Clarke, an on-air consultant to ABC News, said he was particularly shocked by a scene in which it seemed Clinton officials simply hung up the phone on an agent awaiting orders in the field. 'It's 180 degrees from what happened,' he said. 'So, yeah, I think you would have to describe that as deeply flawed.'"

ABC responded Tuesday with a statement saying that the miniseries was 'a dramatization, not a documentary, drawn from a variety of sources, including the 9/11 commission report, other published materials and from personal interviews.'"

Just like Godfrey Jones' popular show "Rock Bottom," ABC's miniseries should carry, as a public service, a brief spoken message: "Dramatization! May Not Have Happened!"

CQ.com: ABC Docudrama Sparks 9/11 Spat

That complaint came to the fore at a National Press Club screening of the show late last month, when Richard Ben-Veniste — one of the 10 members of the independent Sept. 11 commission, whose final report producer Marc Platt credits with supplying much of the mini-series’ detail and narrative structure — rose to denounce the veracity of a key scene involving Clinton national security adviser Samuel R. Berger.

Berger, portrayed as a pasty-faced time-server by Kevin Dunn (Col. Hicks in “Godzilla”) freezes in dithering apprehension when a manly and virtuous CIA agent played by Donnie Wahlberg radios in from the wilds of Afghanistan to say that he and his noble band of local tribesmen have Osama bin Laden within sight and begs for the green light to terminate him with extreme prejudice. In the film, the line goes dead before Berger offers any reply.

The moment is clearly intended to encapsulate the notion of American inattentiveness to the terror threat in the 1990s — a point driven home when the camera pans back to show Berger surrounded by a supporting cast of fellow Clinton administration nervous Nellies, including Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and Defense Secretary William S. Cohen.

So when the post-screening question-and-answer session began, Ben-Veniste stood to say that the Berger-bashing scene didn’t square with the research he and the other commissioners conducted. “There was no incident like that in the film that we came across. I am disturbed by that aspect of it,” Ben-Veniste, a loyal Democrat, told the panel, which included both the producer and the commission’s GOP chairman, former Gov. Thomas H. Kean of New Jersey.

Also, please bear in mind that Scholastic is printing up study guides to be sent to high schools for free, encouraging teachers to use this "dramatization" as an educational tool.

You can tell this is one of those situations that Disney's PR Department didn't really anticipate. They're unprepared for this shitstorm and that's why it's going over so poorly. (Might there still be time to edit out the offensive scenes?) Some crisis management team is working around the clock trying to placate everybody, but this has just been a sloppy roll-out since day one. I mean, they sent copies to Rush Limbaugh for his examination, but not Bill Clinton and Madeline Albright? It's about them! Besides, Limbaugh only watches movies if they have "spank," "cumstain" or "Scary Movie" in the title...]

R.I.P. Crocodile Hunter

I have to say, I wasn't crazy about that name. "The Crocodile Hunter." He didn't "hunt" crocodiles. He followed them. There's a huge difference. In order to hunt, one must neccessarily follow an animal first. But it doesn't work the other way around. Just because you're following a crocodile with a video camera, possibly pointing out some of its significant features for educational purposes, that doesn't make you a hunter. But "The Crocodile Follower" isn't a particularly cool name. And "Crocodile Dundee" was already taken.

But anyway, a man is dead. A gregarious Australian man named Steve Irwin, whose wacky animal-harrassing antics delighted children and simpletons the world over.

I waited a few days to write a post about the passing of Croc King because I figured I would probably make some jokes at his expense. And one or two days just seemed a bit soon. (In fact, the Best Week Ever blog has a post up on this very topic...Are we allowed to laugh about the Crocodile Hunter yet? If not, when will be an appropriate time?)

I'm torn on this subject. On the one hand, this guy is dead and he had a family and I'm sure they're just crushed by this tragedy. Just because he made a living doing animal stunts and messing around with wildlife doesn't mean he deserved to die young.

However, I also understand that the best jokes are usually the ones we aren't supposed to make. Not much is surprising any more. We've crossed just about every boundary inumerable times at this point. Stand-up comics have covered every taboo. If you don't believe me, rent The Aristocrats. There's nothing so vulgar, disgusting or inappropriate as to be beneath Bob Saget. That guy's not just scraping the bottom of the barrell. He's tunnelled straight through barrell and deep within the Earth's molten core.

So what's left to shock people? Only a few things...The Holocaust. Still not really okay to laugh at that. Although Roberto Benigni figured out that if you just alternate between laughing at the Holocaust and being really maudlin about it, they'll give you a pity Oscar. Also, raping children. A few filmmakers have crossed this boundary, including Todd Solondz on multiple occasions, but it's usually more for satirical/social commentary purposes than out-and-out hilarity. I'd say this is next, though. Look for Will Ferrell to start making kiddie rape jokes any day now.

Finally, you get victims of recent tragedies. I think Ann Coulter made it official that we're allowed to make fun of 9/11 victims at this point. And it has been five years...That's only fair...Tsunami victims are probably the next group on the horizon as targets for comedy. I'd say that's any week now. Katrina...ooohhh, that's a bit soon.

And of course, this extends to tragic celebrity deaths. If a celebrity just dies of old age or something, fuck 'em, it's okay to start goofing ont hem immediately. But if it's tragic, like the Crocodile Hunter being viciously attacked by a massive, poisonous stingray, the conventional wisdom states that it's just not funny. (Also, the fact that he had a wife and two children makes it totally not funny.)

