Recently in Politics Category

U.S. Senate apologizes for slavery and segregation: http://bit.ly/G46Cu. Bob Byrd breaks down on Senate floor. "Too soon. Too soon."

I think that's a funny joke. Normally, I find set-up/punch-line jokes the lowest form of humor (far below puns and slapstick in their paucity of imagination), and I regard them warily, not unlike the way Thoreau viewed "all enterprises that require new clothes." But I cracked up when I saw this tweet from Robert A. George. To find it funny, I guess you'd have to know that Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) is very, very old, and that he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan in his youth. But in the ad hominem '00s, many people would first look at the identity of the joke teller before deciding if it was humorous.

Robert A. George, eh? Wait a minute -- he's a conservative and a libertarian! He's black! He's a naturalized American citizen, born in Trinidad (and Tobago)! He's a Catholic! He's a blogger, a Twitterer, a Facebooker, a New York Post columnist, a stand-up comedian, a comic-book geek! Soooooo, of course he's going to make that joke about Bob Byrd, right?!?!

This seven-minute 2008 propaganda film from the Iranian Intelligence Ministry (Ahmadinejad regime), begins with a White House conspiracy involving an animated Senator John McCain (aka Mr. Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb-Bomb Iran) and George Soros. It's kind of hard to tell who is who, but isn't it remarkable to see them cooperating at all? They discuss a plan to "contact authors, intellectuals, and influential people in society who have common interests with us" -- as well as "NGO's that share our goals" -- to expand on the mind-altering efforts used at international scientific conferences and harness the power of satellite TV to bombard the Iranian people with "regime change" propaganda.

The second part is a live-action espionage Afterschool Special about a young man who falls in with a bad crowd who conspire through such subversive technologies as e-mail to "pass on the instructions we get from satellite TV" and please their "friends in America." (The internal use of Twitter and Facebook were apparently not perceived as significant threats to the government at the time.)

The worst thing the U.S. could do right now is to feed Ahmadinejad's disinformation machine by lending credence to the government's claims that the protesters are not citizens with legitimate complaints but American tools with hidden agendas.

(tip: The Plank)

UPDATE below...

"Remember during the campaign when John McCain attacked Obama for acting like a celebrity and we all laughed at the grumpy old shellshocked fool? Well, it turns out he was right. [...] It's getting to where you can't turn on your TV without seeing Obama."

What grumpy old shellshocked fool said that? It was comedian Bill Maher, whose approach to political satire is to talk about televised presidential photo ops as if they were interfering with, or substituting for, policy-making. I mean, the guy admits he thinks what he sees on TV is "news," and then he watches PR puff pieces about presidential puppies and romantic nights out on Broadway and thinks it's Obama who lacks substance? Turn off the boob tube, Bill, and read a newspaper or a web site -- or a blog. If you wanted to learn something about politics (and "topical humor") from TV, you should be watching Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert, not Leno. But I warn you, it's going to make you feel as tired and ancient as your schtick. You may as well be telling jokes about airline food and Geritol. (Anybody remember Geritol? That's my point.)

Following up on "Former President Jar Jar": David Edelstein considers the proper cinematic representation of Dick Cheney -- Fu Manchu, Voldemort, Palpatine, Richard Nixon, Elmer Fudd, Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse (whose cousin Rotwang was recently referenced here) -- though Mabuse perhaps bears more resemblance to Heath Ledger's Joker:

Dr. Mabuse. Like Cheney, the Teutonic arch-fiend controls a vast criminal network while lurking in the shadows. He wields hypnotic power, unnerving subordinates and enemies alike with his implacable demeanor. Called on to surrender in the name of the state, Mabuse cries, "I am the state!" Unlike Cheney, however, he creates chaos intentionally rather than by accident, through the use of incompetent party loyalists and their inbred progeny. Also, he does not hide behind the rule of law, and, again, he never perverts or violates the Constitution of the United States.

Andrew Sullivan is having a contest ("Nixon Without The Conscience,") asking readers to submit "classic movie scenes that depict Cheney." One of the first submissions is this one (after the jump) -- although, above all, I believe it serves as a powerful reminder of what a terrible, amateurish over-actor Tom Cruise has always been -- in this case, especially his right hand. Torture? See if you can watch this without cringing:

What would pundits and stand-up comedians do without their "Star Wars" analogies? Maureen Dowd liked to refer to the former vice president as "Darth Cheney." She recently asked George Lucas if that comparison was a mischaracterization:

Lucas explained politely as I listened contritely. Anakin Skywalker is a promising young man who is turned to the dark side by an older politician and becomes Darth Vader. "George Bush is Darth Vader," he said. "Cheney is the emperor."

Amy Davidson, at the New Yorker's News Desk, is having none of it ("Close Read: Dark Forces"):

From the famous Wall Street Journal Opinion section comes good news for modern Hollywood:

Once again, family-friendly, uplifting and inspiring movies drew far more viewers in 2008 than films with themes of despair, or leftist political agendas. Sex, drugs and antireligious themes were not automatic sellers, either.

According to authors Ted Baehr and Tom Snyder of Movieguide (described as "a ministry dedicated to redeeming the values of the mass media according to biblical principles, by influencing entertainment industry executives and helping families make wise media choices"), 2008's most successful Hollywood movies continued to affirm the values of their organization, such as "coping with Nazi tyranny" ("Valkyrie") and "loyalty, sacrifice and doing the right thing" ("Bolt"). (Films with themes of languishment, or flautist political agendas, are widely considered to have been been less popular at the 2008 box office as well, but they were not tracked as closely in Movieguide's studies.) Baehr and Snyder continue:

The charges have been raised: Exploitation! Historical inaccuracy! Quantitatively insufficient acting! Must be Oscar season. Will any of them stick?

This year's Academy Awards nominations were met with a near-universal ho-hum. Critics yawned ("the most dispiriting and beside-the-point Academy Awards race in decades," wrote Richard T. Jameson) and sneered, while pundits anticipated another plummet in the ratings for the televised ceremony.

So, how do you pump up interest in a desultory Oscar year? With Hollywood scandals, of course -- real or manufactured! Here are some of them (with links to source stories):

Tom Brokaw, NBC News: "It's unfortunate for Vice President Cheney to have had this accident obviously, because there will be those who don't like him, who will be writing tomorrow that he had a Dr. Strangelove appearance as he appeared today in his wheelchair."

Brokaw brought it up. Judge for yourself. Did it occur to Brokaw that that this could have been a wily piece of black-hearted/suited satirical stagecraft on Cheney's part? Wonder what was in those boxes that he was reportedly moving -- himself -- when he injured his back. Shreddable secret documents, perhaps? Or could the former CEO of Halliburton not afford to hire movers?

(AP Photo)

UPDATE: Reports that the ex-VP was doing a little recreational waterboarding down by the Potomac when he slipped on the ice have not been confirmed.

Michael Sheen and Frank Langella are swell as David Frost and Richard Nixon in the adapted-from-the-stage-adaptation movie, but I feel -- and I believe the above clips demonstrate -- that these five minutes provide more compelling drama and suspense (and adrenaline) than the entire feature film. Frost presents himself as a much stronger, more flamboyant "prosecutor" than he is in the movie. And watch the incredible range and focus of Nixon's performance: the deliberate rhetorical emphases and repetitions; the flashes of steely anger and startling shifts into unctuousness/condescension when he seems like he could burst into inappropriate laugher or tears or flames; the (strategic?) digressions and circumlocutions; the hand-gestures, head-shakes, eye-blinks; the splintered syntax and mispronunciations-under-pressure when he gets flustered... At least you can tell (unlike certain modern politicians one could name) that he's actually thinking as he talks, sifting through evidence and debate tactics and talking points in his head, not just going blank and letting his lips flap. THIS is an endlessly fascinating character in peak performance mode...

* * * *

"Frost/Nixon" and "Milk" are glossy products of the Hollywood awards season, prestige pictures in the grand red-carpet tradition of fashioning uplifting, larger-than-life entertainments out of semi-fictionalized semi-recent historical events. The thing is, both have been treated far more thrillingly on documentaries that are available on DVD. Think "Frost/Nioxon" provided compelling drama, suspense and astoundingly rich performances? It can't approach the actual interviews , which have just been released as "Frost/Nixon: The Original Watergate Interviews." Think "Milk" was a moving look at a charismatic public figure and a key period in American civil rights? You have not begun to be moved until you see Rob Epstein's Oscar-winning "The Times of Harvey Milk" (clips after the jump), which is also a more complex, less hagiographic portrait of the man and his heady times.

Ben Stein, whose spectacularly idiotic "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" uses Nazi concentration camps as scenic backdrops for a nonsensical embrace of Intelligent Design, is nominated for a Malkin Award at Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish, for saying the following in an interview aired on the Trinity Broadcasting Network:

When we just saw that man, I think it was Mr. Myers [i.e. biologist P.Z. Myers], talking about how great scientists were, I was thinking to myself the last time any of my relatives saw scientists telling them what to do they were telling them to go to the showers to get gassed ... that was horrifying beyond words, and that's where science -- in my opinion, this is just an opinion -- that's where science leads you... Love of God and compassion and empathy leads you to a very glorious place, and science leads you to killing people.

Right. Just an opinion he picked up somewhere. I mean, when you think about it, what have those murderous scientists (Darwinists!) done about the leading causes of death in the world before the mid-20th Century: tuberculosis, cholera, influenza, pneumonia... ?

The Malkin Award, named after the blogger Michelle Malkin, is given annually for "shrill, hyperbolic, divisive and intemperate right-wing rhetoric. A[--] C[------] is ineligible -- to give others a chance." You can vote for Stein, or one of his ignominious fellow nominees, here.

But, really, check that reasoning: God Love = Compassion therefore Science = Murder. That's gotta win some sort of a prize.

Above: Ben Stein on location at Dachau.

UPDATE: He won! And the scientist he was hating on won the equally nasty [Michael] Moore Award.

That's what I wrote, semi-earnestly, in a June 2006 post about the documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car?" I led up to it with this:

Had GM committed to the electric car, it might be on top of the world today. Instead, GM's boneheaded short-term business decisions have nearly bankrupted the company. And now, why in the world would anyone want to buy an GM vehicle, when you know they're passing off inferior, antiquated merchandise? Unless it can compete, and catch up technologically to where it already was ten years ago, GM deserves a quick and merciless death.

Two and a half years later, my feelings are a lot more ambivalent -- mainly because I don't want to see more people out of work in this freezing economic climate, unless they're the CEOs who steadily ran the American automobile industry into the ground over the last, oh, thirty years. (They learned nothing from the 1970s, when they found themselves making cars Americans didn't want and handed the market to Toyota, Honda, Mazda...?) As Thomas Friedman put it:

I'm off this week, though I may post a few short items if I get the opportunity. Meanwhile, do you have some thanks to offer the Governor of Alaska?

Mark Newman of the Department of Physics and Center for the Study of Complex Systems at the University of Michigan has created some electoral cartograms of the United States that reflect the reality and complexity of our voting patterns much more effectively than those misrepresentative red state/blue state maps to which we have become accustomed. This one, for example, is based on 2008 results by county and population. Note that there's a lot of purple. You won't see this balance on Fox News, where the "real America" is supposedly bright screaming red. (In fact, the pure-blue population centers are much larger than the pure-red ones.)

Newman writes of the above: "As this map makes clear, large portions of the country are quite evenly divided, appearing in various shades of purple, although a number of strongly Democratic (blue) areas are visible too, mostly in the larger cities. There are also some strongly Republican areas, but most of them have relatively small populations and hence appear quite small on this map."

(tip: Andrew Sullivan)

Click below for my own newly redrawn map of Colbert Nation.

Oliver Stone's movie doesn't begin to approach this level of character insight or emotion. This genuine drama took place in Tallahassee, after the 2006 mid-term election. Notice the phrases over which the former president stumbles and weeps when talking about his son, Jeb, who served two terms as governor of Florida and was prevented by term-limit laws from running for a third:

I saw Oliver Stone's "W." a week or two ago, and I almost forgot. Believe me, it felt even more worn out before the election. I kept thinking I'd seen it before in some other form. Not just as in every day for the last eight years, or as in some other slab of Stone. This one reminded me of Woody Allen's "Zelig" or Robert Zemeckis's "Forrest Gump" -- about a nobody who stumbles into history. Then I realized it was more like a reworking of Hal Ashby and Jerzy Kosinski's "Being There" -- the story of a vacancy.

That impression was magnified Tuesday night as I watched Barack step up to fill it. In that one solemn but hopeful election night speech in Grant Park he did more to steady, strengthen and solidify the union for tough times than I've seen any president do in my lifetime. It wasn't just a matter of commanding screen space or being ready for his close-up (although the camera loves him). But after so many years of looking at a skittish hamster-in-the-headlights, squinting or staring blankly into the lens, how dramatic it was to see somebody there at last -- a solid somebody with a firm sense of who he is, and what it means to lead and to strive and to inspire. No smugness, no self-congratulation, no condescension, no desperation. A grown-up. I felt an enormous sense of confidence and relief. And I didn't feel alone in feeling that.

Which brings me back to the hollowness of W. and "W."...

I hear a worldwide sigh of relief. This is just the beginning. We need to put the eight-year nightmare behind us and get some real healing done. But, you know, the truth is healing, and so is laughter. So, one more for the road...

(tip: Andrew Sullivan)

Actual ad from a place called The Patriot Depot, A Division of Discount Book Distributors:

(tip: Alex Koppelman)

This is has been the script co-written by Sarah Palin & William Kristol (uncredited) all along. And once again John McCain played his part in the scenario, opposite the real Palin (Tina Fey's) on "Saturday Night Live." The 2012 Palin rallies (no mention of McCain) are already being held in places like Florida. As I said in my earlier piece, what started out as the "Mrs. Smith Goes to Washington" political narrative has now become "All About Eve" -- the rogue diva backstabbing the soon-to-be-washed-up old vet. Does McCain know he's been cast in the Bette Davis role?

Hang on, Republicans, it's gonna be a bumpy four years...

Skeletons in the closet! Bats in the belfry! Wolves in sheep's clothing! Pit bull-barracudas in Neiman Marcus clothing! Flying pigs in lipstick bursting forth from unlicensed plumbing fixtures! Befitting the sinister tone of season (political and scary), David Bordwell has published a brilliant essay he calls "It was a dark and stormy campaign," in which he examines the concept of "narrative," as it has come to be used in film and campaign circles. This is essential reading:

Clearly the presidential candidates have come to believe that what seizes the public aren't just policy views and promises. Now the campaigns want to tell stories in which the candidates are the protagonists. The life of Barack Obama, or Joe Biden, or Sarah Palin is said to be a story (usually "an American story"). According to Robert Draper's influential recent article ["The Making (and Remaking) of McCain"], John McCain's campaign has deliberately set out a series of "narratives": McCain endures suffering in Hanoi as a POW; he enters politics and fights for reform in government. Mark Salter, McCain's staff member and coauthor, has the responsibility of stitching incidents of the Senator's career into what he calls the "metanarrative" of McCain's life--rather as George Lucas presides over the Bible of the "Star Wars" universe.

