Another in a series of video essays that disappeared from the web earlier this year when iKlipz went under. I'm in the process of finding them in old backups, uploading and restoring them to their proper places on scanners. This one, an x-ray of the Coens' "Miller's Crossing," was originally posted (with commentary, dialog, frame grabs) here.

There's a war going on in America, people, and the stakes are nothing less than Glenn Beck's internal organs. It's all about the connections. Is Glenn Beck, who has not denied raping and killing a young girl in 1990, the only one "crazy" enough to see it?!?! Or to mention Hitler? No. No, he is not, because last night on "The Daily Show" Jon Stewart (in the most inspired television comedy monologue since the Founding Fathers, in their infinite wisdom, gave us Johnny LaRue on the Christmas Eve edition of "Street Beef") traced the connections between Glenn Beck's appendicitis and his previous hemorrhoid surgery! Conspiracy or coincidence? You decide. He's teaching the controversy, fair and balanced. Only Stewart is courageous enough to actually take us inside Beck himself, to follow thoughts as they wend their way through the contours of his brain, down his alimentary canal, into his intestines, and finally out his mouth.

"Take a look, very quickly, if you will, at what your appendix is connected to. I mean... it's all there! Your appendix is connected to your large intestine, which is connected to your small intestine, which is something that Karl Marx... had! That doesn't seem suspicious? Because what is the small intestine connected to, people? Oh, I don't know -- the stomach?!?! Which is where acorns would go if you ate them? Acorns -- where have we heard that name before? And after the intestines sucked the nutrients from the acorn it would go to the colon which goes to the rectum which goes to the anus which is the site of the hemorrhoids that nearly killed Glenn Beck! It's aallll connections!"

Freeze-frame of The Big Board (featuring Van Jones, Che, ACORN and Purity of Essence) after the jump:

Richard Schickel wrote a book review of Robert Altman: The Oral Biography by Mitchell Zuckoff. Except that, rather than review the book, he chose to review Robert Altman's capacity for drinking and dope-smoking:

It appears that from the beginning of his career until almost its end (when illness slowed him), Robert Altman never passed an entirely sober day in his life. When he was not drinking heavily, he was smoking dope -- often doing both simultaneously. When he screened dailies on location, he insisted the cast and crew gather to view them in a party atmosphere, with the merriment rolling on into the night.

Shocking, isn't it?

Alfred Hitchcock's "North By Northwest" is just about my favorite movie. No film has ever been more entertaining. (See Glenn Kenny's personal paen to the picture, "Obviously, they've mistaken me for a much shorter man.") And a piece of it is still alive and well in Lake Forest, IL. From The Lake Forester:

"I bought it about five years ago," Knauz, 81, said of the fully restored Navy N3N that he keeps in his hangar at the Kenosha Regional Airport.

The appeal of owning the plane used in the film -- named by the American Film Institute as the 7th greatest American mystery movie in history -- intrigued Knauz.

"It sat in a hangar in Bakersfield, California until I found it," Knauz said during an interview at his hangar, "Stick and Rudder," in Kenosha.

"The guy I bought it from actually restored it in Hawaii," Knauz said, explaining that the surplus Naval planes built before World War II were later converted to crop-dusters.

(photo by Michelle LaVigne)

Excellent op-ed piece by philosophy prof Tom Dodd Todd May in the New York Times ("Happy Ending") about the ending of "No Country For Old Men":

The harm of death goes to the heart of who we are as human beings. We are, in essence, forward-looking creatures. We create our lives prospectively. We build relationships, careers, and projects that are not solely of the moment but that have a future in our vision of them. One of the reasons Eastern philosophies have developed techniques to train us to be in the moment is that that is not our natural state. We are pulled toward the future, and see the meaning of what we do now in its light.

I'm in the process of tracking down, rescuing and reposting all my video essays that disappeared along with iKlipz when the latter died unexpectedly earlier this year. This one, about M. Night Shyamalan's "Unbreakable," came to mind when posting Richard T. Jameson's comments on framing and John Carpenter's "Halloween."

Blame it on Roger Ebert. He Tweeted up (@ebertchicago) a coupla weeks ago and I have learned from his example that there's more to Twitty-ositude than using a small keyboard to broadcast what you're doing at any given moment. You see, in my daily Intertubular rounds (it's part of my job), I come across all kinds of interesting -- even fascinating -- things that I never get around to writing about. Often because all I want to say is: "Take a look at this, why don't ya?"