I mean, my joking about this subject on my little blog isn't going to make things any better or worse for the Irwin Family. Steve's dead, he can't really have his feelings hurt. I mean, life is harsh, people die every day, right? Why should this guy be so special just because he was on television and starred in a really, really, really, really bad movie? I mean, there's being sensitive, and then there's just being a buzzkill, keeping people from expressing themselves just because it's "not appropriate" or "insensitive."

I don't know. I probably should have waited to have a little fun with Steve Irwin for a few months at least. Instead, I waited a few days and then tried to get away with it by writing a meta-post about the act of making fun of dead celebrities. The only question is...did I just get away with it?

Your Potter Sucks Cocks in Hell!

With all the problems and crises in the world facing modern Catholics, it's nice to know their leadership in the Vatican has its priorities in order...

Pope Benedict XVI's chief exorcist, Rev. Gabriele Amorth, has called fictional wizard-in-training Harry Potter the "king of darkness, the devil."

I love that this guy is the Pope's chief exorcist. What, he oversees a staff of exorcists? Exactly how many demon-fighting priests does Joey Ratz have on the payroll? How many exorcists are working underneath him? And really, the bigger question...how do you get to become a professional exorcist, and is it totally the most popular discipline for young priests just entering the service of the Lord?

I mean, is it like Medical School, where you choose a specialty before you graduate and then intern in that field? So the graduating class from Seminary selects from Helping the Poor, Bashing the Gheys, Anointing (that's a tricky one...you can probably only clinch it if you did well in your Pre-Anointing classes back in school), Laundering the Various Robes and Habits, Molesting the Altar Boys...You know, all the possible different jobs for a priest. Doesn't everyone want Exorcism? Those guys are, like, the Rolling Stones of priests. The bad boys of the cloth.

This would be a phenomenal hour-long drama for, oh I don't know...let's say ABC television. Because that's clearly a network with its head on straight. "Casting Out," it could be called. Or "101 Vatican Place." Or even "Law and Order: Motion to Possess." They'd probably be all over that last one at the network. Nothing says demonic to me like branding!

I don't mean to pick on the Catholics in particular. All religions require a steadfast and sincerely held belief in stupid crap. That's what makes them religions. If they only discussed things that were true, someone in the Bush Administration would have forced them all to shut up by now.

I just have fun with the exorcism thing because (1) it's actually condoned and practiced by the actual Catholic Church and (2) it's mind-bogglingly stupid.

Just consider all of the things in which you have to believe in order to arrive at the conclusion that there's such a thing as Exorcism.

- There's a God. And not just some intangible "force" or "power" that may or may not exist and provide some kind of template for future life on Earth. But a personified being called God who has specific powers and abilities and who is willing to intervene in human affairs if we ask Him in the proper way.

- There's a Devil. Again, not some ethereal metaphorical or symbolic concept responsible in some way for human sin. But an actual being called The Devil who actually causes or foments evil in the world, and who may or may not carry a pitchfork and excel at playing the fiddle.

- This Devil is able to actually invade the bodies of human beings, or get one of his minions to do so if He is unavailable. (Say, if he has tickets to see Evanesence in concert that night). I can't figure out why he'd want to take over a person in the first place. I mean, He's the Devil. He has unlimited powers to cause evil already. Why pack himself into one of our weak, ineffecient primate bodies? Apparently just to mess with our heads. What an sick bastard!

- Objects like wooden crosses or water, if properly blessed, can actually obtain holy or otherwise spiritual properties.

- Priests have magical abilities, granted by God, allowing them to trigger the evacuation of a demon from a host body. Bear in mind, this would seem to violate everything Christians are supposed to believe about God and Man, but particularly Jesus, the theoretical lone combination of God and Man in a single entity.

I mean, there's spirituality and then there's just believing a lot of made-up shit because you once saw it in a movie. Granted, a really cool movie. But a movie all the same.

"Magic is always a turn to the devil," said the Roman Catholic priest, according to Britain's Daily Mail newspaper.

Amorth, who is also the president of the International Association of Exorcists, said the series contains many positive references to "the satanic art" of magic and makes no distinction between black and white magic.

Anyone else notice what I notice? That this guy is speaking about "magic" like it's real? How can "magic" represent a turn to the devil if no one in recorded history has ever actually done anything magical? Okay, fine, except David Blaine.

Maybe it's just a mistranslation. Maybe he said "Reading about magic is always a turn to the devil." Because that's what we're talking about here. A series of books about a boy who can do magic. Not actual magic. I mean...Does the Catholic Church now officially believe in magic? Does this mean David Copperfield will one day be recognized as a saint? For his final trick, he'll be appearing in a tortilla in Juarez.

I have not read all the Potter books (I stopped after #4, "The Gobbler of Firecrotch"), so maybe I'm just out of the loop...but I don't recall any references to Satan at all. Let alone the "satanic arts." Actually, J.K. Rowling pretty much leaves God out of the picture. The main characters aren't religious, but I see no reason to believe that no magic people have religion in the Potter universe. Perhaps they are divided just like Muggles on this issue.

Anyway, the view of magic takes its tradition more from classic secular British children's literature than the Bible. This magic isn't an affront to God, but a special connectedness to the secret, hidden world of enchantment that lies just behind the humdrum everyday reality of modern English life. More Tolkein, less Lewis.

I also can't help but think that these guys just aren't very well read. Phillip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy is both better than the Harry Potter books and way more blasphemous. (They boil down on some levels to a metaphor/plea for atheism, or at the very least passionate humanism.)