The latest in a series. Real politicians and comedians show you how to use simple word/image associations to create creepy political ads as seen on TV and the Internets!

Make your own here.

In some Scanners comments this weekend, we've been discussing various comparisons between George W. Bush and Richard M. Nixon, seeing as how Oliver Stone has now made made both failed presidents the subjects of Major Motion Pictures. Matt Zoller Seitz and Kevin B. Lee, in a series of visual and print essays at Moving Image Source about Oliver Stone's political portraits ("Born on the Fourth of July," "JFK," "Nixon," "Alexander" -- leading up to "W.") have been re-examining these films as part of Stone's cinematic autobiography-in-process. (I think all these films, for better or worse, say more about their maker than they do about their subjects -- though there's nothing exceptional about that.)

Nixon is a key figure in my life -- the center of many of my political disputes with my late father, who would not find it unflattering to be described a "redneck" from Catawissa, MO, which I think is a pretty accurate description. When I was 10 and studied the 1968 presidential candidates in elementary school, I decided I was for Hubert Humphrey. My dad voted Nixon (though sometimes I suspected him of actually going for Wallace -- a racist gargoyle who could not have terrified this young Seattle white boy more if he had actually worn a gown and pointed hood). To me, Nixon's resignation in disgrace represented the triumph of my morality over my father's. To him, the only difference between Nixon and any other politician was that "he got caught."

Now that I'm older than he was then, I think we both have our points. At any rate, the president the country chooses unquestionably reflects and defines that period in its history.

Which leads me to something Matt writes about "Nixon" (the movie):

"Not since 'Sling Blade' has there been a voice that anybody could do.... Anybody can take a swing at this voice."

"You have to be able to goof on the female politicians just as much, otherwise you really are treating them like they're weaker or something."

Also, she gives credit to Seth Meyers for being the primary writer of the Palin SNL sketches. Classy broad.

(Ebert on McCain on Letterman, plus clips, here.)

"W." is the third in what could turn out to be Oliver Stone's five-part trilogy of movies containing pronounceable capital letters in the titles (after "JFK" and "U-Turn"), if you don't count "Natural Born Killers" and "World Trade Center," sometimes known as "NBK" and "WTC," respectively, in which case it may already be the fifth film in a proposed diptych about the tetralogy of power.

I haven't seen the movie yet, but the timing seems inopportune. Few public figures have faded into irrelevance more quickly in recent months than George W. Bush, whose popularity and name-recognition numbers are now running slightly behind Sanjaya, and I'm not sure I remember who that was.

... and what was that ending supposed to mean?

WARNING: HBO-rated profanity and imagery discussed -- including language previously restricted to top-level government officials, mostly during the Nixon and Cheney administrations.

(tip: Andrew Sullivan)

Before I get to the movie part of this post, I want to toast Paul Krugman. He is one of the few public figures I've ever considered a personal hero. (Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are, too, and I'm not joking.)

In the bleakest hours of the new millennium -- through 9/11, Iraq, soul-shattering scandals, national elections, and impending financial disasters -- Krugman stood as a beacon of hope and, if you'll pardon the expression, moral clarity in what Nick Lowe (and Elvis Costello) memorably called "the darkness of insanity."

Hired in 1999 as the New York Times economic columnist, Krugman wound up doing what so many journalists, even at his own paper, were failing to do. He reported. Not just what people said, but how what they said compared to independently verifiable reality. Week after week, column after column, Krugman was virtually alone (alongside Knight-Ridder, NPR and "The Daily Show") in pointing out, and explaining the significance of, relevant facts that so many didn't care to notice, even when they were right there in plain sight -- and in the public record, if anyone bothered to pay attention.

He wasn't just a good reporter but a fine critic.

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...

We've gotta cash in on this quick, so here's my pitch:

Tina Fey plays Sarah Palin as Tina Fey as Sarah Palin in a semi-remake of "Dave."

Animal Control nabs Palin off the street, mistaking her for a stray pit bull whose previous owner tested makeup on animals. Palin is asked to host "SNL" the week before the election, but nobody notices she's missing because the McCain campaign is so successful at keeping her away from the press that they forget where they put her. Security is airtight. Because Fey does a better Palin than Palin does, she is forced to do the show as Palin as Fey as Palin.

"All the really good suicide bombers are gone," laments a trio of bumbling Afghan terrorists early on in "An American Carol," and that's about the high-water mark for humor in this jaw-droppingly awful political comedy from veteran spoofer David Zucker.

-- Steven Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer

After "An American Carol" opened in some cities last week, RogerEbert.com received a few insinuating inquiries from readers asking why we did not publish a review of the film , a biographical musical celebration of the beloved wide-mouthed Broadway star of "Hello, Dolly!". The comedy, directed and co-written by David Zucker ("Airplane!"), is a conservative re-telling of Dickens' "A Christmas Carol, with a fat, unscrupulous, bespectacled, baseball-capped, America-hating documentarian named Michael Malone (played by the late Chris Farley's brother Kevin) as the Scrooge figure. Our correspondents suggested that, because the movie's politics reportedly tilted to the right, perhaps the liberal falafel-loving media establishment was deliberately ignoring it. (Meanwhile, the conservative corporate media establishment was evidently off celebrating a lonely cinematic triumph in a quiet place.)

Oddly, we did not receive a single comment or e-mail asking why we did not carry a review of "Beverly Hills Chihuahua," the Number One Movie of last weekend, but the reasons are the same: neither "An American Carol" nor "BHC" were screened for critics. That is usually the studios' way of ensuring that reviews do not appear on opening day. If any critic-type person still wants to cover it, he or she can simply buy a ticket to a show on Friday or Saturday and file a notice over the weekend.

RottenTomatoes lists 65 reviews for "Beverly Hills Chihuahua" (27 positive), 119 for "Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist" (85 positive), and 28 for "An American Carol" (4 positive), all of which opened the same day.

To help fill in the critical information gap, are some excerpts from the few higher-profile "American Carol" reviews I could find, some of which are kind of funny. The first one is from a review RT.com categorizes as "fresh":

When I first tried to understand what the whole financial meltdown was about, it sounded to me like some kind of perpetual motion machine -- a black box that reversed the first law of thermodynamics ("econo-dynamics"?) to produce energy from nothing, or money from debt. Turns out the principles behind the "financial instruments" that caused the collapse were indeed crafted in part by physicists and mathematicians who designed complex formulas that defied real-world understanding, but that appeared to guarantee profits out of nothing.

Here's my quick take on the smoke-and-mirrors magic-of-the-marketplace that deregulation made possible at the turn of the last century (y'all remember Enron) and how it's manifesting itself in today's financial crises -- using clips from CBS's "60 Minutes" report, "Wall Street's Shadow Market", (10/6/08) and Alex Gibney's documentary, "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" (2005).

And, if she does, how many viewers will be able to tell the difference? Is this gonna be the talent portion?

Bill Zwecker reports in the Chicago Sun-Times:

It's looking more and more likely that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin will appear on ''Saturday Night Live'' -- to have some fun with Tina Fey.

As the comedian's impressions of the GOP vice presidential candidate draw laughs from Republicans and Democrats alike, a top honcho from the John McCain campaign tells me there's a debate going on about how to respond.

I can't get enough of Tina Fey's Sarah Palin. I feel about her the way I felt about Dr. Evil in the first "Austin Powers" movie. My eyes light up whenever she's on camera. And then, of course, there are those little starbursts she sends through the screen that go ricocheting around the living rooms of America, as first reported by Rich Lowry of the National Review.

Something strange is happening, though: Fey's Palin is not only sharper and funnier than Palin's Palin, she's also more vivid, more... real (maybe because she's on TV more). It's as if she's the main Palin and the other one is the paler surrogate Palin. In other words, for you baby boomers, Tina Fey's Palin is the Dick York and Sarah Palin's Palin is the Dick Sargent. Sure, they're both bewitching in their own ways, but Fey's is the real Darrin. If you know what I mean.

I was looking forward to the VP Debate opening sketch on "SNL" as much as the debate itself, and I was not disappointed by either. I'm guessing that former "SNL" head-writer Fey contributes to these because they're "30 Rock" precise -- more pointed than what usually passes for "SNL" political humor. (I didn't make it through the obviously obligatory finanical bailout sketch in the first half hour of the show, even though Fred Armisen's Barney Frank was a hoot).

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.

A boardroom speech from banker Thomas Dickson, written by Robert Ryskin, directed by Frank Capra and delivered by Walter Huston in "American Madness" (1932). Capra and Ryskin collaborated on many films, including "Lady for a Day," "It Happened One Night," "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town," "Lost Horizon" and "Meet John Doe."

"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.

One of the things film critics do for a living is to pay close attention to how people behave, and how that behavior is presented through visual media. This applies not only to actors playing characters, but to people who play themselves, in fictional or nonfictional settings, on and off the screen. It should come as no surprise to learn that some of our best movie critics have backgrounds in psychology.

When Bill Clinton said, "I did not have sex with that woman," it now seems impossible to believe that he fooled anyone at that particular moment. But if any movie critic misread Clinton's voice and body language, that critic should have been impeached. As opaque as the clumsy verbal gymnastics of George W. Bush and Sarah Palin may often be, behind the contortions it's hard to avoid seeing the painful truth, which is simply that they don't know what their own words mean, and even when they know what they've been told to say they don't know how to communicate it. As actors, they're thoroughly unconvincing: You can see the wheels turning inside their heads -- only the gears aren't even engaged. There's a lot of whirring and spinning, but nothing happens. That can be excruciating to watch, but it's also the stuff of modern comedy. Christopher Guest, Ricky Gervais, Steve Carell, Tina Fey, Jon Stewart, Samantha Bee, Stephen Colbert and the whole Judd Apatow crew come to mind.

Patrick Goldstein, writing in the Los Angeles Times, argues that film critics like Roger Ebert, sophisticated in their knowledge of media presentation and human behavior, make more insightful political pundits than the usual beltway-bubble spin-docs employed by television, radio, print and online outlets. In a piece called "From film critic to political pundit," Goldstein writes:

To me, film critics, like TV and theater critics, are especially well equipped to analyze today's politics, which is why Frank Rich made such a seamless transition from theater to media and political commentator. In fact, in some ways film critics are probably better equipped to assess the political theater of today's presidential campaigns, since our campaigns are -- as has surely been obvious for some time -- far more about theater and image creation than politics.

A comedy thought experiment: You've gotta admit, they make it look so easy. Too easy. But they were doing television sketch comedy before SNL and Mad TV and Fox News rediscovered them. Now, as they're being further exposed to audiences of all persuasions, more and more people are saying: "They were so funny, I may previously have forgotten to laugh!" No longer! We're in comedy mode!

UPDATE: She's so quick, I can't even keep up with her anymore. Now she's given us new material on her preferred news sources and the Supreme Court! She's got a million of 'em -- and she'll be here all month! Probably.

Compare and contrast with another famous TV comedy sketch after the jump....

I'm posting this not just because I'm (still) in love with Sarah Silverman (though I am), and not just because she's a genius (though, of course, she is), and not just because of the overt political humor in this short film (though The Great Schlep is an inspired idea), but because of how it relates to recent Scanners posts about comedy and understanding what the joke is. (See posts and discussions regarding "Tropic Thunder," "Juneau," and David Foster Wallace.)

So, please watch the above movie and then provide your interpretation of it, by considering my questions after the jump...

I defy you to tell the difference between her character and the Governor of Alaska, who has been busy lowering expectations all week. The main difference, of course, is that Fey is still in front of TV cameras, while Palin can no longer be found. Anywhere.

And the most brilliant stroke: Palin herself provided much of the material. She writes her own comedy and all Fey has to do is perform it the way Palin does. Fey isn't doing a caricature (like Dana Carvey's George HW Bush), but is giving a performance of uncanny accuracy (closer to, say, Helen Mirren in "The Queen").

NEW! Version 1.1. Now with easier-to-read captions!

Everything I know about economics I learned from the movies. (Collected knowledge after the jump.) So when times get tough, I consult Preston Sturges. Here, I have condensed the financial wisdom of a lifetime into less than five minutes -- all of it distilled from 1937's "Easy Living," written by Sturges, directed by Mitchell Leisen, and starring Jean Arthur, Edward Arnold, Ray Milland, Mary Nash, Franklin Pangborn, Luis Alberni and Andrew Tombes, among many others.

Sturges himself puts in an appearance to explain the key principle behind all successful investment strategies.

And in his movie, there's a happy ending.

Irony alert! Has the very idea of Sarah Palin rendered the concept of irony unrecognizable to many Americans, or has she just pointed out its irrelevance to them in ways that even 9/11 could not? Here's Maureen Dowd channeling/quoting "West Wing" creator Aaron Sorkin on the subject of irony in America today.

President Bartlet (Martin Sheen) speaking frankly, as politicians say, to Barack Obama:

BARTLET: Well ... let me think. ...We went to war against the wrong country, Osama bin Laden just celebrated his seventh anniversary of not being caught either dead or alive, my family's less safe than it was eight years ago, we've lost trillions of dollars, millions of jobs, thousands of lives and we lost an entire city due to bad weather. So, you know ... I'm a little angry.

OBAMA: What would you do?

BARTLET: GET ANGRIER! Call them liars, because that's what they are. Sarah Palin didn't say "thanks but no thanks" to the Bridge to Nowhere. She just said "Thanks." You were raised by a single mother on food stamps -- where does a guy with eight houses who was legacied into Annapolis get off calling you an elitist? And by the way, if you do nothing else, take that word back. Elite is a good word, it means well above average. I'd ask them what their problem is with excellence. While you're at it, I want the word "patriot" back. McCain can say that the transcendent issue of our time is the spread of Islamic fanaticism or he can choose a running mate who doesn't know the Bush doctrine from the Monroe Doctrine, but he can't do both at the same time and call it patriotic. They have to lie -- the truth isn't their friend right now. Get angry. Mock them mercilessly; they've earned it.

Can Tina Fey get an Emmy just for this? I know, it's almost too easy. But she's flawless. I knew she was a terrific writer and comedian (er, "comedienne"?), especially from "30 Rock," but I don't think I ever fully realized what a brilliant actor (er, "actress") she is.