So, that's what I will do. I will show you all the good stuff. And warn you about the bad stuff. I do not like the term "follow," for I am neither a Pied Piper, a Fantastik, nor a Jesus Christ, but do pop over here and help me get started, won't you? That's jeeemerson. Thank you.

Above: The most flattering mug shot I could find. Almost used it for my passport.

Steven Boone at Big Media Vandalism has composed a mesmerizing collage (OK, montage) using text from Jackson's 1988 biography "Moonwalk," audio interviews with MJ, and footage from some of Lynch's films, notably "The Elephant Man," "Mulholland Dr.," "The Straight Story," "The Grandmother" and "Eraserhead" to imagine a biography of Michael Jackson directed by David Lynch. He calls it "Notes for a David Lynch adaptation of Moonwalk."

Boone writes:

It all comes down to what you believe, because none of us knew the man....

By that, of course, I mean the John Carpenter film. Seattle-based Parallax View has begun performing, under the editorship of Sean Axmaker, an invaluable service to film scholarship: publishing the entire back catalog of Movietone News on the web. That great publication, edited through the 1970s and into the 1980s by Richard T. Jameson before he topped the masthead of Film Comment for the duration of the 1990s, was proclaimed "The best publication on film in the English language" by Molly Haskell.

All of which brings us back to the Days of the Dead in which we are currently living (and dying), and Jameson's review of the anamorphically photographed 1978 Carpenter movie that redefined the holiday, and horror filmmaking, for the next generation. RTJ plunges straight into the heart of the matter in his opening paragraphs (originally published in the February 1979 issue of MTN:

A thing that bugs me about the vast majority of contemporary films is, they rarely give the feeling anyone cared much about framing them. The movement away from studio (i.e., factory) filmmaking has had a lot to do with this. Advancements in film speed, equipment mobility, and other such factors that ought to have been unqualifiedly liberating have had the counterproductive effect of encouraging slovenliness rather than responsible flexibility. A movie can get made anywhere now, one place is as good (i.e., workable) as another--and somehow that extends to frame-space as a "place" too. Throw in careless labwork (we waved byebye to real Technicolor several years ago) and you've got smeary colors and big, fuzzy grain to help reduce definition, and definitiveness of vision. It's hard to maintain faith that a given movie had to look the way it does, because it could just as well have looked, well, a little different.

Zombies and vampires, zombies and vampires -- sure, we're entering Dias de los Muertos, but the undead are crawling all over popular culture these nights. "Twilight" to "Tru-Blood," "Zombieland" to "Fox News," the undead are back with a vengeance. But, of course, they've been around for a long, long time. Matt Zoller Seitz takes a bite out of the cinematic zombie corpus with his latest video essay, "Zombies 101." He begins, (un-)naturally, with George Romero's "Night of the Living Dead" (1968), flashes back to Jacques Tourneur's voodoo-themed "I Walked With a Zombie," and moves forward through the Romero "Living Dead" pictures to 21st century remakes and variations -- "Shaun of the Dead" (2004), "28 Days Later..." (2002), "28 Weeks Later..." (2007)...

Matt writes:

This "Illegal Alien" costume has been pulled from a number of stores because, in the words of one immigration rights activist, it is "distasteful, mean-spirited, and ignorant of social stigmas and current debate on immigration reform." I don't know what its designers and manufacturers intended, but I can see how it could be viewed that way.

On the other hand, this particular costume (unlike some others that have been removed from shelves) doesn't single out any particular ethnicity. As someone who is unabashedly pro-immigrant rights, I can also see it as a scathing satirical comment on the mindset of those who view immigrants as non-human. When I saw a photo of this costume, my first thought was of this summer's science-fiction hit "District 9" (and 1988's "Alien Nation"), which used extra-terrestrials as a metaphor for the treatment of illegal aliens and the ghettoization of black South Africans under apartheid. Roger Ebert wrote:

Here's a wickedly perceptive analysis from John Scalzi at Whatever about how the Obama administration is playing Fox News. Scalzi says that the White House is "delighted" that Fox has skewed so far to the right, and knows that by calling out the network as an ideological outlet rather than a news organization, Fox will only spin furiously, even further out into fringe territory -- solidifying its base (in the Palin sense) and alienating even more of the mainstream audience:

Fox News isn't the number one cable news channel because it has a broad spectrum of viewers or because the quality of its news reportage is better than those of other cable news networks or organizations. It's the number one cable news network because it's explicitly conservative in viewpoint where other news networks and organizations are not. Fox News garners the viewers for whom ideology trumps news; every other news organization splits the rest of the viewers. [...]