Then again, I suppose reading voraciously and believing in mystical ceremonies that yank Captain Howdy out of little vomiting girls aren't really complimentary lifestyles. You go with one or the other. Amorth's picked his side. Unfortunately, he's not alone...

Amorth's criticisms of Potter weren't the first to emerge from the Catholic Church, which has never been a fan of the series.

Benedict voiced his disapproval of the character and series before he became Pope in April 2005.

Then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Germany, he wrote a supportive letter in 2005 to the author of a book Harry Potter - Good or Evil? In it, sociologist Gabriele Kuby had argued that Harry Potter series distorts young people's ideas about the battle of good versus evil.

"It is good that you enlighten people about Harry Potter because those are subtle seductions, which act unnoticed and by this deeply distort Christianity in the soul before it can grow properly," Ratzinger told Kuby in his letter.

Can you believe there's an entire book written by a grown man debating whether or not fucking Harry fucking Potter is "good" or "evil"? And then The Pope decided, "Hey, I'm a busy man, but that's a book I simply have to read." It's a fucking children's book, you idiots! Maybe next they'll give us their considered opinions about Barbie's reign over Fairytopia. Is she a benevolent despot or authoritarian imperialist?

Or what about Babar? Is it right for him to just be crowned King of the Elephants when he didn't even grow up as a member of the tribe? And let's not forget that Man in the Yellow Hat! Surely there must be some laws about simply bringing a wild, and particularly curious, animal into the big city and then allowing him to wander around the streets unsupervised. I know President Bush has been deeply concerned these past five years about the suspicious and possibly subversive activities of a certain "pet goat." Perhaps these guys should all get together in Dick Cheney's spare bunker and draw up some long-term proposals to really get these fictional characters under control. Remember, if we don't fight them in the Barnes & Noble kiddie section, we'll just end up fighting them in the self-improvement aisle.

In closing, let me just say this...For the sake of all you Catholics, I hope Der Popenfuhrer will finally agree to the recommendation of the Vatican II Council and declare a religious holiday on every recognized saint's un-birthday. We all have 364 un-birthdays a year! Think of the vacation time!

Glenbushy Glen Ross

Sir, can I have a moment of your time? My name is George W. Bush and I'd love to talk with you, very briefly, about our exciting new War on Iran. You know, no country is really complete without a War on Iran.

Thanks. This will just take up just a moment. I can see you're a busy man. Oh, hey, is that a fishing rod. I've done a bit of fishing myself. Crawford, Texas. I once caught a huge fish out there. Probably the greatest day of my presidency.

But anyway...Oh, store-bought coffee cake. Delicious. Thanks so much.

So here's my situation. I'm sitting in the Oval Office, Dick Cheney comes in, he tells me all about a War in Iran. Now, they want to take out some advertising, spread the word about a War in Iran, find potential voters, even get a Declaration of War from the Congress.

So, I say, hey...You want to start a War on Iran. You don't take out advertising. You don't bother finding any actual allies or gaining the support and confidence of the American people. You find a way to pass those savings right on to the voter.

"Well," Dick says, "how do you do that? How do you go about finding voters to support a War in Iran with magazines, without radio?" And I said, "With a deal this good, you go to a man, has voted for wars before, you pass the savings right along to him." You know what I mean? Rebate!

No, hey, I don't want to sell you on a War in Iran. Alright? I leave that to the pundits. Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity. No, I'm coming here to make you an offer, alright? Think of what a War in Iran can do for your home, okay? Just think about it. More years of Republican authoritarian abuses of power...A guarantee of thousands upon thousands of casualties on both sides...The opportunity for massive corporations to do some more war profiteering. What do you say? Shall I draw up the paperwork right now?

Oh, I see, you 've got to go pick up the wife. We can take my car. Can't wait to meet the little lady...

Oh, you're going to your relatives afterwards? I'll tell you what. I'll go down to my computer, we'll pull up the files. We can get a war for each of them to vote for, the whole family. Syria, Jordan, North Korea, Venezuela, Canada...Look at me, I am in the act of giving a gift away.

Your name's not "Patel," is it?

United 93

Watching Paul Greengrass' 9/11 re-enactment United 93 is a lot like being punched in the gut. Actually, allow me to rephrase that. It's a lot like being punched in the gut repeatedly for about 2 hours while a guy films you, then having that guy show up at your house 5 years later to screen all the footage. What sickness so pervades the American character that we feel the need to lovingly recreate our national tragedies in this way?

Popular films have always chronicled the real events of our history. That's obvious. As the most immersive, immediate and compelling of all our popular arts, it's only natural that a lot of our shared history would find its way into our movies. But the idea was more about presenting historical information with a certain perspective, using a recreation of a iconic moment as part of building a larger case.

The propaganda films of WWII illustrate this concept perfectly. There weren't a lot of films that dryly re-enacted the attack on Pearl Harbor, or that gravely dissected the tactics and calculations behind the Doolittle Raid. These films were a recruitment tool, a declaration of war and a deliberate attempt to sway an uneasy public. Whether or not one agrees morally with the purpose and method of such propagandizing, there can be no debate about the ultimate goal of these sorts of pictures - getting young people to enlist and getting everyone else to conserve aluminum and buy war bonds.

So what, may I ask, is Paul Greengrass' and Universal Studios' purpose in bringing the world United 93, a minute-by-minute account of how, on September 11th as part of a coordinated attack on America, some very angry, very psychotic and very devout Muslims hijacked an airliner and then failed to hit their intended (and unknown) target?

