Recently in Language Category

Reed Hastings sent me an e-mail Sunday night -- did you get one too? -- that began:

Subject: An Explanation and some reflections

Dear Jim,

I messed up. I owe you an explanation.

It is clear from the feedback over the past two months that many members felt we lacked respect and humility in the way we announced the separation of DVD and streaming and the price changes. That was certainly not our intent, and I offer my sincere apology. Let me explain what we are doing....

Oh, Reed. You don't owe me an explanation -- or any reflections -- and you know it. You're just doing exactly what you said you were doing when you made that announcement in July that you now say was lacking in "respect and humility." Only now you're doing it in a way that reeks of condescension and disingenuousness. Not an improvement.

A couple months back, I noted here that Netflix had already announced on its tech blog that it was going to discontinue mobile app support for managing DVD/Blu-ray queues. When you announced, at the same time as your price hikes, that the DVD/Blu-ray-by-mail business would be reconstituted as a separate division, it didn't take the sharpest taco on the beach to figure out what your next step would be, and now you've announced it. Netflix wants out of that business that relies on the nearly bankrupt Postal Service. OK, we get it.

@jeeemerson god. Pretty soon we won't be able to tell a knock knock joke, for fear of hurting a doors feelings. STFU

That's an offended tweeter's response to my previous post, "The "gay" Dilemma: If it's a joke, what does it mean?" -- except that it's not really a response, exactly, since it doesn't address anything I actually, you know, said.¹ It's a tweet. Still, it expresses a fairly common attitude among those who are easily offended that others take offense to things they are not offended by: Why are people hurting my feelings by getting their feelings hurt over what I say or what I like? So, to those whose feelings have been bruised in this way, I want to say: Don't stop whining. Don't stop making it all about you. Keep on complaining that your sensibilities are being hurt because you feel that other people should not express opinions other than your own. How dare other people claim that things you honestly feel are funny are not only not funny to them, but maybe even painful or insulting!?! What if that's not even what you meant at all? Just remember, when your feelings are hurt by somebody who says you've hurt their feelings, it's all their fault for being so sensitive to what words mean and being so rude as to tell you. Blame them. You shouldn't have to accept responsibility for what you do or say or laugh at. That's just not fair!

But seriously, folks...

Several of yesterday's commenters mentioned comedic treatments of the anti-gay epithets "fag" and "faggot" on "South Park" ("The F Word") and Louis CK's series, "Louie," which is where the clip above comes from. A group of comedians are discussing the implications of using the word "faggot" in Louis's stage act. Louis asks Rick, the only gay comic at the table, if he thinks he shouldn't use the word. Rick says, "I think you should use whatever word you want... but are you interested to know what it might mean to gay men?"²

On the day after the near-mystical cosmic alignment of Columbus Day and National Coming Out Day (did the Postal Service suspend delivery on the day Columbus came out in 1492?), and the very day that a US district judge issued a worldwide injunction ordering the Department of Defense to stop enforcement of its absurd, 17-year-old "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy for kicking gays out of the military (best of all, the case was brought by the Log Cabin Republicans!), I have found myself reading about a stupid gay joke that's been removed from trailers for the upcoming Ron Howard comedy "The Dilemma," starring Vince Vaughn and Kevin James.

I saw the trailer in front of "The Social Network," October 1. Vaughn's character is speaking to some automotive businessmen (is this a follow-up to Howard's "Gung-Ho"?) and says: "Electric cars are gay. I mean, not homosexual, but my-parents-are-chaperoning-the-dance gay."

CNN anchor Anderson Cooper reportedly went on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" and said he was "shocked" that Universal "thought that it was OK to put that in a preview for the movie to get people to go and see it." Universal responded by quickly pulling the scene from the trailer. No word on whether it will remain in the movie, which opens in January.

In his latest column, Nicholas Kristof poses some important questions that undermine the myth of "fair and balanced" journalism. He recounts the story of the photo above, taken by Portland Press Herald photographer Gregory Rec on Friday, September 10, showing local Muslims gathering to pray for Eid al Fitr, marking the end of Ramadan. It appeared on the front page -- the kind of image accompanied by a feel-good story about "faith and forgiveness" (as the headline said), that has provided the traditional, benign, pro-religion front-page news-feature in American papers for decades. No problem there.