And now, conservative columnist David Brooks of the New York Times on a word familiar to "SNL" viewers: "prudent"...

I had just begun working on a piece about how comedy is the the only adequate response to the modern world, and the most profound approach to exploring and understanding the modern human psyche... when this happened. The folly and tragedy of human existence, and the indifferent and inhospitable relationship of the universe to human needs and desires, can be plumbed only by the sharpest and most penetrating comedy, without which tragedy loses its meaning and its deepest pain. And sometimes it just happens without comedy writers needing to make anything up. Or is it the other way around? Miss Congeniality. Elle Woods. Tracy Flick. Could this be an example of life imitating comedy?

Maureen Dowd in The New York Times takes a lighter comedic view:

So imagine my delight, my absolute astonishment, when the hokey chick flick came out on the trail, a Cinderella story so preposterous it's hard to believe it's not premiering on Lifetime. Instead of going home and watching "Miss Congeniality" with Sandra Bullock, I get to stay here and watch "Miss Congeniality" with Sarah Palin. [...]

This chick flick, naturally, features a wild stroke of fate, when the two-year governor of an oversized igloo becomes commander in chief after the president-elect chokes on a pretzel on day one.

The movie ends with the former beauty queen shaking out her pinned-up hair, taking off her glasses, slipping on ruby red peep-toe platform heels that reveal a pink French-style pedicure, and facing down Vladimir Putin in an island in the Bering Strait. Putting away her breast pump, she points her rifle and informs him frostily that she has some expertise in Russia because it's close to Alaska. "Back off, Commie dude," she says. "I'm a much better shot than Cheney."

[UPDATE: Now comes news from the McCain-Palin campaign that there's an unmarried, pregnant 17-year-old daughter in the pro-family Palin household. You can't make this stuff up. Reuters reports that the minor is "about five months pregnant and is going to keep the child and marry the father, according to aides of Republican presidential candidate John McCain." Damn right she will. It's written into the GOP platform!]

Quite often, the behavior of public figures displays a cosmic humor beyond anything a comedy writer could actually have gotten away with. In this case, the joke would seem too crass and cynical if it weren't for real. Now its crassness and cynicism give the humor real bite. A week ago if some film or television writer had proposed this preposterous scenario (old politician chooses Alaskan creationist former small-town mayor and beauty contest winner as running mate), it would have just seemed mean and a little desperate. Now? Well, see "Ham Sandwich McCain's Actual Choice for Veep." It no longer seems so far-fetched.

Now you have to wonder: Why didn't he choose someone more qualified? Like Harriet Miers?

When it comes to experience, Dan Quayle was the natural choice -- but his Y chromosome made him ineligible in the all-important tokenism category. (Brownie could bring his hurricane ineptitude to the table, but he's still sporting a scrotum so that won't play.) The main attribute McCain's running mate needed was that she be able to play up her sisterhood with Senator Hillary Clinton, the veteran politician so long beloved and revered by the Republican Party. That and she had to have spunk. The convention is in Minneapolis, and she's gonna make it after all.

Once comedy of this magnitude has occurred, and satire has been rendered superfluous, the really brilliant comedians have only to recognize the situation for what it is. I'm tremendously grateful, then, that Jon Stewart, with his unerring eye for future casting opportunities, and Samantha Bee, with her sharp-as-a-tack "lady brain," found exactly the right words to summarize the genius behind this unprecedented decision.

(Transcript below, after the jump.)

Has "The Dark Knight" signaled a change in the way superhero movies are perceived by the mainstream? Will it "legitimize" a so-called "disreputable genre" (if comic-book superhero movies can be said to comprise a genre)? Has it become to signify a desire for larger acceptance by comic fans, or a crossover hit that aficionados feel can only be fully understood by those well-versed in Batman mythology?

In his indispensable new essay, "Superheroes for sale," David Bordwell takes on the new (tidal) wave of comic-book and superhero movies, examines their historical reputation, their development, reasons for their popularity, critical attitudes and misconceptions, comic-book acting styles...

First -- well, first go read it. DB says he came away from both "Iron Man" and "The Dark Knight" "bored and depressed. I'm also asking questions":

As I was leaving a matinee of "The Dark Knight" this week, I heard a little kid behind me say, "Well, we know there's gonna be a third one." This kid looked to me like he was 8 or 9 years old -- maybe even younger. And he unmistakably felt the "Empire Strikes Back" cliffhanger vibe that concludes the second in this series of Batman movies. The Joker is left suspended in mid-air (though, sadly, he won't be back), Commissioner Gordon gives a big speech over the closing montage about the importance of the heroes we need (and the ones we deserve), and Batman rides off into the dark night. The movie does have an ending but it's still an open-ended ending.

Of course, a serial cliffhanger is one thing, but the strategy of some movies is to deny us the satisfaction of resolution...

“…the fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our photographs but in ourselves…”

-- Errol Morris, paraphrasing Shakespeare, in a footnote to an October 4, 2007, New York Times Zoom column about a pair of Roger Fenton Crimean War photos

* * * *

Errol Morris's new film, "Standard Operating Procedure," is not about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. It is about the photographs themselves, and what went on in and around them, before, during and after they were taken. Perhaps the most baffling question surrounding them is why they were taken at all.

The film reflects Morris's desire to make another "investigative film" in the vein of "The Thin Blue Line." "I think of the film as a nonfiction horror movie," he says in a Q&A on the official web site. The imagery is designed to take the viewer into the moment the photographs were taken, as well as to evoke the nightmarish, hallucinatory quality of Abu Ghraib."

Although I'm still reeling from the shocking revelation that David Mamet once considered himself a liberal ("David Mamet says he is not a brain-dead liberal anymore"), I find myself looking forward to his next (screen-)play more than ever, if only to see if I can detect an interest in ideological politics that I never noticed in his work before.

The week of his much-publicized announcement, history presented him with a perfect subject for a future writing project: the collapse of the investment banking film Bear Stearns and the last-minute bailout by the Federal Reserve, allowing it to merge with JP Morgan Chase. What a dilemma for free-marketeers! This could make for great drama in Mamet's hands. Imagine a "Glengarry Glen Ross" in which Mitch and Murray are rescued from bankruptcy by the intervention of the federal government.

Mamet writes: "...a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism."

And: "[William Allen] White knew that people need both to get ahead and to get along, and that they're always working at one or the other, and that government should most probably stay out of the way and let them get on with it."

And: "... I began to question my hatred for 'the Corporations'—the hatred of which, I found, was but the flip side of my hunger for those goods and services they provide and without which we could not live."

UPDATED: Three more trailers (1997 & 2008) added below for comparison.

When Michael Haneke's movie-star remake of his own "Funny Games" opens Friday, he claims it will pose a direct challenge to American audiences. (In my review, which will appear that day, I call his bluff and propose a few counter-challenges in the same spirit. Two -- or more -- can play at this funny game!)

If you've seen the 1997 version, you've pretty much seen the English language one, because it's virtually a shot-for-shot recreation. Here, from the studio press kit, is what Haneke (whose "Code Unknown" and "Caché" I consider to be masterpieces) has to say about what he's trying to do with "Funny Games":

"I’m trying to find ways to show violence as it really is: it is not something that you can swallow. I want to show the reality of violence, the pain, the wounding of another human being....

"Recently a friend and critic who recently watched 'Funny Games' said to me 'now the film is where it belongs.' He is right. When I first envisioned 'Funny Games' in the middle of the 90s, it was my intention to have an American audience watch the movie. It is a reaction to a certain American Cinema, its violence, its naïveté, the way American Cinema toys with human beings. In many American films violence is made consumable....

One of these days
I'm gonna play it black
Play it black
One of these days...
-- misquoted Elvis Costello song from "My Aim is True"

What will the Jim Crow "one-droppers" who didn't think Angelina Jolie was "African enough" to play Dutch-Jewish / Cuban-black-Hispanic-Chinese Mariane Pearl make of this? The actor in the center of the accompanying image is Robert Downey Jr., a white German-Scottish / Irish-Jewish actor. He's playing a white actor who is cast in a part originally written for a black actor, so he decides to play it black. The movie, "Tropic Thunder," is a satire of Hollywood actors making an epic war movie. It's directed by Stiller, co-written by Etan Cohen ("Idiocracy," "My Wife is Retarded" -- note that the "h" is not in the first name but the last; he's no relation to Joel) and Justin Theroux (who played a director in "Mulholland Dr." and an actor in "Inland Empire"). Nick Nolte, Jay Baruchel and Steve Coogan also star -- along with some big names in cameo appearances.

As Downey told Entertainment Weekly, "If it's done right, it could be the type of role you called Peter Sellers to do 35 years ago. If you don't do it right, we're going to hell." [...]

"We need to examine the history of blacks in film to appreciate their deep roots.... Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy, the top comedy stars of the 80s, have a strange, subversive ancestor in Stepin Fetchit, America's first black millionaire actor."
-- Richard Corliss, Time, "The 25 Most Important Films on Race"

See: "Stepin Fetchit to Denzel Washington (Part I )"

"Stepin Fetchit, then and now" by Jim Emerson (2005)

* * *

The day Clarence Thomas was nominated by George H.W. Bush for the Supreme Court, I was interviewing 23-year-old writer-director John Singleton about his upcoming movie "Boyz N the Hood" (1991). Singleton was sitting in front of a hotel-room TV tuned to CNN and the first words out of his mouth were: "He's the biggest Uncle Tom."

That memory came back again recently as I was reading Harvard Law Professor and Supreme Court bar member Randall Kennedy's book, "Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal." [1] Kennedy writes:

Sometimes "Uncle Tom" is used interchangeably with "sellout." In a Washington Post profile of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, two journalists write that "Uncle Tom is among the most searing insults a black American can hurl at a member of his own race." They describe "Uncle Tom" as a "synonym for sellout, someone subservient to whites at the expense of his own people."

This usage is ironic. The original Uncle Tom -- Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom -- was a character who chose death at the hand of his notorious owner, Simon Legree, rather than reveal the whereabouts of runaway slaves. Still there are those who use "Uncle Tom" to refer to any black whose actions, in their view, retard African-American advancement. Others are more discriminating. For many of them, the label "sellout" is more damning than "Uncle Tom" or kindred epithets -- "Aunt Thomasina," "Oreo," "snowflake," "handkerchief head," "white man's Negro," "Stepin Fetchit"....

Of course, all those terms aren't synonymous, either. The name of Stepin Fetchit is nearly as well-known, and almost synonymous with "Uncle Tom" -- and that, too, may be somewhat ironic. Fetchit (born Lincoln Perry, 1902-1985) was a tremendously popular movie star with black and white audiences. But his act, on stage and screen, was also vilified for perpetuating a stereotype of African-American men as lazy, shuffling, bowing and scraping buffoon. (Other stereotypes of black men as pimps, gangstas, rapists, con artists, drug pushers/addicts, violent criminals, woman-abusers would come from elsewhere, and long outlive him.) He was admired and in many ways emulated by Muhammad Ali, with whom he converted to the Nation of Islam, and he was honored with an NAACP Image Award in 1976.

But how many people today have actually seen him in a movie?

Regarding issues raised by Brian De Palma and "Redacted" (see below): Here are two frame grab from Woody Allen's 1980 feature "Stardust Memories," a United Artists release. The movie is a Felliniesque comedy (it starts right off as a parody of "8 1/2"), not a documentary. The blown-up image on the wall was taken a dozen years before "Stardust Memories" (February 1, 1968) during the Tet Offensive by Associated Press photographer Eddie Adams in Saigon.

The man with the gun is South Vietnamese National Police Chief General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan. The man in the plaid shirt, who is or is about to be shot in the head (his death is shown in NBC News footage taken at the same time), is thought to be Nguyễn Văn Lém (or possibly Le Cong Na), and was either a Viet Cong officer or a political operative. His face was disfigured because he had been beaten. The title of the photo, which became instantly famous around the world, is "General Nguyen Ngoc Loan Executing a Viet Cong Prisoner in Saigon" and it won a Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography in 1969. It was widely reprinted and was used as a symbolic image by the anti-war movement.

Adams later wrote in Time magazine:

The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths... What the photograph didn't say was, 'What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American soldiers?'

Although a number of "galleries and artists" are acknowledged in the end credits of "Stardust Memories" for the use of photos and artworks in the film, the source for this picture is not cited. The film does contain a standard disclaimer, reading: "The story, all names, characters and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. No identification with actual persons is intended or should be inferred."

Edward Copeland, mastermind and organizer of the online ""Best" non-English language films poll, reports that Danny Leigh at the film blog at The Guardian (UK) is wondering about our motives ("The view: Is Hollywood America?"):

Naturally it's nice to see this kind of attention lavished on some of history's finest yet lately neglected films; but between Copeland's poll (coming after The Guardian's similar exercise earlier in the year) and the surging popularity of foreign movies in the UK, I can't help wondering how much of the current enthusiasm for what was once known as world cinema is purely that - and how much a rejection of Hollywood at a time when the wider America is so reviled. In other words, is George Bush responsible in some odd tangential way for the rediscovery of Jean Renoir and Fassbinder?

If so, it's clearly a phenomenon with differing degrees of enmity; few US bloggers are likely to share the anti-Americanism of many British audiences. And yet in both cases there may be an underlying notion of Hollywood as a tool of a cultural imperialism that, however murkily, reflects the actual imperialism of US foreign policy. Follow that logic far enough and Hollywood flicks aren't just dopey time-killers - but sermons straight from the bully pulpit.

I see his angle regarding Hollywood hegemony, but to attribute anti-American (or, rather, anti-Bush) motives to this particular project is stretching things quite a bit.

When it comes to Hollywood movies, I thought we had the British (Robin Wood, Raymond Durgnat) and the French (the Cahiers du Cinema crowd) to thank for originally helping us see the artistic worth of American studio pictures once dismissed as "dopey time-killers."

On the other hand, according to the incessant drumbeat of Fox and the rest of the far-right media, "Hollywood" is America's greatest enemy (since Ronald Reagan left town, anyway) -- especially its outspoken movie stars and Jewish singers! Their favorite targets are Sean Penn, Alec Baldwin, George Clooney, Barbara Streisand... So, in this climate, if we really wanted to appear "anti-American" (by their definition) wouldn't we actually align ourselves with "Hollywood"?

But this effort to showcase films that aren't in our native tongue (including non-British films, if you want to put it that way) has nothing to do with contemporary politics. It has to do with looking beyond the English-speaking film-world to... the rest of the world and the diversity of movies beyond the five government-selected nominees for the annual Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, and the like.