It's not informative. Because none of the film's "characters," from air traffic controllers to military commanders to dazed passengers, have any idea what's going on, nothing concrete about the day's events can be gleaned. The sceanrio plays out just as you'd expect. Odd, unexpecting and violent things begin happening. Everyone gets upset and panicked. Then, fiery death.

It's not entertaining. No, I take that back. If you are Osama bin Laden or a member of Al-Qaida, I suppose there's a small chance you would find the film entertaining. The operation, after all, was a complete success, so it might be a pleasant, nostalgic memory to revisit, much in the way a filthy Jew devil might enjoy looking back over a Bar Mitzvah video. Everyone else will probably find it extremely unpleasant.

It's certainly not insightful. I don't feel like Greengrass really has a lot of say about 9/11. It appears for a brief time that the film will be critical of the government's response. No one can get through to Dick Cheney or George Bush. There's no planned course of action in this situation, so no one has any clue of what to actually do once they know the planes have been hijacked. The military reaction in particular seems lackadaisical. They can't get fighter jets into the air in time to intercept the planes, and no one is even around to answer urgent phone calls.

But these sorts of side observations are never developed. They hang around the margins. The focus remains squarely on retelling the story of United Flight 93 exactly as it might have happened, beat by painful beat. I'll ask again...What's the point of such a brutal exercize? To paraphrase the Brotherhood of the Cruciform Sword..."Paul Greengrass, why do you wish to make the first big studio 9/11 movie? Is it for Todd Beamer's glory...or for yours?"



There is something deeply neurotic about a society that needs to recreate tragic moments exactly as they occured in motion picture entertainments less than 5 years after the events themselves. I suppose it's an understandable impulse (more on this in a moment), but I would think it does us more psychic harm than good.

To be honest, we don't do a very good job of remembering September the 11th. We seem to keep making the same mistakes that led up to that horrible day. We continue to ignore the real threats against us while focusing our energies on boogeymen and infighting. We have yet to enact any realistic measures to keep our citizenry safe, spending this money instead of elaborate and failed foreign wars of conquest. The sense is that our government is less organized and less capable of responding to a crisis now than it was five years ago. (Certainly, the response to Hurricane Katrina did not bode well for anyone).

So, we pretty much ignore what's really important about September 11th, and spend our time memorializing, shedding crocodile tears and cynically exploiting the tragedy for personal gain.

To my mind, we shouldn't make a weepy movie about United Flight 93 and how it crashed because of mean old terrorists and how it's so sad because all the people on that plane were so nice and they just wanted to relax and enjoy their airline food without being explodeded. It is sad those people died. I'm sure most of them were good people. And they definitely did do a brave thing, bum-rushing the terrorists and possibly saving the lives of others by taking down that plane before it could be used as a projectile weapon.

But it doesn't serve their memories to make them into posthumous movie characters. (I'm sure their families and friends remembered them just fine without a Hollywood movie, and the rest of us didn't know them in the first place.) It doesn't somehow make their deaths more sensical or worthwhile to see them dramatized. Actually, it serves the purposes of...the terrorists.

For 2 hours, we go into a theater and we become terrorized, all over again. For some reason I'll never understand, we subject ourselves to al-Qaida's evil plot purposefully. We spend $12 on a ticket and then buy popcorn and a soda to compliment the experience. That's the experience of watching this movie...It is harrowing. It is sickeningly unpleasant. It is like being punched in the gut. It's a second victory for those who want to make Americans afraid and upset.

Of course, I have to be fair. United 93 has this effect because it's rather expertly put together. Greengrass' style is far more suited to this kind of realism than, say, the secret agent theatrics of The Bourne Supremacy. There, his jerky camera and his intrusive close-ups and his jumpy, stacatto editing just seemed like unneccessary window dressing, distractions from what might have been an otherwise highly watchable (if cookie cutter) spy thriller. Here, these same techniques, along with largely improvised performances, give the film a rare naturalism. Solid performances from a large ensemble of actors, playing nameless faces in a crowd rather than characters, on top of Greengrass' matter-of-fact documentarian pose, combine to make the hijacking sequence grueling, almost to the point of being unwatchable.

So, yes, it's well made. I find myself making the same argument about United 93 that I made about another extremely well-realized and unneccessary historical recreation, Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down. Interestingly, these are both films by British filmmakers in which recent, tragic events in American history, both involving failures on the part of the U.S. Military, are recreated in the most exact physical detail possible.

Okay, so here's the case as simply as I can make it, hopefully without getting too overtly Freudian, because I know that's out of fashion these days. These films allow us to recontextualize their respective events. The 9/11 attacks were intensely traumatic. It has justly been called one of the darkest days in all of American history. Of course, among the worst elements of 9/11 was the surprise and the mystery behind it. Anyone who was awake and watching TV that morning (as I was) remembers the baffling nature of these events.

Who is attacking us? Why? Will there be more of these hijackings? Why is the President still reading that book about the goat?

Bin Laden's plan worked because it played on our worst fears, it used our own technology and complacency against us and it kept us guessing. But now, in this film, we get to recreate the events on our own terms. Sure, the Towers still blow up. But this time, we know it's coming, we in the audience. Hell, we even know it's coming before the air traffic controllers do this time. We watch them fumble around confusedly, struggling to come to grips with the knowledge we've already had for years. It's no longer surprising, and thus we feel comforted.

Because 9/11 can't happen twice. It already happened and now we control it and we can do whatever we want with it. It's ours and our definitive film version can now comfortably stand in for unknowable, frightening reality.