The problem was the date of the paper.

The day of this issue's publication, was September 11. And some readers were outraged that these images of American Muslims praying should appear on the anniversary of a deadly attack by radical avowed Muslims nine years earlier. If they'd waited for the next day's (September 12) paper, with coverage of the memorials that took place on September 11, they might have found the balance they were looking for, but on September 11 the paper was bombarded with complaints.

The "New Political Correctness," as I came to call it during the aughts (though it is neither new nor correct) is the pressure to reframe discussion by controlling language. In recent years it has come mostly from the political right ("moral clarity," "War on Christmas," "moral equivalence," "homicide bombers," "Freedom Fries," "restoring honor"...) and, I insist, is an insidious menace to society even greater than the old-school institutionalized PC that came from the left, because its motives are transparently rooted in demagoguery rather than civility and altruism.

Back in early 2007, Sarah Silverman's "Jesus Is Magic" prompted me to write this:

I've been arguing for several years now that, especially since 9/11, "political correctness" has evolved into a mostly reactionary phenomenon. The lefty PC that began as a way of showing sensitivity to minorities and those who had been discriminated against for years (women, the disabled, etc.) eventually turned into a form of monolithic, euphemistic denial of reality, where questioning was verboten and anything that could be interpreted as doubt or dissent was denounced as "fascist." Now we see the same thing coming from the right. The terminology has changed but the brainwashed thinking hasn't.

I'm late to mention this piece by William Saletan, published in Slate August 23 ("Is a mosque near Ground Zero 'insensitive'?"), which gets to the bottom of this manufactured emotional wedge issue like nothing else I've read. After briskly demolishing the initial rumors about the Park51 development, Saletan quotes the fallback position of opponents who have questioned the sensitivity of the project: Sarah Palin, Rudy Giuliani, Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol... all people renowned for their respect of others' sensitivities.

Feelings about 9/11 are raw and real. Many people, including families who lost loved ones that day, find the prospect of a mosque near Ground Zero upsetting. I've heard this reaction in my family, too. But feelings aren't reasons. You can't tell somebody not to build a house of worship somewhere just because the idea upsets you. You have to figure out why you're upset. What's the basis of your discomfort? Why should others respect it? For that matter, why should you?

This kind of reflection is missing from the sensitivity chorus....

Last week I used a clip from the AMC series "Rubicon"¹ (re-posted after the jump) to illustrate what I felt could be interpreted as a parable about film criticism. Since then, it has come to my attention that "President Obama is a secret Muslim" and somebody is planning to build a "terror mosque" at Ground Zero. OK, those notions have been floating about for a while, but people have very, very strong opinions about them. I haven't seen any evidence that the president is a Muslim, secret or otherwise, and I'm not sure what a "terror mosque" is, but I know that the proposed Park51 Islamic cultural center (at the site of a defunct Burlington Coat Factory outlet) isn't at Ground Zero because I used Google Maps to look it up. The Pussycat Lounge, a strip club one block south, is closer, but people aren't expressing their opinions about it, maybe because it's been there for many years, like some of the other mosques in the neighborhood. So, I'm wondering: Where are all these opinions coming from and what are they grounded in? Mostly, it turns out, they have sprung from other opinions. Which are, in turn, based on disinformation or just something somebody heard somebody else say they heard from somewhere.

Fortunately, facts do exist independent of anyone's opinion about them. They are verifiable. Once you know what they are, you might be able to form some opinions. But, to return to the parable, until you know what the tie actually looks like, your position regarding it (whether you approve or disapprove, like or dislike) is worth, as Edwin Starr once said of war, absolutely nothin'.

Here's something from an Opinionator column by Timothy Egan, a National Book Award-winning nonfiction author, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and writer for the New York Times (and a former colleague of mine at the University of Washington Daily!) called "Building a Nation of Know-Nothings" that ought to be read by anyone who thinks they have an opinion about something.

(via Radiolab)

Los Angeles. It's not just a very spread-out geographical area in lower California. It's not merely an attitude or an array of styles. It is a language with words and names for things.

(tip: Dan Ireland)

No offense none taken per se.

I know, we shouldn't give him any more attention, but the elusiveness of his language (it's not quite English, but what is it?) is fascinating. Try to pin down meaning, or responsibility, and they just slip away...