Or to put it otherwise, 2.5 million Americans watch Fox News [roughly the same as an average episode of Fox's just-cancelled recently truncated "Dollhouse"], which means that 297.5 million Americans don't.

Two quibbles: A more meaningful comparison might be to the (shrinking) number of people who get their news from TV, rather than to the total population. And, again, I would argue that Fox is not principally or uniformly "conservative." There are plenty of traditional American conservatives who have no respect for Fox's lowbrow pandering, but those kinds of conservatives have been marginalized by the talk-radio mentality that Fox promotes. "Reactionary" is a better term for Fox's style and content. The channel's figureheads don't pretend to unite behind one coherent political philosophy. There are dabs of libertarianism, neoconservatism, partisan Republicanism, paranoid Know-Nothingism, Evangelical Protestantism -- all reflecting a general attitude that's anti-liberal and anti-moderate, but not necessarily coherently conservative.

Nevertheless, Scalzi explains how he thinks the game will play out:

A scholarly study finds it was the 43rd president's personality, not brain capacity, that limited his functional abilities. This is an important distinction. It is not that the former chief executive was incapable of learning (the "Bush is dumb" meme), but that he did not want to learn, and did not believe it was something he needed to do. From the research paper, "Bush's Brain (No, Not Karl Rove):‎ How Bush's Psyche Shaped His Decision-Making," included in the Stanford University Press anthology, "Judging Bush (Studies in the Modern Presidency)," authors Robert Maranto and Richard E. Redding find:

... [The] best studies, in which raters evaluate statements without being aware of their source, suggest that Bush lacks integrative complexity and thus views issues without nuance. The leading personality theory (the "5-Factor Model"), as measured by the NEO Personality Inventory, suggests that Bush is highly extraverted but not very agreeable or conscientious. He also rates low on "Openness to Experience." Similarly Immelman (2002) had expert raters judge Bush's personality using the Millon Inventory of Diagnostic Criteria. Raters identified Bush as fitting the "Outgoing," "Dominant (Controlling)," and "Dauntless" personality patterns, which together constitute a style given to lack of reflection, superficiality, and impulsivity.

So, in essence, what did he lack? Critical thinking skills.

The big news is that TLRHB (That Little Round-Headed Boy) is back! And here he is, asking some pertinent questions about the art and craft of acting in response to Hilary Swank's comment in the Los Angeles Times: "You can't play Amelia Earhart and not learn how to fly. That would be a huge flaw. I'd be fired immediately."

I always get a chuckle every time I read about a group of pretty-boy actors going to a three-week "boot camp" to learn how to play a soldier. Imagine asking Spencer Tracy or Gable to go to a boot camp. Did John Wayne go to Western Camp to learn how to ride horseback? Did Bogie go to detective school? Did Cary Grant study paleontology before filming "Bringing Up Baby"? Did Errol Flynn go to pirate camp? (I bet Johnny Depp didn't, either. He created his Jack Sparrow persona out of the pure creativity in his mind, and a little bit of vampishness and Keith Richards.) [...]

Is there supposed to be a connection here?

1) Frank Rich, New York Times, "In Defense of the 'Balloon Boy' Dad" (October 24, 2009):

There's also some poignancy in his determination to grab what he and many others see as among the last accessible scraps of the American dream. As a freelance construction worker and handyman, he couldn't find much employment in an economy where construction is frozen and homeowners are more worried about losing their homes than fixing them. Once his appetite had been whetted by two histrionic appearances on "Wife Swap," an ABC reality program, it's easy to see why Heene would turn his life and that of his family into a nonstop audition for more turns in the big tent of the reality media circus.

2) Ken Simmons, The Onion, "In This Economy, It Would Be Crazy To Run Out And Expose Yourself To Your Son's Soccer Team" (October 27, 2009):