That's why, to my mind, Greengrass inserting some real footage of the World Trade Center blowing up is so odious. He confers on to his film that level of reality. He conflates a fictional (if precise) retelling with the real events of that day. He makes United 93 the new "official version," our nationally agreed-upon sense memory of that fateful plane ride.

It's all here in this press photo:



United 93 has now been hijacked for a second time. At first, it was Saudi nationals storming into the aisles with box cutters, slamming down stewardesses and sealing off the cockpit. Now, it's Paul Greengrass, rebuilding an exact replica of the plane in a soundstage and then stomping around, making himself its master. Notice how, in that photo, all the other passengers are obscured by seats. They are the faceless throng, those without identities. The Murdered. But the centerpiece of that image, the subject if you will, is director Paul Greengrass, towering over the heads of those he eulogizes, offering a stylish exercize is self-aggrandizement designed ot highlight his talents as a filmmaker. See how elegantly and cleanly I have reimagined this tragedy? Aren't these swooping, nauseating angles impressive? Don't you admire my subtlety and restraint? I Am The World Trade Center!

I mean, thank goodness we have the director of that Matt Damon sequel to tell us all how to feel about the most discussed and important moment of our young century. We certainly couldn't figure out how to mourn the dead of Flight 93 on our own.

The few actual observations he even bothers to make amidst all the flourishes, the insights about what's actually happening on 9/11 and on Flight 93, are contradictory and confused, particularly when he attempts to extend the scope beyond a straight-forward, interpersonal level. He cuts back and forth between the terrorists praying to Allah in the cockpit and the passengers praying to Jesus in coach. Is he really trying to make a connection between these two groups? "Well, you know, even though those guys are killers and these guys innocent passengers, everyone loves God."

It's not just the egotism of a man who wants to tell this story over again that disgusts me. It's his attitude towards the material. There's a lot of talk in our popular discourse right now about being a "defeatist," of cutting and running from terror or what have you. As you can probably guess, because it's coming out of the mouths of our President, Vice-President and Secretary of Defense, it's all horseshit. Wanting to leave Iraq is being a realist, not a defeatist.

But Greengrass' film does actually strike me as defeatist. It gives in to terrorism. It accepts that we all must live in fear and dismay, that this could happen to us and we should be extremely agitated and disturbed about it. I mean, why else depict it in fetishized and exacting detail, if not to freak everyone out all over again? It happened once to people just like you. Look, they have portable music players and laptops! There are families waiting for them at home! They like a good omelette!

That's not really the message a healthy society would take away from 9/11. Yes, there are evil terrorist bastards who want to kill us. I can fit that neatly into my handy mental spreadsheet entitled "Reasons I Might Die At Any Moment" and go on living my day like normal. I don't panic every time someone mentions colon cancer even though it's extraordinarily frightening and unfortunate. I would definitely lose in a fight against a ninja, but it probably won't ever come to that, so I can watch ninja movies with impunity. Granted, a terrorist attack on Los Angeles is more likely than a ninja attack on yours truly, but still, what happened on 9/11 doesn't need to dominate our daily lives in the way that it has for the past five years.

In a movie that genuinely explored the American experience of being attacked by al-Qaida, all this horrible shit would go down, and then after a while it would be 9/12. People would wake up, get dressed, watch TV, eat breakfast, have sex, drive around, go bowling, shoot up heroin and begin to go about their lives again. It was a weird week, but we got through it, right? And that's the real story. United 93 crashes into a field in Pennsylvania, then some guy takes out the trash and plays Grand Theft Auto for a few hours, then someone in Cleveland robs a convenience store, then an old guy in a nursing home has a heart attack and dies of natural causes. Life goes on.

In Greengrass' film, 9/11 took place in a vacuum. Before, everyone was happy and content. Afterwards...well, there is no afterwards. This awful thing happened. The End. It was a complete anomaly with no context. Some crazy men gathered together one morning and laid out a plan of attack on the United States. Many died, some with bravery and others in silence. These are their stories.

Todayborday is Labor Day

Yeah, I know, Labor Day's not until Monday. But, you see, I've been tagged. Tasked by PSoTD to discuss what Labor Day means to me as a holiday.

My first thought is...not much. I work retail and have for the bulk of my employed life. If you work in a store, you don't get Labor Day off. In fact, it's usually twice as crowded with doofuses in white shorts and loud Hawaiian shirts fumbling with your stock, hauling around their screaming, grab-happy children and asking questions so stupid, you'd think they were auditioning for the Teen Jeopardy Tournament. So I typically wind up doing more work on Labor Day than I would otherwise, making it not just an empty, meaningless holiday but actually kind of a cruel, federal governmentally-sanctioned joke at my expense.

The whole enterprise just reflects our bullshit society, how only one segment of the population is deemed worthy of attention and respect. If you work in some office as a cubicle jockey, if you're an executive or middle-management type, there's this whole day set aside to commemorate your efforts. "Oh my word, you've been filing? Extensive data entry as part of an ongoing reorganizational project? You had to take an extended lunch meeting at Dorcia and now you don't have time to work out before getting back to the office for your afternoon conference call with Leo in New York? OH MY GOD YOU'VE GOT CARPAL TUNNEL SYNDROME? You need a legal, annual holiday so you can watch more televised athletics!"

But a huge segment of the population - people who also work hard and frequently aren't paid as well for the work that they do - don't ever get Labor Day off. You think all the firemen get to hang out at home with their families and have barbecues? Of course not. Because what if one of those office drone schmucks or mail carriers lights herself on fire during her family barbecue? Someone's got to go put her out, right?