There's a movie moment for nearly every occasion in life. Take this one from Harold Meyerson -- arguing against impeachment (of Bush and Cheney, anyway) in a cover story in The American Prospect:

You may recall the scene in Clint Eastwood's 1992 Western "Unforgiven" where Eastwood's character levels his gun at Gene Hackman's malevolent sheriff, whom he is about to dispatch to hell's lower depths. "I don't deserve this," Hackman protests. "Deserve's got nothin' to do with it," Eastwood replies, and pulls the trigger.

And that -- a touch overstated, I'll admit -- is pretty much my position on impeachment. Does George W. Bush deserve to be impeached? Absolutely. Problem is, that doesn't resolve the question of whether trying to impeach Bush (and, necessarily, Dick Cheney, too) is a good idea.... "Deserve" does have something to do with it, but not enough to carry the day. At least, not this day. [...]

Two gay icons in a network TV musical number celebrating illicit drug use. The "Anything Goes" of the 1970s. Have times changed, do you think?

(Than kyew to Dina Martina.)

In the discussion about my hypothetical Athiest Film Festival (before the deaths of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni), I was trying to get at the difference I see between Bergman's theological sensibility (seeing/defining the world in terms of man's relationship with god, even if that relationship involves god's silence, indifference, death or nonexistence) and a view in which god is not only not a default position, but not even a question. This, I think, is closer to Antonioni's aesthetic and philosophical outlook, at least as far as his films express it.

There's an excellent, and long overdue, article in the New York Times Magazine today ("The Politics of God"), which is primarily about how the West has (catastrophically?) failed to comprehend that, even in modern times, "theological ideas still stir up messianic passions, leaving societies in ruin. We had assumed this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, that fanaticism was dead. We were wrong."

The piece, by Columbia University humanities Professor Mark Lilla, is adapted from his upcoming book "The Stillborn God: Religion Politics and the Modern West," but the passage that got me thinking about the Atheist Film Festival (and the "Banana as Atheist's Nightmare") again was this one:

Theology is, after all, a set of reasons people give themselves for the way things are and the way they ought to be....

Imagine human beings who first become aware of themselves in a world not of their own making. Their world has unknown origins and behaves in a regular fashion, so they wonder why that is. They know that the things they themselves fashion behave in a predictable manner because they conceive and construct them with some end in mind. They stretch the bow, the arrow flies; that is why they were made. So, by analogy, it is not difficult for them to assume that the cosmic order was constructed for a purpose, reflecting its maker’s will. By following this analogy, they begin to have ideas about that maker, about his intentions and therefore about his personality.

In taking these few short steps, the human mind finds itself confronted with a picture, a theological image in which God, man and world form a divine nexus. Believers have reasons for thinking that they live in this nexus, just as they have reasons for assuming that it offers guidance for political life. But how that guidance is to be understood, and whether believers think it is authoritative, will depend on how they imagine God. If God is thought to be passive, a silent force like the sky, nothing in particular may follow. He is a hypothesis we can do without. But if we take seriously the thought that God is a person with intentions, and that the cosmic order is a result of those intentions, then a great deal can follow. The intentions of such a God reveal something man cannot fully know on his own. This revelation then becomes the source of his authority, over nature and over us, and we have no choice but to obey him and see that his plans are carried out on earth....

My question is: By what authority does anyone claim to know, and be able to interpret, the intentions of such a God? It's always puzzled me how many leaps of faith a person has to take before even getting to the idea of a deity... which may be one reason why, if I had to compare, I'd have to say Antonioni's films do speak to me more deeply and personally than Bergman's.

(Of course, when it comes to movies, you can usually just substitute the term "auteur" for "God" in that quotation above.)

See Martin Scorsese's eloquent appreciation of Antonioni for more...

I'm still on vacation. Back Thursday with some thoughts on Martin Scorsese, the late Tony Wilson and Merv Griffin, Michelangelo Antonioni (surprise!), video games, the Meaning of Life, and more. In the meantime, here's what in any rational world would be a shocking clip (if the country wasn't already so jaded by nearly seven years of malfeasance), from a man with (evidently) unimpeachable integrity:

Elizabeth Edwards says this in a Salon interview:

Ignoring the fact that she exists doesn't make her go away. If it did, you wouldn't hear me utter her name. So I think maybe the better thing to do is simply confront people like her. Are you going to stop them? Under no circumstances will you stop them. But maybe you empower other people to stand up, and maybe that has an effect. When I travel, so many older people thank me for what I did. Because the vile kind of way [she] thinks and talks, that was not ever part of the public discourse until recently. [...]

And later on, I talked to somebody, not an advisor -- I really don't have anybody advising me -- and not someone in the campaign. She'd been in a previous campaign, and she said, "Oh, I wouldn't have done that. I think that you put yourself at risk, subject to criticism unnecessarily." I understand the advice -- if you were advising somebody you might say that -- but that exact attitude is what protects somebody like [her]. Nobody wants to jump in the mud puddle with her.

Gosh, I wonder what Edwards could be talking about...?

The term "moral relativism" (or "moral equivalence") has always fascinated me because of its slipperiness -- its moral relativism, if you will. The way the term is used in politics these days (by Israelis and Palestinians, conservatives and liberals, Christians and Muslims, and so on), it can mean one thing or its opposite, depending on who's using it and what they're trying to justify.

What it boils down to, in popular rhetorical discourse, is the moral equivalent of a five-year-old's finger-pointing: "But they started it!" and "What they did was worse!" This creates an inescapable and illogical ideological loop, wherein each new assault is justified by a previous one (or fear of a future one) that attempts to even the score but never, ever does, since it is always used to rationalize the next reprisal. It's always a matter of "self-defense" in the minds of the perpetrators.*

This ever-escalating tit-for-tat is, in fact, moral relativism at its most insidious, because it posits that there is no objective right or wrong. Something is considered moral or immoral depending on who does it and when, rather than on the nature of the act itself and its consequences -- whether unintended ones, or the intended kind that pave the road to hell.

Judea Pearl, the father of Daniel Pearl, has an essay at The New Republic website ("Moral relativism and 'A Mighty Heart'") in which he recalls a conversation with a Pakistani friend who said "he loathed people like President Bush who insisted on dividing the world into 'us' and 'them.' My friend, of course, was taking an innocent stand against intolerance, and did not realize that, in so doing, he was in fact dividing the world into 'us' and 'them,' falling straight into the camp of people he loathed."

In other words, if there's one thing I can't tolerate, it's intolerance.

In A.O. Scott's review of "Knocked Up" in the New York Times, he expressed admiration for "a funny, knowing riff on the reluctance of movies and television shows even to use the word 'abortion.'" I thought that was one of the most brilliant bits in the movie, and not just because it emphasized the entertainment industry's squeamishness about the "a-word," but because it also captured men's unwillingness to interfere with (or face up to) "a woman's right to choose," and the way abortion has been swept under the carpet by the new right-wing Political Correctness. No longer is abortion considered a difficult and regrettable personal choice; the new PC has restored the shame and guilt from the old Scarlet Letter days of back alleys and coat hangers. That's one of the things I think "Knocked Up" was satirizing: Don't mention abortion! (The Bush administration cuts funding to any family planning counseling facility, in Africa and elsewhere, that acknowledges abortion as an option for women.)

In the Genuine Canadian Magazine (says so right on the cover) cinema scope, Associate Editor Jessica Winter offers this take:

As funny and endearing as Judd Apatow’s proudly vulgar new comedy can be, it may give the viewer nostalgia for the sequence in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" (1982) when Jennifer Jason Leigh falls pregnant by a guy she shouldn’t be with, promptly gets an abortion, and rides back from the clinic with her brother, who takes her out for a cheeseburger. And that’s it: no apparent self-torment, no post-facto breakdown, no further discussion. Twenty-five years later—plus a nationwide swing to the right, the founding of Operation Rescue, and that deathless Ben Folds Five song—"Knocked Up" presents us with a similarly unpromising scenario: smart twentysomething who just got a big career break has inadvertently fruitful one-night stand with unemployed shlub. Yet in this case, abortion is only briefly suggested by third parties and dismissed out of hand. That’s not to say that the outcome is unrealistic: When Allison (Katherine Heigl) bursts into tears at the sight of the heartbeat on the sonogram, it’s obvious that ending the pregnancy simply isn’t an option for her—just as bearing a child simply isn’t an option for Leigh’s teenage character in "Fast Times." Still, when the closest a movie like Knocked Up comes to even saying the word is “rhymes with shmashmortion,” it’s clear that we’re considering less a depiction of life as actual people live it but rather a pop-culture product that embodies the squeamish contradictions of the mainstream moment a little too accurately. This is a movie, after all, in which Allison always has sex with her bra on but we get an extreme close-up of the baby’s head inching through Mom’s conspicuously bald vagina. Who knew the miracle of childbirth could be liberated from the dark shame of pubic hair?

Winter says that we can "blame the MPAA" for the missing pubic hair.

How will the movies handle -- or avoid mentioning -- abortion once the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, I wonder?

"A Mighty Heart," Michael Winterbottom's film based on Mariane van Neyenhoff Pearl's book about her husband Daniel, a journalist who was kidnapped and executed in Karachi, Pakistan, opens this weekend. I've had my say about the casting of (Czech / Haudenosaunee / American) Angelina Jolie as (Dutch / Cuban / French) Mariane Pearl. And so has Mariane Pearl, who told Newsweek: "This is not about skin color. I wanted her to play me because I trust her. Aren't we past this?"

Well, some people are. And some aren't. Like, I guess, the people who hired Halle Berry to play white Nevada schoolteacher Tierney Cahill in the upcoming "Class Act." (Berry's at least as much white as she is black. But will she wear "whiteface" in the movie? Do you care?) Or, perhaps, the ones who hired John Travolta to play a woman in "Hairspray." Or even those who think it was just wrong for Marriane Pearl to have married a white Jew in the first place. (Miscegenation!) Let's take that logic to its inevitable extreme. Some people are sticklers for racial, cultural and gender purity. If only race, culture and gender were really that monolithic and clear-cut...

And we're talking about actors here. I'm not advocating blackface or whiteface minstrelsy (that implies bad acting, doesn't it?), but these people are supposed to be able to play characters other than themselves. That's what they do.

Maybe Jolie is terrible and totally miscast in the part. I don't know, I haven't seen the movie yet. But a commenter at the site concreteloop.com succinctly summarizes my own feelings about the matter at this stage:

At first it does seem a bit odd, because I am sure there are women of African American or Afro-Cuban descent who could play that role but I would not say this is modern day black-face. If it were some blond-hair, blue-eyed non-talented actress, I would really have a problem. However, I do think Angelina is a great actress and as a matter of fact Mariane Pearl wanted Angelina to portray her in the film. So shouldn’t her wishes be respected?

Producer Brad Pitt, who hired his honey for the part, said he was nervous about doing it, but he felt it was the right decision for the movie: "I knew the part had to be played by someone with Mariane's strength and understanding of the world, but I didn't know how to broach the subject. It feels a little like Wolfowitz trying to get his girlfriend a job. [...]

"I know that people are frustrated at the lack of great roles (for people of color), but I think they've picked the wrong example here."

I guess it also depends not only on whether you think Mariane Pearl has a (moral? contractual?) right to approve who plays her in a movie made from her own book, but whether you consider Angelina Jolie an actress or just "Brad's girlfriend" -- you know, half of "Brangelina." (Or even whether women are capable of making such important judgments, since those who cry "racism" here insist that Jolie and Pearl do not have the personal or professional credibility or authority to make such decisions for themselves.)

And whether you consider the fact that both share Northern European / Caucasian heritage. Much of the criticism I've seen has focused on the tabloid "Brangelina" phenomenon (as if that were real anywhere beyond the supermarket checkstands), or has tried to tie this casting into the history of racist portrayals of African-Americans in Hollywood movies. (In that regard, I recommend Donald Bogle's book, "Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies & Bucks.") But is that really an appropriate conclusion to draw in this particular instance?

I agree that actors of color should be offered more and better roles -- including those that weren't originally written to be one race or another. (Sigourney Weaver played a man's role in "The TV Set" without changing a word. Other parts have been re-written for the actor selected for the part.) But is the problem really one of casting people with the same racial make-up as their characters? Or is it more significant that writers and directors and casting directors are not making films with enough characters of color?

On the practical side... well, a star is a star. Angelina Jolie and Halle Berry are Oscar winners, marquee names, not struggling unknowns. (Not that struggling unknowns or semi-knowns don't deserve a chance, but they're unlikely to get one in such a high-profile project.) Mariane Pearl wanted Angelina Jolie to play her, sought her out, and sold the rights to Brad Pitt's production company. Based on this "package," the film was able to get a greenlight from Paramount Vantage, with the expectation that they would make a profit. The question becomes: Is the only form of "good casting" to make sure the racial balance of the character matches that of the actor?

Is Beyonce really too light -- or too dark -- to have played a character based on Diana Ross in "Dreamgirls"? Is Denzel Washington really too dark to have played light-skinned, reddish-haired Malcolm X? Was it racist to have cast Chinese actress Gong Li as a Japanese woman in "Memoirs of a Geisha"? Were Al Pacino -- or Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio or Robert Loggia -- terrible in "Scarface" (1983) because they are not Cuban? Was it wrong for Benecio Del Toro (Puerto Rican-American) to play a Mexican cop in "Traffic"? If these actors were good or bad in those movies, was it because of their racial background, or because of the roles and their performances in them?

I wonder what happened to a sense of proportion here. This isn't exactly Mickey Rooney playing a grotesque caricature of a Chinese guy in "Breakfast at Tiffany's." Doesn't the performance itself count for anything -- or is it all about appearances? (OK, if Jennifer Aniston had been cast as Pearl, I'd be a lot more skeptical. Even though she's only two years younger than Pearl, while Jolie is seven years younger. But if Jolie is playing Pearl in 2001-2002, then she's just about the perfect age, no?)

Judd Apatow's "Knocked Up" ought to be the most-discussed (and argument-generating) movie of the year so far -- which means it's uncommonly smart and subversive and disturbing (and funny), especially for a summer sex comedy. I happen to think Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann, as Pete and Debbie, the bitter and resentful married couple with kids (Mann is Apatow's wife, and the kids in the movie are theirs) are the funniest characters/actors in the picture (and Kristen Wiig: amazing), mainly because their material, and their performances, are so painfully true that it's not funny. Which is what makes it so funny. It helps that all three are top-flight actors with a gift for uncanny understatement. Sometimes you don't even know if the scene is funny or not (like Debbie's suburban ambush of Pete) -- and those are inevitably the most revealing and rewarding kinds of laughs, when you surprise yourself by laughing at how awful and truthful the characters are behaving.

Anyway, I've found that some women don't like the movie, for sex-specific reasons I hope to discuss at length in the near future. Let me offer a few examples now from reviews that I think "get" "Knocked Up" -- and not from my usual suspects, either.