Armond White, review of "Mr. Jealousy," June 3, 1998:

I won't comment on [Noah] Baumbach's deliberate, onscreen references to his former film-reviewer mother except to note how her colleagues now shamelessly bestow reviews as belated nursery presents. To others, "Mr. Jealousy" might suggest retroactive abortion.

Armond White, referring to the comment above in a non-review of "Greenberg," March 17, 2010:

The last line is not Oscar Wilde but it's also not a death warrant; its impact is in your inference. It clearly points out the clubhouse aspect of Baumbach's raves, then contrasts natal congratulations with their demurral. No more than that. The abortion quip is easily understood unless your goal is to besmirch another critic and wage a personal attack.

"What would I give if I could live / Out of these waters? / What would I pay just for one day / Warm on the sand? / Betcha on land, they understand / Bet they don't reprimand their daughters / Bright young women, sick o' swimmin' / Ready to stand!"

"Part of Their World" by Howard Ashman and Alan Mencken, from "The Little Mermaid" (John Musker and Ron Clements, 1989).

(reminder: @ryknight)

NEXT...

The 2008 documentary "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (which I recommend to anyone who wants a deeper understanding of the charges facing him now) documents a public perception of Roman Polanski that blamed him not only for the darkness of his films, but even for surviving the Holocaust and for the Manson-led murder of his wife, Sharon Tate, and friends. All of this years before he pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor and then fled the country before sentencing.

I don't know what was going through Larry King's mind last night on his CNN show, but here's what happened (from the CNN transcript):

KING: Joining Lawrence Silver with us now is Debra Tate, Roman Polanski's former sister in law, the sister of the late Sharon Tate. On a persona note, I knew Sharon Tate. I had interviewed her a couple of months before her tragic murder. What do you want to see happen?

DEBRA TATE, FMR. SISTER IN LAW OF ROMAN POLANSKI: I would like to see this whole thing go away. I think that there has been a lot of time that has passed and we need to bring it to an end.

KING: Have you ever talked to Roman Polanski?

TATE: I have.

KING: How can you have a civil conversation with someone who so brutally murdered your sister?

TATE: Roman didn't murder my sister.

KING: I'm sorry. When the fact that he would have this terrible thing happen to him after the death of your sister, to once again focus you into the public light. That's what I meant.

Bizarre how easily the lines get blurred...

Would sarcastic or satirical intent be better communicated on the InterTubes if we had access to backward-italic sarcastic fonts?

From the Sarcastic Font Manifesto:

For too long e-mails, instant messages, web pages and documents have been unable to fully communicate the subtleties of sarcasm. Text delivered without intonation fail to represent the rare form of language where the intended meaning is the opposite of the written word.

Over the internet we yell at each other with ALL CAPS and emphasize with bold and italics, but where is sarcasm? Where is the nuance, the elegance? We say it is time for a change. It's time for a revolution. It's time for a new font style....

(tip: Daniel Oxenhandler)

A new critical thinking meme: This web site features a grating parody of the "Leave Britney alone!" video at the top of the page, and proceeds to explain its purpose:

This site exists to try and help examine the vicious rumor that Glenn Beck raped and murdered a young girl in 1990. We don't claim to know the truth -- only that the rumour floating around saying that Glenn Beck raped and murdered a young girl in 1990 should be discussed. So we're going to do our part to try and help get to the bottom of this.

Why won't Glenn Beck deny these allegations? We're not accusing Glenn Beck of raping and murdering a young girl in 1990 - in fact, we think he didn't! But we can't help but wonder, since he has failed to deny these horrible allegations. Why won't he deny that he raped and killed a young girl in 1990?

Breaking News: Famously loose-lipped presidential heckler Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina (catch him in the above clip) now says his outburst ("You lie!") was "inappropriate and regrettable." He did not say he regretted it or found it inappropriate, but he implied that somebody else may have, which is why the party leadership told him to apologize. Surely his lapse was also, you know, a youthful indiscretion. After all, we must proceed under the assumption that people cannot be held responsible for the things they say and do. They just happen. Like when babies go potty in their diapers. Or like meteor showers. Wilson is flat-out wrong, too, but he maintains that he has a right to "disagree" that the bill says what it says, because he would prefer to pretend it says something other than what it does, in fact, say:

H.R. 3200: Sec. 246. NO FEDERAL PAYMENT FOR UNDOCUMENTED ALIENS

Nothing in this subtitle shall allow Federal payments for affordability credits on behalf of individuals who are not lawfully present in the United States.