Ditto the cops, the people who work in stores or entertainment venues, bus drivers, flight attendants, soldiers, Hewlitt-Packard's Bangalore Customer Service and Relations call center staff...They don't get shit. When's our holiday? We could call it "WE'RE CLOSED Day." Or, int he case of city employees, "SAVE YOUR OWN STUPID LIFE Day."

I mean, here's the reality: For most Americans, there's only one real holiday, and it comes twice a month...It's called fucking payday, and if they really wanted to "honor the workers," they'd give us another one of those once a year come September. Yeah, but you're right, better to give executives who already get three weeks a year paid vacation on top of company-sponsored conferences and retreats and extra day to hang out with the fam...They've earned it!

I'm all about the spirit in which Labor Day was founded. It's hard to even believe at this point in our history that organized labor and unions were ever respected organizations, considering the smear job corporatists have been running against them for my entire lifetime.

Seriously, since I was a child, the concepts of labor and organized crime have been entirely conflated in my head. Unions are, by definition, corrupt sub-Mafia organizations, so obviously they should be done away with completely. That's the attitude now. Ask someone under the age of...hell, probably 40, about unions and all they'll come up with is "Jimmy Hoffa" and "lazy Teamsters." Rich Americans have convinced everybody else that they deserve to be poor and they deserve to be downtrodden and that to unify and fight back is a pointless, futile pursuit. The only hope is to lie and cheat your way to the upper eschalon so you can begin shitting on the little guy. And the message has stuck cause rich white guys have a kickass PR Department.

And that's why Labor Day itself has become a cruel charade. It no longer exists to "honor the workers" or to commemorate any great gains made by the working class. It's just another hollow yearly summer ritual - the last insufferable pool party before the insufferable kids return to their prisons reformatories conformism factories schools for another round of consumerist brainwashing.

Perhaps This is Why Keith Cannot Be Killed By Conventional Weapons

From Keith Olbermann's show tonight comes this amazing commentary. I swear, this is the best takedown of Donald Rumsfeld I've seen on television. Ever. Bra-fucking-vo, K-Greasy. Way to be.



You should really watch the whole thing, but here's a highlight from the complete transcript at Keith's Blog:

That, about which Mr. Rumsfeld is confused is simply this: This is a Democracy. Still. Sometimes just barely.

And, as such, all voices count -- not just his.

Had he or his president perhaps proven any of their prior claims of omniscience — about Osama Bin Laden’s plans five years ago, about Saddam Hussein’s weapons four years ago, about Hurricane Katrina’s impact one year ago — we all might be able to swallow hard, and accept their “omniscience” as a bearable, even useful recipe, of fact, plus ego.

But, to date, this government has proved little besides its own arrogance, and its own hubris.
Mr. Rumsfeld is also personally confused, morally or intellectually, about his own standing in this matter. From Iraq to Katrina, to the entire “Fog of Fear” which continues to envelop this nation, he, Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, and their cronies have — inadvertently or intentionally — profited and benefited, both personally, and politically.

And yet he can stand up, in public, and question the morality and the intellect of those of us who dare ask just for the receipt for the Emporer’s New Clothes?

In what country was Mr. Rumsfeld raised? As a child, of whose heroism did he read? On what side of the battle for freedom did he dream one day to fight? With what country has he confused the United States of America?

Read the whole speech. It's thoughtful and it actually includes real historical information and facts. Can you believe this thing aired on MSNBC?

[My thanks to TRex at the essential Firedoglake for the link.]

The Unrentables: Jake Speed

With the surname Speed, you kind of have to give your kid a cool name like Jake. Francis Speed? Not so much. Todd Speed? Umm..not quite. But Jake Speed, yeah...Now you've got something. Two years after Robert Zemeckis' Romancing the Stone, some B-movie and direct-to-cable filmmakers thought..."Why not me?" And now, 20 years later, I have to suffer the consequences.

THE UNRENTABLES: VOLUME #3
Jake Speed
Director: Andrew Lane
IMDB Rating: 4.6


The name's Jake...Speed Jake. No, wait, I messed that up.

We open in France, where a couple of thugs rush into a slumber party and start beating the hell out of random women. Two girls escape through the streets of Paris to the strains of absolutely abysmal '80s New Wave rock, but one, a blonde in a UCLA sweatshirt, is captured soon after.

It turns out that this last girl, Maureen (Becca Ashley), has a wily old senile grandfather (Leon Ames) with a plan...He wants to phone up pulp novel hero Jake Speed to save his beloved granddaughter. The cantankerous old guy's full of helpful advice like that. "Call a fictional character for help! Nuke the bastards! The trail's gettin' colder 'an a witch's tit!" He's not unlike Donald Rumsfeld, really.

Maureen's siter Margaret (Karen Kopins) bails on a neighbor's party filled with Furries - everyone's dressed as their favorite animal - to sit in her room and cry about her lost sibling. Wah...someone kidnapped by sister in France...Wah...I'm a featured player in a movie called Jake Speed earning second billing after some dude named Wayne Crawford! (This whole subplot feels ripped off from Ghostbusters. Margaret's nerdy neighbor and his lame party is very reminiscent of Sigourney Weaver's nerdy neighbor Rick Moranis and his lame party.)

Margaret is contacted by an assistant to Mr. Speed (Dennis Chrstopher), who turns out to be a real guy. Co-writer/star Crawford kind of looks like the love child of Bob Dylan and Dustin Hoffman. So, you know, the ideal action star. Unfortunately, he's apparently inherited the acting talent from Bob's side of the family. Speed tells Margaret that her sister's been kidnapped by white slave traders in Africa.