Anthony Lane, The New Yorker:

One night, Ben [Seth Rogen] goes to a bar, picks up a girl, and goes to bed with her. Both are drunk at the time, and both, in consequence, throw up: Ben the next morning (“I just yakked,” he says winningly over breakfast), and the girl—who is no girl but a young woman named Alison (Katherine Heigl), with a growing career on television—some weeks later, into a trash can at work. Here comes the bit that will divide Apatow’s audience and (he hopes) get them arguing over the movie: Alison decides to inform the father and, little by little, to enfold him and his oafish, froggy grin in the gentle business of parenting. Call it the taming of the Shrek. Most women, I imagine, will scoff with incredulity: this is neither a last hurrah (Alison is still in her twenties) nor the ideal time (she has a good job), and Ben is the last slob on earth she would have chosen. Most men, meanwhile, will be too busy watching through their fingers. To them, this is “The Omen.”

What's interesting about this paragraph is that it's slightly wrong. We go to the bar with the women, not the men. The gals are swept inside (even though Mann's character is really too old to be there), while we catch a glimpse of Ben and his geek buddies near the front of the line. They've probably been standing out there for hours. (This doorman scene will pay off later -- though I think it's the weakest in the movie.)

My first reaction to the Ben-Alison match was that she would never want to see him again after their one-night stand. But, like so many women, Alison is someone who falls in love with a guy for who she wants him to be, not for who he really is. (She doesn't even know who he is -- and vice-versa.) At the point where she (improbably) lets him back into her life, it's because she now views him as "the father of her child" (which, in her view though not our society's, gives him some marginal rights) and as Pete and Debbie indicate cynically at the breakfast table in front of the kids, men and women who are in love get married and have babies. Or men and women who have babies get married and fall in love. Or something like that. Alison wants to be in love with the father of her child (their child, she insists), so she is determined to make herself believe that's the case, even when it isn't, because that's the way it should be. And maybe she can even make him believe it.

From a 2003 interview with Toby Young, celeb interviewer, memoirist and author of "How to Lose Friends and Alienate People":

"I have this idea for a dystopian satire. It's set in the immediate future, and it's going to be about the moment when ordinary Americans turn on the celebrity class. There's going to be a sort of French Revolutionary-style bloodbath where A-list celebrities are strung up from lampposts and lynched on street corners. The storming-the-Bastille moment is going to be when the looky-loos outside the 2023 Academy Awards kind of break through into the Kodak Theater and start lynching A-list movie stars on live TV." (Only 15 minutes 'til the first VF Oscar party reference, I note.)

"And it sets off a chain reaction across the United States," he continues, leaning in, conspiratorially. "And there's a scarlet pimpernel figure, who's kind of a second rate English talent agent based in Los Angeles, and in the pre-revolutionary era, he couldn't get anyone to return his calls. But in the post-revolutionary era, he figures out a way to get celebrities to safety. And the way he does that is, the only country where celebrities are still safe is Britain, because they're such craven starfuckers that the revolution doesn't actually affect them. And the way he smuggle celebrities out of Los Angeles is by disguising them as flight attendants on Virgin Atlantic. They occasionally get spotted. They get rumbles in mid-air and tossed off the plane. I need to come up with the right word to describe this celebrity apocalypse. If I can come up with the right word, I'll be in business. My father wrote a similar book in the 1950s called 'The Rise of the Meritocracy,' which is about a bloody revolution in which a kind of meritocratic overclass overcame and coined the term 'meritocracy.' I want to coin a similar word to describe a society in which celebrities are the kind of governing class."

Don't we already live in a celebritocracy? Not in the sense that the National Inquirer and the Star and People and Vanity Fair and cable news continue to inflate the importance of celebrities (including wannabes from the media like Anna Wintour or Graydon Carter or A-- C------). That kind of thing has been going on for a long time.

What I'm fascinated by is the insistence by some of the media entertainers (from Sean Hannity to Wolf Blitzer) that the lives and political views of celebrities really are as important as those of elected officials! It's just amazing. Quote from a reader at Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish blog:

... [T]he actor Alec Baldwin was on a radio show in NYC a short time ago when conservative radio hosts Sean Hannity and Marc Levin called in to hurl insults against him. During the course of the 7-minute battle, Levin, out of nowhere, suddenly seeks to mock Baldwin as "Brokeback Alec."

Which, when you think of it, makes no sense. You can love or hate Alec Baldwin. But to hurl the epithet "Brokeback Alec" at him – at an actor who was married to, and had children with Kim Basinger, who has had any number of relationships with any number of starlets -- to call him "Brokeback Alec" is as nutty, as counterintuitive and just plain silly, as to hurl that ["faggot"] epithet against Edwards!

[Sullivan responds]: Mark Levin anti-gay? I listened to the exchange. Levin called Baldwin a "butt-boy" as well as "Brokeback Alec."

This is hilarious! Well, OK, pathetic. But it reveals the priorities and reasoning abilities of lightweights like Hannity and Levin when they feel they have to call in to a talk show to hurl nonsensical names at an actor. (BTW, "30 Rock" is really funny most of the time. It's a TV sitcom. Starring Alec Baldwin. I hope Hannity and Levin will call in to randomly question Jim Belushi's sexuality the next time he does promotion for "According to Jim." Then they can go on Ellen DeGeneres's show and accuse her of having a hankering for man-flesh!)

What Hannity and Levin and other celebritalkers don't get is that they themselves are just celebrities, famous for being on TV or radio. (And, I suspect, some acting talent.) If Toby Young's "revolution" ever comes about, they'll be the first ones to go -- not because they're "A-list" (they're certainly not), but because, like Paris Hillton or Zsa Zsa Gabor, they're famous just for being famous. They're at the bottom rung of celebrity along with reality TV personalities (maybe above William Hung but below Rob and Amber), yet their entire careers depend on them pretending to be serious ideologues. (Except for Rush Limbaugh, who admits to just being an "entertainer" who makes stuff up in character that he's not stupid enough to actually believe himself. Is that worse?)

"I mean, you got the first sorta mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and- and- and clean, and a nice lookin' guy. I mean, it's -- that's a storybook, man!"

or

"I mean, you got the first sorta mainstream African-American, who is articulate and bright and- and- and clean, and a nice lookin' guy. I mean, it's -- that's a storybook, man!"

What Joe Biden said of Barack Obama -- it all comes down to one li'l comma.

Or a pause that is the equivalent of a comma.

I guess I'm a little behind on this story. A Scanners reader (thanks again, Matthew!) posted a comment with this link from Language Log that gets into more detail about what Biden said (including an actual recorded excerpt of the interview, so you can hear for yourself) versus what the New York Observer reported he said. It's so interesting I thought it deserved a separate top-level post.

From Mark Lieberman at Language Log:

But there's also a linguistic and a journalistic point here. Senator Biden's word sequence corresponds to two different sentences with very different meanings, and the Observer misquoted him by omitting the comma.

I don't know whether the Observer misrepresented Biden's statement out of ignorance, carelessness, or malice. Maybe [reporter Jason] Horowitz and his editors don't know the difference between the two types of relative clauses; maybe they didn't bother to think about the difference in interpretation in this case; or maybe they know the difference in general, thought about it in this case, and decided that it would make a better story to present the wrong version.

Again, let me emphasize that I do not know what Biden was thinking when he said what he said. As I wrote before, I'm sure that some people use "articulate" (intentionally or not) to express their mild surprise that some African-Americans have a command of the English language.

But having listened to the Biden interview excerpt, and considering the context of his remarks (sizing up his opponents for the Democratic presidential nomination), I agree with Lieberman that what Biden most likely meant was: Obama (the storybook political phenom behind "Obama-mania" -- a phrase that returns "about 105,000" results on Google) is the first African-American candidate who has a serious shot at the nomination because he is articulate and bright and clean and nice-looking. (I'm more disturbed by the word "clean," but I assume he's talking about the first-term senator's lack of negative baggage, not how often he showers. But I don't see how any of those adjectives in the second part of his sentence can be construed as prejudicial -- especially in politics. I welcome Joe Biden to say the same things about me, as long as he's sincere.)

In this context, if you can't describe a man like Senator Barack Obama, former president of the Harvard Law Review, as "articulate" (as in "Expressing oneself easily in clear and effective language: an articulate speaker"), then the word has no real-world meaning -- unless you honestly think Biden was attempting to point out that his fellow senator is "Endowed with the power of speech." Look: With Obama in the race, Biden doesn't have a chance at the nomination, anyway. I would love for Obama to be our next president. How refreshing it would be to have someone in the White House who expresses himself easily in clear and effective language. Or who knows how to pronounce "nuclear." Or who knows the difference between "dissemble" and "dissasemble"...

"I know what I believe. I will continue to articulate what I believe and what I believe — I believe what I believe is right." — President George W. Bush, Rome, Italy, July 22, 2001

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.

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?

I love Sarah Silverman and A.O. Scott all the more for this, from today's New York Times:

While most actors are reluctant to discuss critics’ opinions of them, Ms. Silverman addresses them head on, particularly a 2005 review of “Jesus Is Magic” by A. O. Scott, a film critic for The New York Times.

“It totally hurt my feelings and was like a kick in the stomach,” but, she said, she found it fascinating.

In the review Mr. Scott said her act was “the latest evidence that mocking political correctness has become a form of political correctness in its own right.”

“She depends on the assumption that only someone secure in his or her own lack of racism would dare to make, or to laugh at, a racist joke, the telling of which thus becomes a way of making fun simultaneously of racism and of racial hypersensitivity,” he wrote. In short, he added, “naughty as she may seem, she’s playing it safe.”

Ms. Silverman said the review articulated a point that she had felt, but had been struggling to express. “That was something that always festered in the back of my mind that I never talked about,” she said. Her crowds are usually liberal ones, “and we know we’re not racist,” she said. “But the whiter the crowd, the more that kind of voice in the back of my head comes toward the front, and I feel grosser doing that kind of stuff.”

“At the very least, it’s made me assess the choir,” she continued. “Context is everything, and I don’t think he would be pondering all that stuff if I was doing the material in front of an all-black crowd or a very mixed crowd,” which, she said, she regularly does.

Still, she added, she is reassessing at least part of her work.

“It was rebellious to be politically incorrect now and in the past couple of years,” she said. “But I don’t know how rebellious it will be when everybody has that point of view. It becomes hackneyed and it becomes irrelevant and it turns into something else.”

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.

The inevitable backlash to liberal PC came in the form of the right-wing, talk-radio rebellion, in which uppity women were "feminazis" and liberals were "terrorist sympathizers" (even when they were too timid and spineless to oppose the administration's foreign policy blunders, which, ironically, flagrantly violated traditional conservative principles). Fox News took the talk-radio attitude mainstream, appealing to its viewers' PC biases so that it appeared, at least to the network's partisans, "fair and balanced." (If somebody already sees the world in black and white, and you show them a black and white image, they won't notice it's not in color.)

Anyway, even though I was a fan of Silverman's "Jesus Is Magic," I appreciate Scott's warning about where this is all going in the era of so-called "'South Park' Republicans." And I admire Silverman for questioning her own (and her audiences') underlying assumptions, as well.

“It’s now fundamentally an information fight. The enemy gets that, and we don’t yet get that, and I think that’s why we’re losing.�?
-- David Kilcullen

In "Knowing the Enemy," an essential article in the December 18 issue of The New Yorker, George Packer reports that some experts inside the Pentagon and Departments of State and Defense have been trying for years to explain (to Condoleeza Rice and others) why the US has yet to properly identify the enemies it's fighting in the "War on Terrorism" -- and, therefore, why we have been so shockingly ineffective at fighting it. As David Kilcullen, an Australian lieutenant colonel and political anthropologist currently "on loan" to the State Depatment, explains: "After 9/11, when a lot of people were saying, ‘The problem is Islam,’ I was thinking, It’s something deeper than that. It’s about human social networks and the way that they operate.... [I]t's not about theology. There are elements in human psychological and social makeup that drive what’s happening. The Islamic bit is secondary. This is human behavior in an Islamic setting. This is not ‘Islamic behavior.’"

Packer reports:

In a lecture that Kilcullen teaches on counterterrorism at Johns Hopkins, his students watch “Fight Club,�? the 1999 satire about anti-capitalist terrorists, to see a radical ideology without an Islamic face.

That, I submit, is revelatory. I wonder if those who can't see what's going on in "Fight Club" -- the feelings of impotence and alienation and personal violation that fuel the rage and the desire to belong to a force larger than the individual, even if it's just a form of nihilistic fascism that lacks the religious, racial or nationalistic aspirations of Naziism, Soviet Communism or "Bin Laden-ism" (for lack of a better term) -- can even begin to comprehend contemporary jihadism and what we now call "the insurgency" (as if there were just one).

Just as the Bush administration misunderstood Saddam's motives (Why is he acting like he's hiding something? Is it because he's hiding WMD -- or because he knows he'd be gone in a second if anybody knew he didn't have them?), they have also misread the nature of Osama bin Laden's motives, power and strategy for Al Quaeda and global jihad:

Just before the 2004 American elections, Kilcullen was doing intelligence work for the Australian government, sifting through Osama bin Laden’s public statements, including transcripts of a video that offered a list of grievances against America: Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, global warming. The last item brought Kilcullen up short. “I thought, Hang on! What kind of jihadist are you?�? he recalled. The odd inclusion of environmentalist rhetoric, he said, made clear that “this wasn’t a list of genuine grievances. This was an Al Qaeda information strategy.�? Ron Suskind, in his book “The One Percent Doctrine,�? claims that analysts at the C.I.A. watched a similar video, released in 2004, and concluded that “bin Laden’s message was clearly designed to assist the President’s reëlection.�? Bin Laden shrewdly created an implicit association between Al Qaeda and the Democratic Party, for he had come to feel that Bush’s strategy in the war on terror was sustaining his own global importance. Indeed, in the years after September 11th Al Qaeda’s core leadership had become a propaganda hub. “If bin Laden didn’t have access to global media, satellite communications, and the Internet, he’d just be a cranky guy in a cave,�? Kilcullen said.

Kilcullen would make a good film critic. He understands human nature and has an eye for reading it in dramatic context. Thumbs up for him! (Bin Laden hadn't been a champion for the Palestinian cause before, either. It was obvious he was trying to create the perception of a war declared by the West against Muslims -- and Cheney, Rummy and Co. played right into that perception from Day One.)