(tip: Ms. Feeney)

I hope you're enjoying all the arguments swirling around "Inglourious Basterds" as much as I am -- not just here, but all over the place. Since I posted "Some ways to watch Inglourious Basterds [sic]," I've been reading other people's reviews and comments and interviews about the movie and, hell, even Quentin Tarantino doesn't always agree with Quentin Tarantino about what the movie's up to. (And why should he? Like all of us, he contains multitudes.) It's not about the Holocaust, but it is about the Holocaust; it's not real, but it's real; it's not fantasy, but it's fantasy; it's not history, but it's history; it's not amoral, but it's amoral; it's not moral, but it's moral...

What some people have difficulty with is exactly what others delight in: "Inglorious Basterds" is never situated in one reality or another reality. It's always juggling various combinations of reality and unreality -- history, alt-history, war movie (platoon movie, mission movie, spy movie, detective movie, propaganda movie, European art movie...), cartoon, folklore, satire, comic book, revenge fantasy, etc. -- and the combinations change from one moment to the next. And that, I think, is its subject. I don't think there's anything more to it than QT trying to create movie-moments. He does, and some of them are superb. I don't blame people who find its story and characters thin, or factual liberties preposterous, or generic conventions twisted, or (a-)morality ambiguous, or humor offensive, but he's got no reason to apologize for creating his alternative historical universe in a Hollywood movie -- a world in which all of the above are woven into its warp and woof.

Because "Inglourious Basterds" provides so much to talk about and to interpret, I thought I'd put together some fascinating observations (some of which I wish I'd made myself; some of which I think are off-base, but nevertheless revealing of something about the film) and set them bouncing off one another to get your own analytical juices flowing, starting with QT's (and others') takes on the nature of the world in which it unreels:

"I stop short of calling it a fantasy. I present it in this fairytale kind of thing as far as for the masses to take in, but that's not where I'm coming from. Where I'm coming from is my characters changed the course of the war. Now that didn't happen, because my characters didn't exist, but if they had existed, everything that happens in the movie is possible."
-- QT, after a Museum of Jewish Heritage screening in Manhattan

Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds" (that's QT's spelling for you) has been greeted with love and hate since it played Cannes last spring. It opens Friday, and to prepare for the occastion, Matt Zoller Seitz, with an able assist from Keith Uhlich, has composed "Quentin Tarantino: Words in Action for L Magazine. It's very well put-together, and it lets Tarantino riff in his own words.

I find QT's work alternately exhilarating (his fluid direction) and exhausting/embarrassing (his cutesy, over-written dialog that all sounds the same -- a monolog divided up among "characters"). You can see and hear the whole range in this montage.

Matt writes:

Bottom line: unfair as it probably sounds, Tarantino's still not quite the director I'd personally like him to be -- the Tarantino-influenced South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-Wook, whose movies are equally artificial but more emotionally engaging, is much more my speed. But while re-watching QT's films, I did find myself admiring elements that had previously bugged the hell out of me....

Conserve water. Save the rainforests. A Brazilian public awareness campaign.

The whole Henry Louis Gates Jr. arrest fiasco instantly reminded me of the best line in Martin Scorsese's "The Departed" (2006), spoken by Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) to a fellow police trainee: "Look at it this way, you're a black guy in Boston. You don't need any help from me to be completely f**ked." But it proved to be more complicated than that.

The 911 caller who saw two men trying to get into Gates' house wasn't making the racial assumptions many assumed had been. The transcript of the call reveals that she couldn't identify their races even when prodded for information by the operator (she thought one of them "looked kind of Hispanic, but I'm not really sure"), and was only calling on behalf of an elderly woman who was walking by and thought she saw something suspicious.

Here's $10,000 in $100 bills.

Page Tutor used Google's free Sketchup software to visualize the massive amounts of "money" that threaten to sink the world economy... unless we get more of it circulating again.

Here's a million:

A trillion? See below...