"Are you ready for an adventure?" Speed's assistant asks. That's the kind of question you only ask if you're already sure to get a yes. How embarrassing to contact a mysterious woman in a bar, as her if she's ready for an adventure and then hear back that she really just stopped by to meet up with some friends and have a Cosmopolitan, and she's ready to head home now.

Margaret's friend at this point brings up an excellent point. If you were randomly contacted by a stranger who claimed to be a character in a series of popular novels...would you just believe him or her right off the bat?

"Hi, nice to meet you, I'm Jack Ryan. I believe you may have read something about me? I.D.? No, I don't have any I.D. I'm a secret agent. Just call Tom Clancy! He'll tell you..."

But Margaret doesn't want to listen to "reason." She's not interested in whether the man she met is "really Jake Speed" or "some insane sex offender who is flying her to Africa so that he can enslave her nude in a bamboo cage to be jabbed and prodded repeatedly with crudely-sharpened spears until such time as she is fed to an oversized ape in order to appease the Monkey God." Come on! It's time for an adventure!

Suddenly, we're in Africa, which in the world of the movie consists entirely of small dusty villages in which small children try to sell you watermelons. And of course, the whole place is poised on the brink of revolution!

Prissy Margaret wants to get started looking for her sister, but of course that silly rapscallion Jake just wants to play poker with the natives and dick around. If he didn't want to be bothered finding her sister, why fly her to Africa in the first place? She was all set to believe he was fictional. Speaking of fictional characters, the movie does this really annoying thing where it keeps referencing other mythical pulp adventure heroes. There's throwaway allusions to Remo Williams, Doc Savage, Allan Quartermain...Who does Lane think he is? Alan Moore? It's like he wants desperately to be clever but just can't manage to actually get there.

From here on out, the thing starts playing like a dinner theater production of Indiana Jones. Unfortunately, they're going with the Kate Capshaw-inspired love interest character and the part of the hero is being played by some hapless, squinty bozo. Oh, and the kitchen just ran out of Salisbury Steak.

"Guess I better shower first, huh?" she pouts, arguing that Jake wants to sleep with her more than he wants to find her sister. "Good idea," he responds. "Let's shower together!" This is what passes for banter in Jake Speed's world. The novels about him must have been written by Bill O'Reilly.

During a firefight in the street, Jake smashes his jeep into a shop window. The resulting stunt man shot is perhaps the most hilarious thing I have seen in an Unrentable yet. The guy looks nothing like Wayne Crawford. He kind of looks like Ed Asner. I'm not sure an infant would be fooled by this effect. The other characters in the film seem confused when it happens.

Leaving the car accident, Jake and his love interest head over the hottest club in town. As if that opening New Wave song weren't bad enough, at about the halfway point, musicians at the club are recreating that song "Maniac" with authetnic native African instruments. Getting into a brawl shortly thereafter, Jake becomes quite possibly the first hero in a PG film ever to say the line "I'll tear off your head and shit in the hole." He then threatens to sell Margaret into sexual slavery, until she gets out of it by claiming to have a variety of STD's. Hilarious.

Barely escaping with their lives following a near-fatal breakaway glass incident, Jake and Margaret take off running through a variety of cheap sets. People keep running up to them and trying to shoot or explode them, but I couldn't figure out why. They haven't done anything. They're not any closer to finding Maureen siter. It still hasn't even been explained how Jake knows Maureen was taken by white slave traders from Africa in the first place. All we saw was that she was kidnapped in Paris. Wouldn't this occur to Margaret to ask at some point? When they weren't being randomly shot at, perhaps?

At about the hour mark, I've begun to realize why Jake Speed feels so boring and pointless. It has no story or logical progression. We just follow around Jake, who always seems like he knows what he's doing, as he zips around Africa having random side adventures. There are no clues, there is no bad guy, nothing of note happens. Jake just wanders into a barn or a hotel or a village somewhere, Margaret starts to have a panic attack, then black guys with guns show up and a lot of squibs go off. Then the whole thing repeats itself.

Jake and his associate keep implying that their present adventure will soon after become its own book. Sort of a Jake Speed novelization-within-the-movie meta kind of thing. I can't imagine what reading a book with this story would be like.

"Hey, let's wander around this inexpensive set for a little while, Margaret."

"Okay, Jake. I hope no squibs go off while we're down there."

Margaret and Jake walked slowly down the alley. Then a fat guy ran after them with a shotgun. He seemed to aim and fire the gun properly, but Margaret and Jake were magically unharmed. Then they kept running, then it was poorly shot and dark for a second so it was unclear what was happening, then there were some explosions. Jake seemed vaguely uninterested.

So, Margaret ditches Jake and his life partner in the desert and hauls ass to the British Consulate, hoping to get the hell out of Dodge before the peculiar sporadic revolution really gets going in earnest. There, she finds out that "Jake" and "Desmond" are really notorious con artists. I know...It's shocking that they didn't turn out to be those made up guys. Shocking.

"I can't believe it," Margaret says. "They were really nice." Yeah, all they did was bring you to Africa under false pretenses and then continually place you in the immediate path of exploding tanks. She's a pretty easy sell on what constitutes "being nice." I bet she voted for Bush both times.

For God knows what reason, Margaret decides to go back to Jake and the Not Terribly Fat Man, somehow finding their secret hideout in the desert despite only having been there once before and afterwards getting lost in the desert. (Peculiar, as well, that their hideout is made entirely from lumber, despite the fact that it's in the middle of the goddamn desert and there's no trees around. Did they ship in all the materials from Canada or something?