Jagshemash! If you are confused about the difference between the fictional Kazakhstan, homeland of Borat Sagdiyev, as portrayed in "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan" and the former Soviet Socialist Republic in Central Asia, why not visit the Official Web Site of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Kazakhstan? Here you will find a FAQ (Truth About Kazakhstan) and other helpful resources, from which you will learn that potassium is not even listed among Kazakhstan's major exports:

Kazakhstan possesses 30 per cent of the world’s proven resources of chromium, 25 per cent of manganese, 19 per cent of lead, 13 per cent of zinc, 10 per cent of copper and 10 per cent of iron. Kazakhstan also possesses about 20 per cent of the world’s uranium resources, with plans to become among the world’s top producers, and contains Central Asia’s largest recoverable coal reserves.

Also, if you like America but are confused by the portrayal of the fictional one in "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan," you can visit the Official America Web Site and learn about the land of Premier George Walter Bush, where you will discover that "Mainstream Media Reports Inaccurate." Also, there is this from Imperial Leader Bush: "We have a plan for victory in Iraq.... And I know the people of Montana can count on Conrad Burns to make sure our troops have all that is necessary to do the jobs I've asked them to do." This is the difference between the fiction America and the real one, if you can't tell. Conrad Burns from Big Sky Country will finally make sure our troops get what they need to do the job Bush has asked told them to do in Iraq! (And wasn't he the dad on "Diff'rent Strokes," too? Amazing fellow!)

The indignation over the BBC British speculative fiction film "Death of a President" has died down substantially since the film received its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. Some of those who were initially alarmed and offended and downright disgusted at the idea of a film about the assassination of an American president seem to have figured out that presidential assassination is not a novel idea, even in the movies. (I do not recall a storm of outrage after season two of "24," which ended with an attempt on the life of President David Palmer; nor after the beginning of season five last January, which began -- SPOILER ALERT -- with a depiction of his assassination far more explicit than anything in "Death of a President.")

The most shocking thing about the movie is portrayal of the essential truth: that George W. Bush, like his father before him during Iran-Contra, is out of the loop of history. He's a dupe, the "wimp factor" personified, and he serves only as a placeholder for the people who decided to put him in power, when he was still a pathetic nobody in Texas (the pathetic nobody he reveals himself to be every time he opens his mouth). Dubya is but a balloon with a cartoonish face painted on it. Sooner or later, the illusion will pop. By 2006, that news shouldn't be shocking to many people -- but as a perspective on history, it's still a little ahead of the curve.

For the literalists among us, however, it's all in a name. As long as the character's name is fictional (even if the office he holds is not), then the dramatization of the repercussions of a hypothetical assassination (in the case of "DoaP," set in the future: October, 2007) is OK. Just as it's apparently OK to use Robert F. Kennedy's death as an opportunity to turn the Ambassador Hotel into something like "Neil Simon's California Suite with Assassination" (in "Bobby") because, well, that murder actually happened. Right? Then there's Philip Roth's 2004 alternate history novel, "The Plot Against America," in which Charles Lindberg defeats FDR in the 1940 presidential election and turns the United States into an anti-Semitic isolationist dystopia. That one has been read as an allegory for the current Bush administration, too, but Roth used other real names instead of George W. Bush's. Meanwhile, "South Park" and "Team America: World Police" graphically kill off real public figures by name, but use cartoons or puppets (with realistic gore). And disaster and horror movies depict the destruction of entire real-life cities and landmarks, with thousands or even millions killed, without any serious intent, but just for entertainment.

I don't know what the fuss is about, except that it's provided people on the right and the left with an opportunity to profess disingenuous pseudo-patriotic horror (they are shocked, shocked!) that such a thing would be deemed a suitable subject for a motion picture, and it's a good thing the U.S. Constitution protects freedom of speech because this is in bad taste and going too far, blather, blather, blather... (These are the same people who think Borat lives in the real Kazakhstan.)

Either you understand the difference between fact and fiction -- whether the names are real or not -- or you don't. Here's what I wrote after the Toronto press screening of "Death of a President":

"Death of a President," the documentary-style speculative fiction about the assassination of the 43rd President of the United States, is seamless, intelligent and maybe even necessary to an understanding of George W. Bush's role in the world today, and his place in the wider scope of history. Especially when public awareness of the facts about his administration lags so far behind what has already been documented.

Written and directed by Gabriel Range, this very convincingly staged television "documentary" falls into a tradition of fictionalized British films (going back to Peter Watkins' famous "The War Game" and "Punishment Park" in the early 1960s) that use nonfiction techniques to explore contemporary social and political issues. Range himself made a film in 2003 called "The Day Britain Stopped," about what might happen if public transportation came to a standstill. Before that, he made "The Menendez Murders" (2002), described as another form of docu-drama.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has issued the following statement about "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan," which opens in the US November 3:

When approaching this film, one has to understand that there is absolutely no intent on the part of the filmmakers to offend, and no malevolence on the part of Sacha Baron Cohen, who is himself proudly Jewish. We hope that everyone who chooses to see the film understands Mr. Cohen's comedic technique, which is to use humor to unmask the absurd and irrational side of anti-Semitism and other phobias born of ignorance and fear.

We are concerned, however, that one serious pitfall is that the audience may not always be sophisticated enough to get the joke, and that some may even find it reinforcing their bigotry.

While Mr. Cohen's brand of humor may be tasteless and even offensive to some, we understand that the intent is to dash stereotypes, not to perpetuate them. It is our hope that everyone in the audience will come away with an understanding that some types of comedy that work well on screen do not necessarily translate well in the real world -- especially when attempted on others through retelling or mimicry.

My response: If anybody is stupid enough to think that "Borat" reinforces their own bigotry, then they can find reinforcement just about anywhere -- including the ADL's statement, which will probably do more to unintentionally inflame anti-Semitism than anything in "Borat."

REUTERS reports:

Secret Service agents turned away British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, in character as the boorish, anti-Semitic journalist, when he tried to invite "Premier George Walter Bush" to a screening of his upcoming movie, "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan."

Also invited to the screening: O.J. Simpson, "Mel Gibsons" and other "American dignitaries."

Cohen's stunt was timed to coincide with an official visit by Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who is scheduled to meet with Bush on Friday.

Nazarbayev and other Kazakh officials have sought to raise the profile of the oil-rich former Soviet republic and assure the West that, contrary to Borat's claims, theirs is not a nation of drunken anti-Semites who treat their women worse than their donkeys. [...]

Cohen's "Borat" comedy routine has drawn legal threats from the Kazakh government, which keeps a tight lid on criticism in its news media. Kazakh press secretary Roman Vasilenko said he was worried that some may take the Borat routine seriously.

"He is not a Kazakh. What he represents is a country of Boratastan, a country of one," Vasilenko told Reuters.

And from the New York Times:

Mr. Ashykbayev denounced Mr. Cohen’s performance as host of the MTV Europe Music Awards in Lisbon last fall, in which a skit mocked the imperial aura that surrounds Mr. Nazarbayev, the country’s president since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Mr. Ashykbayev suggested that Mr. Cohen was acting on behalf of “someone’s political order�? to denigrate Kazakhstan and that the government “reserved the right to any legal action to prevent new pranks of this kind.�?

Mr. Cohen, who is Jewish, responded, as Borat, in a video posted on his Web site, citing Mr. Ashykbayev by name and declaring that he “fully supported my government’s decision to sue this Jew.�?

“Since the 2003 Tulyakov reforms, Kazakhstan is as civilized as any other country in the world,�? he goes on in the video, citing fictional details in the absurdly stilted English that is central to his act. “Women can now travel inside of bus. Homosexuals no longer have to wear blue hats. And age of consent has been raised to 8 years old.�?

But it was the Foreign Ministry’s complaint that gave some in the country’s news media a chance to report on it, and that was when most Kazakhs first learned that a faraway British comedian had turned the world’s attention to their country.

In an atmosphere of legal constraints on press freedoms, if not outright censorship, the ministry’s statement offered a way to poke fun at Mr. Nazarbayev’s near-absolute political power, at least indirectly, by showing what the fuss was all about.

Throw this Jew down the well, so his country can be free!

When the issue of torture comes up, many people think of the way it's portrayed on the screen (especially in '24'), as an effective tool for extracting vital information in a ticking-clock scenario. Hey, it works for Jack Bauer, and he's saved the country, and the world, several times over, right?

In real life, however, torture has proved to be a lousy way of getting anything meaningful out of, uh, "suspects." (And then there's that whole Geneva Convention thing...) To quote Professor Darius Rejali ("Torture and Democracy") in Salon.com:

Aside from its devastating effects and the wasted time and resources, does torture actually work? Organizations can certainly use torture to intimidate prisoners and to produce confessions (many of which turn out to be false). But the real question is whether organizations can apply torture scientifically and professionally to produce true information. Does this method yield better results than others at an army's disposal? The history of torture demonstrates that it does not -- whether it is stealthy or not.

Another perspective from a reader's e-mail to Andrew Sullivan:

When Americans think of torture they think of Dirty Harry standing over a serial killer whose next victim is running out of air at a remote location. Americans think of Harry as a hero for doing everything he can to save the victim. But what most people fail to realize is the thing that makes Harry the hero is not the act of torture. It is the choice to torture given he will face consequences for his action. If the consequences are removed then Harry becomes a meter maid.

Once the torture bill passes it won't take long before many, many more terror suspects will be tortured. A time will inevitably come when a detainee is found to contain some information that could have stopped a loss of life or property. At that time interrogators will have to account for not getting the information. Torture will become a cover-your-ass technique.

This is a sad time for morality and accountability.

And for the reputation of Senator John McCain, who has once again expediently sold out his alleged principles to satisfy his political ambitions.

It's a place, it's a sculpture, it's an installation, it's a performance piece, it's a movie, it's a house, it's a home. It's La Demeure du Chaos, the Abode of Chaos, outside the French town of Lyon. This headline in The Australian caught my eye: "Town outraged over chaos house":

Crashed aircraft, fire-blackened walls, a swimming pool of blood and portraits of Tony Blair and Osama bin Laden adorn a sprawling "shrine to chaos" which is at the centre of a dispute in a village on the outskirts of Lyon in France. [...]

Thierry Ehrmann, 44, the owner and creator, was fined E200,000 ($A336,000) for failing to seek planning permission to turn his 17th-century coaching inn and its grounds in the village of Saint-Romain-au-Mont-d'Or into a theatre of war. The appeal judges annulled a lower court order to have the site, developed by 45 European artists, restored to its original state.

Ehrmann's celebration of the apocalypse, inspired by his experiences in the Middle East and by the events of September 11, 2001, has enraged residents who are offended by its charred walls, twisted metal, burnt-out cars and battlefield debris. A mock oil platform sits on one roof amid camouflage netting. The garden includes a sculpture recreating the remains of the World Trade Centre. [...]

Michael Tolkin, who wrote the novel and screenplay on which Robert Altman's "The Player" was based, has published a sequel in which studio executive Griffin Mill, now 52, is trying to get out of Hollywood. Tolkin has this to say about the state of movies, in a New York Times interview:

“The movies haven’t been very good the last three or four years, they really haven’t,�? he said. “Everybody knows that. At least that, maybe more. And what they were will never return.�?

The source of all this creative- industrial- complex angst is the death of what he both eulogizes and parodies: the classic journey-of-the-hero story structure, analyzed by Joseph Campbell in the 1940’s, popularized a generation ago by George Lucas through “Star Wars,�? spouted and shorthanded by studio executives ever since, and all but trampled to death, Mr. Tolkin said, by nearly every subsequent action movie and thriller that Hollywood has turned out.

Or as Griffin puts it: “Physics cracked the atom, biology cracked the genome and Hollywood cracked the story.�?

What he's talking about, of course, is the ubiquity of screenwriting guru Robert McKee's story structure techniques, satirized in "Adaptation." with Brian Cox playing McKee.

Following up on my posts about "Wag the Dog"/JonBenet/Iraq & 9/11 and modern propaganda films:

As we approach the fifth anniversary of the atrocities of 9/11, I still think one of the most important yet least explored aspects of the day's attacks is how they were carefully designed and staged for the cameras. Deadly spectacles that everyone kept saying was "like a movie" actually were directed that way, as a horror/disaster movie with unforgettable psychological impact -- because it wasn't just a movie, it was real. The "terror" in "terrorism" is about spreading fear and panic, and the World Trade Center towers weren't just chosen because they were symbols of American riches and hubris, but because they were visual symbols that would make for spectacular and terrifying footage. The first plane guaranteed that the second would come as an even greater shock -- and would be caught by thousands of cameras. That was the way the perpetrators spread their murderous message: they intended to terrify not just the government but the population. And, initially, they succeeded. (Nobody looked more terrified on that day than Brave President Sir Robin, who bravely ran away, away, for most of the day: "When danger reared its ugly head / He bravely turned his tail and fled...")

So, the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (who called the WTC attacks "the greatest work of art ever" -- later changing it to "Lucifer's greatest work of art") was pilloried for being insensitive (and he was), while his larger point was ignored.

British artist/provocateur Danien Hirst elaborated a bit more in 2002, but it was still "too soon" for many, who thought his words sounded flip:

"The thing about 9/11 is that it's kind of an artwork in its own right. It was wicked, but it was devised in this way for this kind of impact. It was devised visually."

No matter what you think of his tone or his timing, I don't see how one can contest that.

Lawrence Wright's new book, "The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11," explores this in greater detail than any reporting or analysis that has come along so far. A piece in Salon.com cites Osama bin Laden's role as "director":

At the heart of Wright's wide-ranging narrative is America's arch nemesis. "One can ask whether 9/11 or some similar tragedy might have happened without bin Laden to steer it," he says. "The answer is certainly not."

That's why I'm skeptical that a plot to blow up airliners somewhere in the middle of the Pacific is really the biggest plan out there. It's missing the visual aspect that is so effective at creating the fear and panic that lead to hysterical, reckless, wasteful, counter-productive and even self-destructive decision-making of the sort we've seen since 9/11. Politicians, no matter what their party affiliation (or lack of one), still haven't come to their senses.

Edward Bernays, the founder of modern public relations, on the ways in which power is maintained in a democracy (as opposed to the much cruder, more conspicuous and therefore more vulnerable power held by totalitarian rulers), in his hugely influential 1928 book, "Propaganda":

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.... We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.... In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons ... who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.

(Also quoted in Larry Beinert's "Fog Facts.")

Just a timely reminder about thinking critically in "every act of our daily lives": Every movie you see, every story you read (fiction or nonfiction), is to some extent propaganda. It's trying to sell you something -- an idea, a philosophy, a version of events, a vision of reality. Just try to be aware. Even this is propaganda, but it's true:

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty—power is ever stealing from the many to the few…. The hand entrusted with power becomes … the necessary enemy of the people. Only by continual oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening into a despot: only by unintermitted Agitation can a people be kept sufficiently awake to principle not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity. -- Wendell Phillips (1852), Speeches Before the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society

So, what are some propaganda films you've seen recently, what do you think they were trying to sell, and how did they go about doing it? (And let's hear it for "Snakes on a Plane" for at least succeeding in undermining the myth of "airport security" -- which, we should all know by now, is but a flimsy facade designed to give us the illusion of being "safer," even though we aren't. Still, the odds against snakes or bombs or terrorists on a plane are pretty good, for reasons that have little to do with those increasingly lengthy security lines.)