Couric and Palin, on piano. This is an ear-opening way to hear spoken words. As notes.

I can think of so many movies in which the images play the orchestra (or band, depending on the kind of music the movie suggests) and the actors are the soloists. Dialog by Billy Wilder, or Preston Sturges, or the Coen Bros. often strikes me as fundamentally musical. But I didn't hear this one coming.

Rarely has an American political candidate triggered so many associations with a famed British comedy troupe of stage, screen, television and phonograph recordings:

"I used to think that Michael Palin was the funniest Palin on earth.... [Sarah Palin] is like a nice-looking parrot, because the parrot speaks beautifully and kinda says 'Aw, shucks,' every now and again, but doesn't really have any understanding of the meaning of the words that it is producing, even though it's producing them very accurately.... I mean, Monty Python could have written this."

-- John Cleese, co-founder of Monty Python's Flying Circus (Clip here.)

(See above. Monty Python did.)

"But Palin is as ridiculous as the competitors from Monty Python's Upperclass Twit of the Year competition, jumping over hurdles that are nothing more than a stack of matchbooks." -- Anne Lamott, Salon.com

"Cue marching band music and a big cartoon foot. US Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, hackers have revealed, has used a Yahoo! free webmail account to talk government business with aides."

-- David Winder, ITwire

"As Monty Python used to say, 'No one expects the Spanish Inquisition' -- which is another way of saying that no one expects the unexpected."

-- Mark J. Penn, Politico

So many times over the last nine years (especially the last nine years) I have watched politicians on television and thought of John Cleese. No so much of the parrot sketch (to which he also alludes in the quotation above) but of another beloved Python bit he did...

Michael Cera, on his decision to act in "Juno" (or "Juneau"):

"Well, I had a feeling when I took the part that something like that would happen, that Sarah Palin would run and her teen would be pregnant, and so I'm glad that it finally was fulfilled."

☺☺☺☺

The Fargo Interview, with Marge Gunderson:

Gosh darn it, whether ya just love her or ya can't stand her, there's something about that Sarah Palin that's got everybody talkin' -- whether it's tryin' to talk her kinda plain ol' "Say it ain't so, Joe Sixpack" Hockey Mom talk, or just tryin' to figure out what the heck the gal is sayin'! Can ya tell what she thinks she means when she flaps that lipstick, or do ya just like the sparkle motion she makes when the words come out? Get back to me on that! Anyways, here we go again, with a buncha ways of looking at that Sarah Palin Talk that everybody's talkin' about:

Linguist Steven Pinker, "Everything You Heard Is Wrong," New York Times, October 4, 2008:

Since the vice presidential debate on Thursday night, two opposing myths have quickly taken hold about Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska. The first, advanced by her supporters, is that she made it through a gantlet of fire; the second, embraced by her detractors, is that her speaking style betrays her naïveté. Both are wrong. [...]

But it would be unfair to question the authenticity of her accent or to use it as a measure of her intellect or sophistication. The dialect is certainly for real. Listeners who hear the Minnewegian sounds of the characters from "Fargo" when they listen to Ms. Palin are on to something: the Matanuska-Susitna Valley in Alaska, where she grew up, was settled by farmers from Minnesota during the Depression.

"My cousin's niece has carpal tunnel, so I think I understand a lot about what it's like to suffer from the discrimination against the autistic in our society."

That's not a direct quote. It's also not much of an exaggeration of the kind of things I've heard people say. Maybe because it's election season, many people's sense of identity politics is going haywire, with individuals pretending they have some special qualifications to speak on behalf of others -- or groups of others -- with whom they don't really have much in common. Mainly, I think, this is because of the narcissism of the speakers, who are not so much concerned with the rights and feelings of those for whom they claim to speak, but are chiefly interested in hogging a moment in the spotlight. Yes, it's all about them and their privileged relationship with... the special, the disadvantaged, the shunned. (See "Literalism advocates literally protest the portrayal of literalists in film." OK, that's really a story about "Blindness" and those who object to metaphors that are too obvious.)