Unfortunately, the evil British consulate guys tail Margaret and thus find their way to the ever-elusive Jake Speed. Curses! His brilliant plan to wander around aimlessly and not find anoyne's sister has been foiled! Once again! He's so upset, he even calls one of the goons "ass ears!" Oooh, take that, evildoer! You'll rue the day you tangled with the maniacal wit of one Mr. Jacob Speedowitz! (I'm just assuming that's the real name. It could also be Speedberg or Spederman.)

Finally, FINALLY, with 15 minutes in the film remaining, John Hurt shows up as the actual bad guy, the slave trading bastard Sid. He's selling off the lovely and angelic Maureen to two creepy Arab guys in fezes. (How else would you know they're dirty Arabs?)

Hurt's trying his best, but most of the lines he's been given don't make any sense at all.

"What have you done with my sister," Margaret sneers.
"Relax, toots," Sid replies. "We should be feeling so good!"
"You scum-sucking pig!" Margaret responds.
"How old are you pussycat," Sid retorts (?)

What a comeback. Sid, you are the king.

I will say this...Hurt's got one sinister-looking creepy grin going. It makes several featured appearances during his brief scenes.

So he ties up Jake and Margaret, knotting the rope conveniently in the crotch so we can get a cheap blowjob joke. Whooo-eee. With that bit of business on top of some bad Arnold Schwarzenegger impressions and shenanigans concerning Sid's wacky gay assistant (Maurice!)who's always trying to clean the rug...Let me just say, the last 10 minutes of this bad boy is a regular cavalcade of comic pranksterism. Like Porky's 2, just not quite as arty.

Hurt closes things out with the film's best monologue. Okay, the film's only monologue. "I'm a bad guy, Jake. I do anything I want. I lie. I cheat. I steal. I kill." So, I guess there are two characters in the film based on Rumsfeld. Maybe the original ending was that John Hurt and the Grandfather are the same person, and they just reshot the scene because it was too confusing.

Bob Dylan's "Modern Times"

A new Bob Dylan album is an event. Maybe not every Bob Dylan album ever. There's some good '80s discs, but I wouldn't say that any time Bob released an album during my youth, it was a cause for excitement. (Not that I would have been aware back then either way, the bulk of my musical tastes being defined by my mother's tape collection...A lot of Sting, Genesis, Peter Gabriel, Whitney Houston, Elton John and Terrence Trent D'Arby...)

But America's greatest living songwriter has been on a role lately. His well-received autobiography Chronicles and Martin Scorsese's extensive PBS documentary No Direction Home have cemented his position among the great American icons of the 20th Century. With the universally lauded Time Out of Mind and the breezy, old-fashioned Love and Theft, as well as a near-constant touring schedule, he's making music more relevant and compelling now than any time since the 1970's.

So while Modern Times, Dylan's 31st or 44th album depending on how you count, doesn't break any new ground or indicate any sea change in his sound, it's nonetheless a terrific, stirring and accomplished collection of 10 new songs. Absolutely 100% worth the wait, and almost assured a spot on my eventual Favorites of 2006 list.



Amanda Petrusich at Pitchfork calls the album a "companion piece" to Love and Theft, and in terms of the album's production and style, that's absolutely accuarate. Like that 2001 effort, Modern Times is an incredibly tight, well-played collection of throwback 1950's rock-and-roll songs. None of the guy's old folk-rock trappings are evident in the new material, none of the spazzy surrealism that marked his classic '70s efforts. He's turned back the dial to the era of his own youth, experimenting in the sounds that first inspired his own generation to explore this music.

Many trakcs are straight-up rockabilly, at times eerily reminiscent of Chuck Berry or Carl Perkins. But other early branches of rock music make brief appearances - lilting ballad "Spirit on the Water" reminded me of that old George Jones country-rock tune "She Thinks I Still Care" and "Workingman's Blues 2" sounds exactly as you'd think a song named "Workingman's Blues" would sound.

Two of the tracks are new arrangements of traditional songs. In "Rollin' and Tumblin'," a driving adaptation of a song previously recorded by Muddy Waters, Dyaln contemporizes some of the lyrics. ("Some lazy slut has charmed away my brains.") The stomping drum running behind Dylan's wheezy vocals on the 19th century ballad "Nettie Moore" seems to signal some impending apocalyptic doom. When it finally lets up during the sweeping chorus, it's the most beautiful moment on the album.

There's a interesting, anachronistic level running through Modern Theft that differentiates it somewhat from its predecessor. Opening crowd pleaser "Thunder on the Mountain" references Alicia Keys, indicating there's at least one modern artist who has caught old Bob's attention. I'm fairly certain the tremendous "The Levee's Gonna Break" conflates Dylan's life story with a hurricane-ravaged New Orelans. (Seriously!)

If it keep on rainin'
The levee gonna break
Some of these people gonna
Strip you of all you can take

I can't stop here
I ain't ready to unload
Riches and salvation might be
Around the next bend in the road

Audacious? Yes. A bit self-obsessed? I suppose...But that's why he's Bob Dylan and you're some schmo reading my blog. No offense.

The best track might be the epic closer, "Ain't Talkin," kind of an dystopian Ennio Morricone spaghetti western riff in which Bob is "walking through the cities of the plague." It's nearly 9 minutes long and completely awesome.

Ain't talkin', just walkin'
My mule is sick, my horse is blind
Hot burning, still yearning
Thinking 'bout that gal I left behind

Sweet.