It's enormously frustrating and stressful trying to live in three places at once, especially when they're: 1) the "reality-based community"; 2) the arena of critical thinking; and 3) America in the 21st century. So, who was surprised by this headline?

Prosecutors drop case in Ramsey slaying

Prosecutors abruptly dropped their case Monday against John Mark Karr in the slaying of JonBenet Ramsey, saying DNA tests failed to put him at the crime scene despite his insistence he sexually assaulted and strangled the 6-year-old beauty queen.

Just a week and a half after Karr's arrest in Thailand was seen as a remarkable break in the sensational, decade-old case, prosecutors suggested in court papers that he was just a man with a twisted fascination with JonBenet who confessed to a crime he didn't commit.

The only difference between this story and innumerable others (like, say the non-case for invading Iraq) is how quickly and easily it unravelled (or, rather, evaporated), after the press and the public suddenly realized they'd never had any good reason to accept it as legitimate in the first place.

This Sierra Mist commercial featuring Kathy Griffin ("It's Pat," "Pulp Fiction," "My Life on the D-List") and Michael Ian Black ("Ed," "The Baxter," "Stella") ran on Thursday night's edition of "The Daily Show," which featured a brilliant report about the foiled British bomb plot involving the use of liquid explosives aboard airliners. Correspondent John Oliver on the sudden ban on carrying liquids aboard passenger jets: "I'm afraid these terrorists have struck at what we in the West hold most dear: our beverages. They resent our wide array of fluid refreshment options. We live in the most easily quenched part of the world and they hate that.... Unfortunately, the men arrested were British citizens, which means the form of government here in Britian must not be democracy, for as you know, democracy is the only known antidote to extremism... It means regime change, Jon. America must topple the British government."

The premise of the ad is that airport security guard Griffin detains Black and pretends her wand is beeping when she passes it over his bottle of Sierra Mist. Don't expect to see this spot in heavy rotation much longer....

Reading today's critical responses to Oliver Stone's "World Trade Center," I find it fascinating that the positive reviews and the negative reviews are saying essentially the same things. People have interpreted the movie in different ways, as a disaster picture and as a political picture, but if you look at the specific observations about the film, it's not as easy as you'd think to distinguish the favorable notices from the unfavorable ones.

I saw "WTC" with three other people: two of us thought it was an honorable memorial, two of us thought it was phony and formulaic, but we all thought it was more or less emotionally inert. (I thought Stephanie Zacharek at Salon hit the nail on the head: "Even when Stone is clumsy, he at least seems to recognize that he can't possibly re-create the experience of these policemen: The best he can do is put it onstage, reminding us that this happened to someone else and not to us." That perfectly describes the sense of distance I felt in, and from, the film.)

One of my friends (also a film critic) who was favorably impressed said she thought the portrayal of the heroic Marine at the end was sad, because he was deluded into thinking the war in Iraq was about avenging 9/11. I don't know if that's what Stone intended. I didn't see it that way. But it's a legitimate interpretation of what's up there on the screen. And make no mistake, this is a political movie. It makes choices about what to show and what not to show (including worldwide reactions on television), and in 2006 those choices in a film about 9/11 can't help but be political as well as dramatic or cinematic.

Now, here's a test (the movie itself is a test). What follows are excerpts of "WTC" reviews. See if you can guess which ones are considered "fresh" (by Rottentomatoes.com) and which are "rotten." Answers, and the identities of the reviewers, after the jump. Ready? Begin...

1) ['WTC'] wields a simple, blunt emotional instrument. It is a film about an American tragedy done up in the trappings of honorable, well-meaning melodrama.... 'World Trade Center' is the second major studio picture to weigh in on the events of Sept. 11, 2001. It is a more limited achievement: a comfortably unsettling drama."

2) "In this screen version of the Sept. 11 story, however, we see only two people die, the same number that the movie shows being rescued. By creating a kind of equivalency between the living and the dead, the picture always feels as if it's laboring to arrive at a Hollywood ending. 'World Trade Center' delivers to its audience a calculated dose of uplift and gooses us along to feel suspense here, compassion there and hope at the end."

3) "The filmmaker and his colleagues have brought the sensibility of an old-fashioned Hollywood disaster movie..."

4) "Stone's film bears some thematic resemblance to 'Alive,' Frank Marshall's 1993 chronicle of a plane crash in the Andes. Both offer a tribute to human endurance under unimaginable conditions, but watching young guys huddle together trying not to freeze to death or two cops pinned under tons of debris isn't exactly a cinematic thrill ride."

5) "Attempting to convey a macro vision of Sept. 11 through a micro lens, Oliver Stone is to be credited for presenting this challenging, fact-based story with admirable restraint, a quality that has not always characterized his past directorial efforts...."

6) "'WTC' is not a definitive statement about 9/11, or one that is likely to make you see that day any differently than you do now. And there's nothing wrong with that."

7) "The surprising thing about this commission job, directed from Andrea Berloff's script, is not its factuality but its restraint.... As befits a new-style disaster film, spectacle is subsumed in subjective experience—in this case, being buried alive."

8) "Stone has dutifully repeated his studio-given mantra that 'World Trade Center' is "not a political movie." (As if that were possible: Even the musical cues suggest the mawkish piano doodling that's been a campaign ad staple since Reagan ran for re-election.)"

9) "In some ways, it's a typically unsubtle Stone movie. Stone can't show New Yorkers (civilians as well as firefighters, policemen and Marines) helping one another through the disaster without later adding a voiceover about how everyone helped each other that day.... Over and over in "World Trade Center," Stone acknowledges the importance of showing, as opposed to telling, and then goes ahead and tells anyway."

10) "It's impossible to watch Oliver Stone's 'World Trade Center' without being moved.... Although 'World Trade Center' doesn't fuel anyone's political agenda, it lends itself to the kind of romanticized view of ordinary men that found its way into 'Platoon.' Stone can't conceal his admiration for these salt-of-the-earth cops."

11) "For the reality of what took place on the streets of Lower Manhattan is such an overwhelmingly sad and troubling story that simply re-creating those horrific events, as this film does, guarantees that your work will have moments of power and emotion. A person's heart would have to be made of stone if he or she weren't at least a little affected by the against-all-odds rescue of two Port Authority policemen, played by Nicolas Cage and Michael Peña, from beneath crushing piles of rubble, as their despairing wives, played by Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal, cry literal tears of joy."

12) "The unthinkable has happened. Oliver Stone has made a film that is unrecognizable as an Oliver Stone film.... Most of all, it exhibits no political slant whatsoever, injecting only heartfelt empathy for the day's many victims and heroes."

13) "The films of Oliver Stone are the ongoing cry of a distressed romantic. Romantic, because the best of them are animated, and the worst marred, by the same simple dialectic of good versus evil.... Here, evil is a 'yeah, sure' given, unnecessary to cast and too obvious to show as anything more than a plane's fleeting shadow, hovering above a valley of death where goodness and mercy abound. Such is the heroic myth that now permeates the hours of that fateful day."

14) "As a tribute to those who died, and survived, on Sept. 11, World Trade Center is a scrupulous and honorable film. Yet it never comes close to being a revelatory one; it sentimentalizes more than it haunts."

Answers next...

That's a question everyone who sees Oliver Stone's 9/11 movie will have to answer for him- or herself. The studio's official line is that it's an inspirational and healing movie ("The World Saw Evil That Day. Two Men Saw Something Else"), and that it's not political at all. But it's about 9/11, and no contemporary event has been more politicized -- beginning within moments of the attacks themselves.

Stone himself is quoted in the Chicago Sun-Times, sounding very political indeed:

"At the time, I thought we were overreacting," he says. "I've been through many disasters in my life. There was Vietnam. The Kennedy assassination, Watergate. The last presidential election. Sept. 11 to me was a national wound. It was one big murder job. But it plunged us into this homeland security state of mind.

"All I can say is that we had the sympathy of the world on that day. The rest of the world was with us. We had a right to pursue those murderers. We should have closed the circle. We didn't need more and more terror, Constitutional breakdowns and more pain. But those are only my opinions as John Q. Citizen."

I have to say I agree with Stone on this. I think history will show that the World's Only Superpower's overriding reaction of "Why us?" (going beyond righteous grief and shock and anger to a protracted and unseemly wallow in self-pity, as if we had the corner on victimization in the world) was one of our most shameful hours as a nation, and was, as we witnessed at the time, part of what sparked an anti-American backlash in record time of only a few weeks. If this was indeed a modern Pearl Harbor moment, we failed miserably in our response. I kept thinking of FDR, who made a stirring speech without resorting to overblown (and simultaneously reductive, picayune) language about "Evildoers." Stone actually makes Bush look good, and doesn't show how he went AWOL for most of the day, or how, when he did finally appear, he looked like a scared rodent in the headlights. That's something else about that day that we should never forget -- not that we could if we tried.

Richard Roeper, in his Sun-Times review recalls thinking of A-- C------ (The Coprophagic Thing That Shall Not Be Named) while watching "WTC" -- and, I confess, I did, too -- for the same reasons:

I'm still trying to figure out what to make of Oliver Stone's "World Trade Center" (and what kind of movie Stone and Paramount thought they were making), but in the meantime I have an essay looking at the shape of Stone's career over at MSN Movies today: "Exile in Stonesville." In part, it's a "Whatever Happened to...?" piece, looking at how a director who once grabbed the zeitgeist by the horns now seems so irrelevant, a relic of the 20th century. But my primary thesis is that he's a reactionary filmmaker with a reputation as a political "liberal." Excerpt:

"JFK" probably represents the peak of Stone's career and reputation -- and it was about as subtle and nuanced as he ever got. Which is to say, it wasn't. And though his name became synonymous with paranoia and liberal politics, he never quite fit the double-bill. Stone may be a hysteric, but his moral and artistic instincts are hardly progressive. They're old-fashioned and deeply reactionary -- the work not so much of a visionary as a vigilante. [...]

[M]acho Stone was never a "bleeding-heart liberal" any more than George W. Bush was a conservative, compassionate or otherwise. Compare, say, the attitude toward big, intrusive, centralized government -- the litmus test of true conservatism -- in Stone's films with Bush's record and Stone comes out looking more reliably conservative than the president.

("Exile in Stonesville")

When apprehended for drunk driving in Malibu last Friday, Mel Gibson claimed that "The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world." And, yeah, he said, "F--- Jews," something of a blanket statement. But, he insists, it's nothing personal. According to his religious beliefs, everyone except those who follow his form of fundamentalist Catholicism (sometimes called "traditionalist Catholicism") is going to hell anyway -- and chances are, that includes you... and nearly everyone else in the world. Roman Catholics, Protestants (Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians...), agnostics, Muslims, Buddhists, atheists, Hindus, Jains, Scientologists -- they're all going to hell. Along with the Jews. Even Mel's Episcopalian wife is, he says, hellbound. As he told the Australian Herald Sun newspaper: "There is no salvation for those outside the Church. I believe it.... [My wife] prays, she believes in God, she knows Jesus, she believes in that stuff. And it’s just not fair if she doesn’t make it, she’s better than I am. But that is a pronouncement from the chair. I go with it.�?

In his second apology, Gibson said: "The tenets of what I profess to believe necessitate that I exercise charity and tolerance as a way of life. Every human being is God's child, and if I wish to honor my God I have to honor his children. But please know from my heart that I am not an anti-Semite. I am not a bigot. Hatred of any kind goes against my faith." (The $64 million question remains: Just what in the world does someone have to do or say that might properly qualify as "anti-Semitic" or bigoted?) Gibson's faith rejects the ecumenical reforms of Vatican II, among them a formal statement that Jews were not responsible for the death of Jesus -- which is why the portrayal of the crucifixion in Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" was particularly egregious to some -- including the ADL's Abraham Foxman, the same man who accepted Gibson's most recent apology.

Pope John XXIII said: ""What happened in [Christ's] passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today." Those words don't wash with the congregation of "The Church of the Holy Family in Malibu." Gibson's statements about religion, and particularly about Judaism, have been complicated by the religious beliefs he shares with his father, Hutton Gibson, who claims the attacks of 9/11 were perpetrated via remote control by Zionists, and who has associated himself with Holocaust deniers, although the son says his father merely disputes the number of Jewish victims: "My dad taught me my faith and I believe what he taught me. The man never lied to me in his life. [...] I have friends and parents of friends who have numbers on their arms. The guy who taught me Spanish was a Holocaust survivor. He worked in a concentration camp in France. Yes, of course. And my dad also knows that there were internment camps where many people died. Now, his whole thing was about the numbers. I mean atrocities happened. The thing with him [my father] was that he was talking about numbers. I mean when the war was over they said it was 12 million. Then it was six. Now it's four. I mean it's that kind of numbers game. I mean war is horrible. The Second World War killed tens of millions of people. Some of them were Jews in concentration camps. Many people lost their lives. In the Ukraine, several million people starved to death between 1932 and 1933. During the last century 20 million people died in the Soviet Union. Okay? It's horrible. "

(For further information, see "Disown Your Dad's Denial of the Holocaust, Gibson Told" -- The Australian, December 8, 2005.) Meanwhile, ABC has cancelled the Holocaust miniseries it was developing with Gibson's Icon Productions, saying no script was ever delivered.

Michael Bonner (an associate producer on "United 93") has an article in Vanity Fair reconstructing events of 9/11 from 30 hours of previously unreleased tapes from the Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS) of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) . Bonner concludes that the situation was more chaotic and uncertain than the Pentagon would later claim, and the tapes support that conclusion. He interviews several of the key participants, including NEADS mission-crew commander, Major Kevin Nasypany:

Five years after the attack, the controversy around United 93 clearly eats at Arnold, Marr, Nasypany, and several other military people I spoke with, who resent both conspiracy theories that accuse them of shooting the flight down and the 9/11 commission's conclusion that they were chasing ghosts and never stood a chance of intercepting any of the real hijackings. "I don't know about time lines and stuff like that," Nasypany, who is now a lieutenant colonel, said in one of our last conversations. "I knew where 93 was. I don't care what [the commission says]. I mean, I care, but—I made that assessment to put my fighters over Washington. Ninety-three was on its way in. I knew there was another one out there. I knew there was somebody else coming in—whatever you want to call it. And I knew what I was going to have to end up doing." When you listen to the tapes, it couldn't feel more horrendously true.