When somebody invokes a real or imagined relationship to a demographic they believe has been sinned against, asserting their personal connection without offering any additional insight, I often want to ask: What are you saying? That you wouldn't be offended if you didn't know somebody who you think has something in common with the group you think should be offended? (Sometimes, as in the fictionalized quotation at the top of this post, they can't even establish a meaningful link.) Prefacing a comment with something like "I know somebody who..." (as in, "Some of my best friends are...") is not, in itself, a sufficient argument. It just makes the speaker sound superficial.

Remember the whole "Tropic Thunder" brouhaha way back in August, when groups protested by carrying signs saying "Ban the Movie, Ban the Word"? (The word was "retard.") Last week, when the picture opened in the UK, the The Guardian ran a pointed piece by David Cox called "The imbecilic truth about the Tropic Thunder retard debate, in which he wrote:

By using the word "retard", Stiller relocates those to whom it's applied back in the real world. By acknowledging the distaste they may inspire, he does them the service of taking their situation seriously. And he reminds audiences that cinema's reluctance to engage honestly with them is ultimately the fault of cinemagoers themselves, not the studios, which must work within the parameters of acceptability.

View image From "The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant" -- one of the best movies, and movie titles, ever. Say it five times.

Back when the New German Cinema was colonizing America, my friends and I liked to transform our favorite actor-names, especially those from Fassbinder movies, into exclamations. "Ulli Lommel!" we would exclaim. Or, "Gottfried John!" (with a W.C. Fields inflection). Or, "What the Harry Baer was that!?!" The moniker-musik of Fassbinder's cinematographers alone still fill me with joy: Michael Ballhaus, Dietrich Lohmann, Xaver Schwarzenberger, Jürgen Jürges...

My dream was to hear the complete cast and credits of "Berlin Alexanderplatz" read by a National Public Radio on-air personality. Sure, every name sounds great when pronounced on NPR -- and especially "Sylvia Poggioli" or "Corey Flintoff." (I love how the second syllable of "Flintoff" falls off, like it's going over a cliff. Say that last sentence out loud. It's fun.) But what if you put the two together? It could be like peanut butter and chocolate.

What follows is a list of very, very good names for your enjoyment. They are best when you speak them with impeccable diction. And don't forget the umlauts, where appropriate. While you're doing that, can you also figure out which ones are from NPR and which are from Fassbinder? After scrambling the two lists of my favorites I'm not sure I can anymore. I will, however, say this: Rüdiger Vogler. (He's a Wim Wenders actor, not a Fassbinder vet, but he's a damn fine one with a damn fine name and I wanted to get him in here somewhere.)

UPDATE: You want to hear how it's done? Our Man In Istanbul, Ali Arikan, reads some Fassbinderian names with poetic precision here.

Before the jump, here's a few to get you started -- but beware, there are three tricks!

1 Kai Ryssdal
2 Kurt Raab
3 Peer Raben
4 Mara Liasson
5 Ulla Jacobsson
6 Annabelle Gurwitch
7 Elisabeth Trissenaar
8 Ira Flatow
9 David Folkenflik

Words are linear. Movies not so much, even though they are encoded onto strips of celluloid or served up as streams or spirals of digital bits.

The web is not so linear, actually. Hyperlinks in all directions are more like the interconnected synapses of the human brain than any other technology or art form I can think of. But sometimes when I try to convey something about my experience of movies -- filtered, as always, through reflections and contrasts between images, memories, themes, styles -- what I really want to do is make a movie about it. That seems like the shortest, most direct way from imagination to articulation. The movie itself (as Godard famously suggested) is the criticism, the analysis.

When I put together the images and commentary for my previous post, "Close-Ups: A free-association dream sequence," in celebration of the Close-Up Blog-a-thon at the House Next Door, that's what I was getting at. I just didn't have the tools to fully express what I wanted to say. Strike that. I had the tools, right here on my MacBook, but I didn't know how to use them.

One weekend and three long nights later, here's what I wanted to say. I will resist the temptation (you don't know how much I am tempted) to analyze my own cinematic essay, but I want you to watch it for yourself first. I'll translate it from web into movie and back into language later. This is a direction in which I want to move my film criticism.

Oh, and it's not a "literal" interpretation of the post. Some things just work differently on the motion picture screen than they do on the computer screen. Think of the first post as the original set of annotated storyboards, from which I felt free to depart whenever it felt right. The idea was not to overthink it, just to go with the flow and see where it led, like the ant-hole in hand / armpit / sea urchin / top of head sequence in "Un Chien Andalou." Enjoy -- and please leave comments, critiques, interpretations and questions! Just be sure to stay all the way through the end credits -- a minute or so of the six-minute running time....

UPDATED 10/19/07: While looking for a frame grab from "Black Narcissus" to honor the late Deborah Kerr, I discovered the source of an indelible mirror-image (you'll see) that I'd previously been unable to locate. It's now been incorporated into the movie.

View image Forest Whitaker as Idi Amin in "The Last King of Scotland." The New York Times asks: Which Best Actor Oscar nominee is the bestest articulater: Whitaker or Peter O'Toole? (Answer: Neither.)

Senator Joseph Biden praised (or faintly damned) Senator Barack Obama last week by calling him "the first sort of mainstream African-American [presidential candidate], who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy." OK, we know Jesse Jackson's record isn't exactly squeaky clean, what with the "Hymietown" and infidelity/paternity scandals and all. (I'm assuming that Biden was talking about the cleanliness of candidates' public images, not their personal hygiene.) Shirley Chisolm, Elizabeth Dole, Hillary Clinton and Carol Moseley Braun are not guys. Al Sharpton is not all that mainstream (how many people outside New York know who he is?) and -- at least when wearing a track suit -- not particularly nice-looking.

View image Peter O'Toole in "Venus."

So, that leaves Obama, who is male and partly African-American. (He was born in Hawaii to a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas). He may also be all those other things Biden said, but it was the "African-American" part and the "articulate" part that got Biden in the most trouble. Obama said he didn't think Biden was making a subconscious racial slur. But as Lynette Clemetson wrote in a piece called "The Racial Politics of Speaking Well" in Sunday's New York Times: "Being articulate must surely be a baseline requirement for a former president of The Harvard Law Review.... It would be more incredible, more of a phenomenon, to borrow two more of the senator’s puzzling words, if Mr. Obama were inarticulate."

Good point. But if the former president of the Harvard Law Review cannot properly be described as "articulate," then who can? Just because somebody has achieved a certain position in life does not necessarily mean that person is articulate ("Expressing oneself easily in clear and effective language: an articulate speaker."). Clemetson notes that President Bush has also called Obama "articulate" -- which reminds me of when Bush called the late Gerald Ford "decent" and "competent." Mr. Bush went to Yale University (and is President of the United States of America) and yet he is about as articulate as Lindsay "Be Adequite" Lohan. Listen to him talk sometime. He appears to be painfully unaware of the meanings of the words he attempts to pronounce -- especially, perhaps, "decent," "competent" and "articulate." (Some Disassembly Required.) From his mouth, those words sound like insults. Given his record and the way he speaks, what indication do we have that he understands them?

All of the cuss words, none of the plot! Now that the courts have stopped companies like Clean Flicks and Family Flicks USA from releasing their own custom-sanitized DVD versions of other people's movies (we used to just call this "bowdlerization"), perhaps it is time to celebrate with a different approach: a feature with all the f-words left in, but the rest of the movie taken out. That's what somebody's done with "The Big Lebowski" in this two-minute, fourteen-second "F*cking Short Version." If you're offended by profanity... well, then you're out of your element, Donny!

Don't let a scrunt near that bleedin' narf!

The ferocious topiary bear-like creatures who inflict near-fatal superficial wounds on a narf in M. Night Shyamalan's "The Lady in the Water" are called "scrunts." (I think there's only one of them in the movie, but it's hard to tell.) Shyamalan, who improvised this tale for his young daughters before he released it as a movie and a children's book, may have some explaining to do. According to the Urban Dictionary, a "scrunt" is nasty filthy slang for a ... dirty lady and her parts. If you want to learn more, beware: the vulgarism contained in the word "scrunt" (aka the c-word) is part of the definition. According to MSN Encarta, however, "scrunt" is Caribbean slang, an intransitive verb meaning "financially strapped: to be in a poor financial situation." Like the wolf at the door, if you catch my drift.

You're in safer waters with narf, which is said to be "a substitute word, does not need to be for a curse word, can be used in any circumstance," from the TV show "Pinky and the Bean Brain." BTW, "Tartutic" and "Eatlon" are undefined.

(Thanks, I think, to Jeff Shannon)