When I asked Nasypany about the conspiracy theories—the people who believe that he, or someone like him, secretly ordered the shootdown of United 93 and covered it up—the corners of his mouth began to quiver. Then, I think to the surprise of both of us, he suddenly put his head in his hands and cried. "Flight 93 was not shot down," he said when he finally looked up. "The individuals on that aircraft, the passengers, they actually took the aircraft down. Because of what those people did, I didn't have to do anything."

Related story, from Scripps-Howard via the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Poll: A third of U.S. public believes 9/11 conspiracy theory.

Drunk people say the darndest things. Like Mel Gibson, who was arrested on DUI charges Friday (blood alcohol level: 0.12; legal limit: 0.08). He seized the occasion, around three in the morning, to offer the arresting officers his assessment of the role of Jewry in world affairs. And, really, who wouldn't, under the circumstances? Field sobriety tests present splendid opportunities to expound on a range of subjects, especially if you can't focus on any one of them for too terribly long. You've kind of got a captive audience (or vice-versa), and if the cops will listen and record what you say, what a handy way to organize your religious and political opinions before they put you in a detox cell! According to the incident report obtained by AOL's TMZ.com and summarized in the New York Daily News:

The "Passion of the Christ" director repeatedly said, "My life is f----d," according to the report by Los Angeles County Deputy James Mee... [...]

"F-----g Jews. The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world," Mee's report quotes him as saying.

"Are you a Jew?" Gibson asked the deputy, according to the report.

The actor also berated the deputy, threatening, "You motherf----r. I'm going to f--- you," according to Mee's report.

The actor also told the cop he "owns Malibu" and would spend all his money "to get even with me," Mee said in his report.

TMZ quoted a law enforcement source as saying Gibson noticed a female sergeant on the scene and yelled at her, "What do you think you're looking at, sugar t--s?"

Deputy Mee then wrote an eight-page report detailing of the incident, but higher-ups in the sheriff's department felt it was too "inflammatory" to release and would merely serve to incite "Jewish hatred," TMZ said.

(Note: Officer Mee's last name is not a traditional Hebraic one.) TMZ.com, which broke the story and the allegations of a police cover-up of Gibson's Jew-hating tantrum, reports that Malibu police had stopped Gibson two other times for DUIs -- three years ago and last year -- but let him slide. Not Friday, though.

Everybody and her pedicurist has been weighing in on this, but the first thing I thought of was how alcohol loosens the inhibitions that usually prevent people from saying what they really feel. Drunken free-speech probably more accurately reflects someone's true attitudes than sober, publicist-crafted press statements. Gibson has apologized, saying he has a problem with alcohol. But it sounds to me like he has a bit more of a problem with Jews. And as Albert Finney said in John Huston's film of "Under the Volcano": "There are some things you can't apologize for." A commenter over at Anne Thompson's Hollywood Reporter Risky Biz Blog sums up my own feelings about Mel's Latest Disgrace:

Wow, that booze is pretty potent stuff. Like Mel Gibson, I can say that some of my best friends are Jews. It's quite disturbing to think that I might denounce them with obscenities and blood-libel accusations if I drank too much alcohol.

Jeepers.

Yeah. Jeepers creepers.

MEL UPDATE (8/1/06): Mel Gibson issued another apology (this time to Jews -- oops, he forgot the first time), asking for forgiveness, and announcing that he will check into rehab. We assume he means the Shylock Center for Jew Abuse, but maybe not. Classic stuff from the horse's... mouth: "There is no excuse, nor should there be any tolerance, for anyone who thinks or expresses any kind of anti-Semitic remark.... [Note: It's the remark that is inexusable, whether silently thought or said aloud, not the anti-Semitism itself.] But please know from my heart that I am not an anti-Semite. I am not a bigot. Hatred of any kind goes against my faith." And yet... hatred of any kind is almost always said to go against any faith -- and yet, it's that same faith that people use to justify their hatred. Maybe Mel needs to detox on whatever virulent strain of renegade Catholicism he's infected with...

It's the hottest thing in contemporary cinema -- after superhero movies and pirate movies, that is! I refer, of course, to movies about clowns in Nazi concentration camps! Who doesn't adore that genre? Let's see, there's Jerry Lewis's infamous, unreleased "The Day the Clown Cried" (wince), Robin Williams in "Jakob the Liar" (cringe), and Robert Benigni's cuddly and zany, Oscar-winning "Life is Beautiful" (projectile vomit). Holocaust hilarity ensues! Now The Guardian reports, in an item with a fantastic headline ("Schrader to direct death camp clown tale" -- sounds like a great name for a Northwest band) that Paul Schrader will direct Jeff Goldblum in an adaptation of Israeli writer Yoram Kaniuk's novel "Adam Resurrected," about a clown who entertains Jews on their way to the gas chambers. Actually, Schrader (writer of "Taxi Driver" and "The Last Temptation of Christ," director of "American Gigolo," "Mishima," and "Light Sleeper," among many others) may have exactly the right sensibility for this project because he has virtually no sense of humor. In this case, that would likely be an asset.

A notorious 1989 Spy magazine article about Lewis's legally locked-up death-camp slapstick project quoted Harry Shearer, one of the few who has actually seen a cut of "The Day the Clown Cried":

With most of these kinds of things, you find that the anticipation, or the concept, is better than the thing itself. But seeing this film was really awe-inspiring, in that you are rarely in the presence of a perfect object. This was a perfect object. This movie is so drastically wrong, its pathos and its comedy are so wildly misplaced, that you could not, in your fantasy of what it might be like, improve on what it really is. "Oh My God!"—that's all you can say.

The original writers, according to a Wikipedia entry, will never allow the film to be released "in part due to changes in the script made by Lewis which made the clown more sympathetic and Emmett Kelly-like." (You can read the script yourself here.) Well, it could have been worse. Lewis could have made the character more Robin Williams-like or Roberto Benigni-like....

What do you think about Clowns and Nazis? Has anybody made it work? If so, how? Is it a good idea to play the Holocaust for sentimental humor, as opposed to, say, satirical humor -- as in Lubitsch's "To Be or Not To Be" -- made while the war was still raging, and the outcome uncertain, in 1942? (Now that was a gutsy movie.

"When I find myself in a position like this, I ask myself: 'What would General Motors do?' And then I do the opposite!"

-- Johnny Case (Cary Grant) in "Holiday" (1938). Screenplay by Donald Ogden Stewart, based on the play by Philip Barry. Directed by George Cukor.

On Monday night's The Daily Show, Jon Stewart reported on the big press conference called by Attorney General (and Pillar of Integrity) Alberto Gonzales to announce the arrest of seven men for "conspiring to support the Al Qaeda organization" -- by, maybe, tossing out the idea of blowing up the Sears Tower. Or something. Except that it turns out the men were a gaggle of losers living in Miami, had no weapons or explosives and no terrorist network connections, and one of them had mentioned the Sears Tower one time. However, one of the, uh, "alleged terrorists," was familiar with Chicago. (As Maureen Dowd described them on Saturday ("We Need Chloe!"): "[The] Miami gang of terrorist wannabes... look like they couldn't find the local Sears, let alone the Sears Tower. These guys were so lame they asked an informant for boots, radios, binoculars, uniforms and cash, believing he was Al Qaeda — and that jihadists need uniforms.")

Observed Stewart: "No weapons, no actual contact with Al Qaeda, but one of them had been to Chicago. By that standard, I believe this [see above] may be a terror cell." No doubt A--- C-----r & Co. would agree. Your Homeland Insecurity dollars at work...

"To preserve our children's future, we have to waste every resource we've got."

No, that was not Dick Cheney. That was Stephen Colbert, endorsing General Motors' $1.99 gasoline promotion: Buy one of their guzzlers and they'll reimburse you for fuel costs at the end of one year so that you wind up paying no more than a buck ninety-nine a gallon. (If you remember to send in your receipts with that mail-in rebate form, that is!) Colbert heartily endorses the deal, using flawless logic: The only way we're going to get more efficient fuel technology is to use up all the oil we can, as fast as we can.

Oddly, this is much the same logic behind the death of GM's electric car, the EV1, in the mid-1990s. According to the new documentary (and technological murder-mystery) "Who Killed the Electric Car?," there was simply too much easy money remaining to be made from old technology and the remaining trillion gallons of crude oil beneath the Earth's crust. So, anti-free-market forces (oil companies, petro-politicians, automakers) killed off an existing, and quite successful, fuel cell vehicle that was already available in California and Arizona. Emissions: None. Speed: Up to 184 mph. Operating cost: The equivalent of buying gasoline at 60 cents a gallon.

At The Hot Blog, David Poland has somehow gotten ahold of an obscenely funny memo from "South Park"'s Matt Stone, sent to the MPAA Ratings Board during negotiations over the rating for 1999's "South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut." (WARNING: Explicit language -- as if you couldn't have anticipated that.) Stone even misspells "Sadaam." Ah, those were such innocent times. It ends with one of the great kiss-offs in Hollywood studio correspondence history: "P.S. This is my favorite memo ever." One of mine, too.

Yes, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal is generally an intellectual black hole. (Check that metaphor: Can a black hole be shallow? After all, doesn't it, too, instantly narrow to a single teeny point?) But this piece by Brian C. Anderson extolling the mental health benefits of video games does provide some amusing and intriguing fodder for our neverending debate about games and art and the human brain:

Video games can also exercise the brain in remarkable ways. I recently spent (too) many late-night hours working my way through "X-Men: Legends II: The Rise of Apocalypse," a game I ostensibly bought for my kids. Figuring out how to deploy a particular grouping of heroes (each of whom has special powers and weaknesses); using trial and error and hunches to learn the game's rules and solve its puzzles; weighing short-term and long-term goals -- the experience was mentally exhausting and, when my team finally beat the Apocalypse, exhilarating.

This letter from Leland McInnes eloquently sums up so many of the issues I keep returning to in Scanners (recently in regard to "United 93," "The Da Vinci Code," "An Inconvenient Truth") -- because, well, I'm obsessed with their vital importance: (film) criticism and critical thinking, skepticism, logic, conspiratorial thinking, art, religion, science, politics, you name it:

Joe Killin wrote a letter on the topic of theories and skepticism. There is a valid place for skepticism, especially in science where no result is ever certain, merely highly likely given the evidence. There is a distinct difference, however, between the skepticism that keeps an open mind and the sort of perverse skepticism required to reject well-supported theories.

There is a classic tale of Pyrrho, the founder of skepticism as a philosophy. He took the view that without certainty it was impossible to know which course of action was wiser. When out walking one day he found his teacher stuck in a ditch, unable to get out. After contemplating for a while, he walked on, having decided that he could not be certain he would actually do any good.

I am a big fan of absurdist advertising campaigns. My all-time favorite is still Monsanto's astonishingly brilliant '60s slogan: "Without chemicals, life itself would be impossible." The delicious disingenuousness of that tag line still makes me well-up with laughter and delight, even when I am chemically depressed. I treasure its Pythonesque logic: Chemicals support life. Monstanto manufactures chemical products. Therefore, Monsanto supports life! (My second-favorite is the possibly apocryphal story of the launch of Pepsi's "Come Alive!" campaign in Taiwan, which was supposedly translated into a distasteful and not-at-all easy-to-swallow: "Pepsi raises your ancestors from the dead.") Now the concerned folks at the Competitive Enterprise Institute have come up with an ad to counter Al Gore's global warming documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth" (recently unveiled at the Cannes Film Festival) -- and it's bold and hilarious enough to rival Monsanto's.

As a species, we humans are designed to connect the dots. But so many of our problems and mistakes arise from: 1) not knowing (due to misunderstanding or lack of information) where, exactly, the dots are; 2) not knowing what they signify; and 3) misattributing conscious intention to some hidden force behind the nature and placement of those dots.

I'm alternately amused and bothered by responses I've seen to "United 93" and "The Da Vinci Code" that claim to know, one way or another, the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the events of 9/11, the history of the bible, the historical validity of Christianity and the existence of a monotheistic deity. (I have to pause here, just to laugh at that last sentence.)

The biggest conspiracy theory yet invented by mankind is "Intelligent Design," the idea that everything that currently exists was destined to "turn out" the way it is right now because a supernatural intelligence (conspiring, apparently, with itself) made it happen deliberately. No room for chance or coincidence or (shudder) evolution in that fixed, closed-world view. But the only reason a concept as preposterous as Intelligent Design can continue to exist is because there are still so many things we don't know about the development of life on this planet (or any other). That's why Intelligent Design is also known as "God in the Gaps." Anything that's unclear or can't yet be explained? Just plug "God" into the equation and voila! -- it's complete! Conspiracies about 9/11 or Christianity are, in principle, exactly the same: Just fill in the gaps in what is known with a top-secret cabal guiding everything behind the scenes, and suddenly it all makes sense. I guess that's why they say a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.

One of the things I love about "24" (not just this season, which is the best one ever, but in general) is the way it shows how people never cease being petty and self-centered, even in the midst of potentially catastrophic international crises in which millions of other people's lives are at stake. What it all comes down to is this: In any crisis, office politics are probably more important than global politics. We see it all the time with our politicians' egocentric defenses of indefensible ineptitude and gridlock caused by inter-agency squabbling (which the papers always call "turf wars").

Now, here's another example of bureaucratic bungling in the name of Homeland Security that shows why, as Jon Stewart recently observed, if terrorists have not yet attacked us since 9/11 it can only be because they are even more incompetent than our own so-called "security" apparatus: Director Richard Kelly ("Donnie Darko," "Southland Tales") is being investigated as a possible terrorist and may not be able to attend the premiere of his new movie at the Cannes Film Festival next week, where his film is in competition for the Palm d'Or. Why?

The thing about speaking truth to power is that the powerful don't really like it all that much. That was apparent at the White House Correspondents Dinner Saturday night, when Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central's satirical "The Colbert Report" (basically a Fox News parody in which Colbert plays a fact-challenged, egomaniacal character based on Bill O'Reilly -- and Sean Hannity, Britt Hume, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter...) delivered a speech that cut maybe just an eentsy bit too close to the truth (or "truthiness") for the comfort of the President, the First Lady and the ineffectual reporters in the audience.

British filmmaker Paul Greengrass, as I've mentioned before, is surely the most accomplished action-thriller director around these days. "Bloody Sunday" and "The Bourne Supremacy" are evidence enough of that. This week, Greengrass's "United 93," about the September 11, 2001, flight now commemorated in a Pennsylvania field, opens the Tribeca Film Festival and then moves into theaters.

David Poland, over at "The Hot Blog," saw the film recently and writes: