Less Standard Christmas Movie Fare

Unlike the last post, I'm not going to bother with Youtube stuff. I just wanted to steer you to some pictures involving or set during Christmas that might interest you if you're burned out on Christmas Carol, A Christmas Story, or The Greatest Story Ever Told.

On Her Majesty's Secret Service: Over the yule tide holiday, James Bond tries to prevent Blofeld's deadly gifts from poisoning the world's food supply. He also meets the one and only woman he'd ever want to marry, and since she was played by Diana Rigg, everyone can understand why.

Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick's final film follows a naive doctor (Tom Cruise) on a strange, dreamlike journey set on a night before Christmas.

Lethal Weapon: Because nothing says the holiday season like Riggs and Murtaugh interrupting their plans for suicide and Christmas dinner to hunt down a gang of ex-CIA drug dealers.

The Godfather: No, it's not all set during the holidays, but the scenes from Don Corleone's first meeting with Sollozzo to Michael's first murder in the Italian restaurant take place over Christmas. Sure, Santa can bring you a bicycle, but if you've slept with the studio boss's favorite young starlet and still want work in the movies, there's only one guy who can deliver that Christmas present.

Wrong Star Wars Character

Dick Cheney's recent interviews have led people to compare him once again to Darth Vader. I hate to get geeky about it, but if you want to compare Cheney, a man who spent a lifetime scheming and plotting in hopes of one day acquiring absolute power, to any Star Wars character, there is only one appropriate analog:

My Way of Saying Thanks

Lindsay Erika Crain, or Anna, as she's known in Diary of A Superfluous Man was kind enough to talk up the play on her weblog. It would be wrong of me not to reciprocate in the only way a penniless sod like me can, by linking to her blog.

Buy some of her photographs. Now.

Movies For a Snowy Afternoon

I'll include a list for those who love to wallow in snow, as well as for those who want nothing more than to get away.

For Wallowers:

The Shining (1980): For the person who loves snow, what could be better than being snowbound at home, watching a movie about a snowbound family whose patriarch is going mad? There is no time of year when The Shining isn't a favorite film of mine, but today seems like an appropriate day to watch Jack Nicholson get cabin fever.



Misery (1990): Snow seems to agree with Stephen King, or at least with those who adapt his work. This picture, done before Rob Reiner foolishly decided to stop shooting William Goldman scripts, made a star of Kathy Bates as Annie Wilkes, the world's most psychopathic obsessed fan, (and that's up against some stiff competition).



On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1968): Yes, you'll have to endure some sun kissed beaches in the South of France, but don't worry. You'll soon be in the Alps, watching 007 perform some of his best ski moves as he tries to stop Blofeld's plan to unleash a biological weapon on the world.



Downhill Racer (1969): It's not my favorite of Robert Redford's films about competition--that would be The Candidate but if you like ski action, this is your film. (Sorry, no video)

The Empire Strikes Back (1980): The ice planet of Hoth. Need I say more.



For Would-be Escapees:

Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981): There is a brief sequence in snowy Nepal, but the rest of it is in the South American jungle, Egypt, and the Mediterranean. See? You're warmer already.



Lawrence of Arabia (1962): Vast stretches of desert, shot in 70mm splendor, serve as backdrop for one of the greatest movies ever made.



The Spy Who Loved Me (1977): This one could be thought of as a present for both sides. It opens with the most spectacular ski stunt ever performed in a Bond film before moving on to beautiful, balmy locations in Egypt and Sardinia.



Duel 1971: When you need to warm up, Steven Spielberg really is your pal. He loves desert landscapes, and this one is about as deserty as you can get. You will, however, learn to treat truck drivers with greater reverence and respect when this movie ends.



The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) Clint Eastwood's most deeply felt western--with the arguable exception of Unforgiven--takes place, for the most part, in the deserts of Texas and Mexico. Exciting and thoughtful, The Outlaw Josey Wales is a worthy way to warm yourself up when the weather outside trends frightful.

Diary of A Superfluous Man Enters the World

Diary of a A Superfluous Man is out. Some very fine actors put up with me for way too long to get this made, so download it today from here or here.

The Day the Earth Stood Still Beamed Into Space

When a huge starfleet of pissed off aliens comes to Earth to carry on cranky, we'll know it's because 20th Century Fox sent them the remake instead of the original.

Who could blame them, really?

Speaking Your Peace

One of the disadvantages of podcast theater is that it offers few places for listeners to chat amongst themselves about what they've just heard. While I'm afraid I can't announce that the MMIP has purchased an enormous room where listeners around the world can gather, drink and kibbitz, I can offer a few options that will do both you and the MMIP a service.

1. You can leave a comment at our website.

2. Those of you who plant to be "Diary of a Superfluous Man" listeners can hop on over to The Stranger, Seattle's only functional alternative weekly, and leave a review of our upcoming show (or pick fights with the pinheaded lunatics who demonstrated their bad taste and bad breath by disagreeing with you).

3. Or you can visit the MMIP's location at the iTunes Music Store by typing "McCroskey" into iTunes's search field while the browser is pointed at the store. (Needlessly pedantic? Good.) There you can do much the same thing that you would at the Stranger, but play to an international audience of people who, rest assured, are desperate to know what you think about an obscure audio play.

Because I want to beat as many possible drums for our upcoming show "Diary of A Superfluous Man", I want to urge you towards methods 2 and 3 of expressing your opinions. Your posts, if placed in those locations, could help drive traffic to us and will, regardless of what you say, guarantee you infinite supplies of chocolate and leather bondage equipment in the afterlife.* So, after you've heard "Diary of A Superfluous Man", stop by those locations to let the world know what you thought.

*Existence of afterlife not guaranteed. Offer void in Tennessee.

An Endorsement (Insert Fanfare Here)

I've spent much more time than I'm ordinarily comfortable with promoting my work, and while I'm afraid I'm going to have to do a good deal more of that between now and the 12th, I do want to pause for just a moment from hawking my wares and wearing my hawks to pass on my endorsement, for the spectacularly miniscule amount that it's worth, of The New Adventures of Mr. Stephen Fry. I've been an enormous fan of Mr. Fry's since I saw his work in Blackadder II, many thousands of years ago, and through the centuries since, my appreciation for his wit and verbal dexterity has never waned. Go to his website. Listen to his podgrams. Read his blessays. Hope in sweet vain that you can someday nestle securely between his thighs. Live him. Love him. Be him. Stephen Fry.

What? Not fulsome enough? Fuck off.

Brief Review: Quantum of Solace

I enjoyed the movie and thought Roger Ebert was too harsh in giving it the two stars of death. I do think that, for all of Casino Royale's flaws, it is the superior of Daniel Craig's two outings. QOS's action sequences are too messily edited, at times bordering on incoherent. Michael Bay's long and awful shadow falls over them. Aside from Judi Dench's M, I found the female characters in QOS to be too sketchily written. And I'm beginning to wonder whether it's advisable, in a series that's based primarily on wish fulfillment fantasies about the wild life of "00" agents, to turn James Bond into yet another moody adventurer bent on avenging himself upon an unfair world. It's not Daniel Craig's fault. His Bond clearly does want to have a good time and enjoy some luxury; it's just that QOS never takes time to allow the character to savor the more fun aspects of the 007 life.

That said, I did enjoy Craig's work as 007 and Judi Dench's work as M. I thought the dialog was frequently close to witty, and that the villain, while not in the first rank of Bondian adversaries, brought enough menace to the role to keep me interested. All in all I had a good time with Quantum of Solace. It's in the middle of the Bond pack, fun to watch but not outstanding. Think Thunderball or Octopussy.

Oh, two final quibbles. I hated, hated, hated, hated, hated the title sequence, which stands as the most pedestrian one since License To Kill, and loathed the meandering, pointless title song. I also question the decision to save the gun barrel sequence for end. I missed it at the beginning, and I really want them to put it back. It just doesn't feel like a Bond movie without it.

Atlas Shrugged II: Electric Boogaloo

I've never been able to take anyone who takes Atlas Shrugged seriously seriously, at least where politics, economics, or aesthetics are concerned. And no, I haven't read more than a few pages of this literary cement overshoe, mainly because, after ten pages or so, I kind of figured a) that the novel's odds of improvement were long and b) that the siren call of thousands of more interesting diversions, including doing the dishes and cleaning my computer screen, easily lured me from Ayn Rand's cardboard characters and turgid prose. Besides, I'm not a book reviewer by trade, so nobody's ever offered to pay me to endure 1,100 pages of Rand's nonsense, the gist of which I had already absorbed from a political science class in the form of Rand's equally silly but mercifully shorter essay collection The Virtue of Selfishness.

Still, it is gratifying to see that one of the charming someones at McSweeney's spent enough time with Atlas Shrugged to write this brilliant, timely parody.

Diary of A Superfluous Man

I just thought I'd mention, since it's been consuming my life for the last three months, that Diary of A Superfluous Man will premiere on the MMIP website and at the iTunes Music Store as a free podcast Dec. 12th. It's exciting to finally have the play realized, if only electronically. The production process improved the script markedly, and, as with Let Us Sit Upon the Ground, I was damned lucky in casting. I've seldom had trouble finding talented actors to devote vast swathes of time to my projects, in spite of inability to pay. (Hopefully the MMIP's move to nonprofit status, and the generous support of listeners...hint...hint...will deliver us from this penury.)

You can listen to a sample scene here.

It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Every year, the War on Christmas comes earlier and earlier.

Where does the time go? My meeting with the Northwestern Division Atheistical Sanhedrin (NORWESDAS, for short)--at which Julia Sweeney (looking quite fetching in a Prada-made black cape and cowl), me, Henry Rollins, and the Mythbusters set fire to a ceremonial Christmas Tree while singing the A side of the fifth Black Sabbath album and popping man-sized balloons inflated in the shape of TV Pundit William Bennett--seems like it happened just yesterday. I remember how we plotted all night to place ourselves, by means both insidious and foul, in key positions to rename the Christmas decorations slated to hang in the town square of Chitting Switch, Montana "holiday decorations". I remember cackling "WHERE WILL THEIR PRECIOUS GOD BE THEN! MUHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"

After the orgy (a bacchanalia of absinthe and Vietnamese spin-fuck chairs), we said goodbye to each other with the traditional NORWESDAS salute, and melted away in the night mist.

Now it's time to buy the onyx candles and heroin again. I swear, if it keeps up, we'll be starting the War on Christmas on Labor Day.

We Done Treated Him Bad

Because I am relieved that Barack Obama is now the President-Elect, I laugh a little louder at arguments like this one from the Wall Street Journal's Jeffrey Scott Shapiro:

The treatment President Bush has received from this country is nothing less than a disgrace. The attacks launched against him have been cruel and slanderous, proving to the world what little character and resolve we have. The president is not to blame for all these problems. He never lost faith in America or her people, and has tried his hardest to continue leading our nation during a very difficult time.

Our failure to stand by the one person who continued to stand by us has not gone unnoticed by our enemies. It has shown to the world how disloyal we can be when our president needed loyalty -- a shameful display of arrogance and weakness that will haunt this nation long after Mr. Bush has left the White House.

Just a few weeks ago, I'd have used this argument as a chance to launch into another jeremiad about why people like Jeffrey Scott Shapiro make me ashamed of my connection to the human race. Now, I smile, as I did whenever Archie Bunker whined about the treatment of his beloved "Richard E. Nixon".

One argument deserves a response though. Shapiro says that one day people will recognize Bush's leadership in difficult times and accord him a higher degree of respect. Even though Bush's administration was a political, financial, and moral disaster of world-historical proportions, Shapiro may be on to something. Among Russians, Josef Stalin's reputation, which suffered greatly in the Khrushchev and Gorbachev eras, has rebounded. His approval rating among Russians (47%) is nearly double Bush's current rating with us. So, yes, Mr. Shapiro, Bush can take comfort. Any country sufficiently motivated to ignore the facts of its own history can rehabilitate even its most hideous leaders.

If this ever happens, then I'll have something to blame the people for.

The Unbearable Lightness of Palin

I've been consumed with both paying work and my labors on the next MMIP production. (Diary of A Superfluous Man coming to the internet in November). Consequently, and perhaps mercifully, I've been unable to follow the adventures of Sarah Palin all that closely. I did catch a segment of the debate last night, though, and I watched her interview with Couric on Youtube.

Palin is an ignoramus: a hustling, bullshitting featherhead completely out of her depth. But that's not the worst bit. Such creatures are legion in the world, and life is generally kind to them. What troubles me more is that a sizable percentage of the American public doesn't mind that she's running for Vice President as a hustling, bullshitting featherhead completely out of her depth. Indeed, they try to sell her glib ignorance and sad unwillingness to look facts in the face as evidence that she's a Real American, an authentic, two fisted, meat eating, faith holding exemplar of the Good, True, the Red-White-and-Blue. I would have thought that the farce of the last eight years would have sated all but the most stupidity-hungry voters, but no. Tens of millions of people actually look upon Sarah Palin, smile warm smiles, and say "She's so me!".

I remember, years ago, sitting in my friend Neil's apartment and watching evangelical TV. We did it for a laugh. Anyone who can tune in to Jack Van Impe or Paul Crouch and not laugh at the combination of piety, syrup, bombast, hairspray, eye shadow, and gold-painted particle board can never hope to laugh at anything. But even as we chuckled we knew that most of the people watching and giving money to these clowns weren't laughing. They believe in this gilded tripe. When Jack Van Impe claims that UFOs are the angels foretold in Revelations, or when Pat Robertson claims that feminists are witches, their congregations, millions strong, not only swallow their stories, but they also write checks to sponsor the spread of these important messages. Sarah Palin would have gotten nowhere in life if these same people weren't willing to stuff envelopes and knock on doors to spread the word for her.

Of course, every nation can boast its resident population of boobs, and they often wield substantial political power. But it's always been strange to me that the U.S., a country with magnificent cities, great universities, and more than its share of great thinkers in every field of human endeavor, would choose the benighted clodhopper as the symbol of its national identity, and judge politicians on the basis of how closely they match that image. You'd think that George W. Bush would have spoiled this symbol for good and all, but no. It lives and appears immortal. Hence, Sarah Palin.

The rest of the world might want to start interviewing for the next last best hope of humanity.

Irrationality Among Secular People

Yglesias picked this up from Douthat, who picked it up from the Wall Street Journal. Apparently Baylor University commissioned Gallup to conduct a poll that showed that secular people credit non-religious superstitions more readily than traditional Christians. Yglesias isn't surprised, and neither am I, I suppose, but I do have some questions and observations to toss out as well.

I wasn't able to see the poll's sub-data, but the article suggested that the big dividing line between secular and religious voters is the difference in frequency of religious observance. That's okay as far as it goes, but how far does it go? My father is a believer, but isn't a churchgoer. There are lots of people out there who describe themselves as "spiritual but not religious" who eschew services but believe in a everything from astrology to Zoroastrianism. And there are lots of people who are "Christmas/Easter" Christians. Are they lumped in with people like me, or does the poll separate the "secular" with the same rigor that it sifts the "traditionally religious"? The article doesn't say.

The reluctance of traditional Christians to go in for tarot cards or communication with the dead doesn't shock me either. Traditional Christianity frowns on such practices, not so much because they are irrational, but rather because they're ostensibly Satanic. That's why some of the more Ned Flandersey Christians become such pains in the ass about Harry Potter and Halloween. They think that depictions of magical practices or of ghouls and goblins, even when done in fun, will lead them and their children to hell. Christian superstitions proscribe other kinds of superstition. That's all.

And in the end it should be said that everyone is, to some degree or other, susceptible to irrational beliefs, particularly when the belief touches on an area where the victim either has limited expertise or feels certain the belief can grant their long-held wishes. Bill Maher's rejection of conventional medicine and Frank Tipler's Omega Point are examples of both impulses. We're all of us capable of being conned, or of conning ourselves. And we all look a little crazy to each other. Here's Mark Twain to explain:

Let us consider that we are all partially insane. It will explain us to each other; it will unriddle many riddles; it will make clear and simple many things which are involved in haunting and harassing difficulties and obscurities now.
Those of us who are not in the asylum, and not demonstrably due there, are nevertheless, no doubt, insane in one or two particulars. I think we must admit this; but I think that we are otherwise healthy-minded. I think that when we all see one thing alike, it is evidence that, as regards that one thing, our minds are perfectly sound. Now there are really several things which we do all see alike; things which we all accept, and about which we do not dispute. For instance, we who are outside of the asylum all agree that water seeks its level; that the sun gives light and heat; that fire consumes; that fog is damp; that six times six are thirty-six, that two from ten leaves eight; that eight and seven are fifteen. These are, perhaps, the only things we are agreed about; but, although they are so few, they are of inestimable value, because they make an infallible standard of sanity. Whosoever accepts them him we know to be substantially sane; sufficiently sane; in the working essentials, sane. Whoever disputes a single one of them him we know to be wholly insane, and qualified for the asylum.

Very well, the man who disputes none of them we concede to be entitled to go at large. But that is concession enough. We cannot go any further than that; for we know that in all matters of mere opinion that same man is insane--just as insane as we are; just as insane as Shakespeare was. We know exactly where to put our finger upon his insanity: it is where his opinion differs from ours.

That is a simple rule, and easy to remember. When I, a thoughtful and unblessed Presbyterian, examine the Koran, I know that beyond any question every Mohammedan is insane; not in all things, but in religious matters. When a thoughtful and unblessed Mohammedan examines the Westminster Catechism, he knows that beyond any question I am spiritually insane. I cannot prove to him that he is insane, because you never can prove anything to a lunatic--for that is a part of his insanity and the evidence of it. He cannot prove to me that I am insane, for my mind has the same defect that afflicts his. All Democrats are insane, but not one of them knows it; none but the Republicans and Mugwumps know it. All the Republicans are insane, but only the Democrats and Mugwumps can perceive it. The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.

When I look around me, I am often troubled to see how many people are mad. To mention only a few:
The Atheist, The Theosophists, The Infidel, The Swedenborgians, The Agnostic, The Shakers, The Baptist, The Millerites, The Methodist, The Mormons, The Christian Scientist, The Laurence Oliphant Harrisites, The Catholic, and the 115 Christian sects, the Presbyterian excepted, The Grand Lama's people, The Monarchists, The Imperialists, The 72 Mohammedan sects, The Democrats, The Republicans (but not the Mugwumps), The Buddhist, The Blavatsky-Buddhist, The Mind-Curists, The Faith-Curists, The Nationalist, The Mental Scientists, The Confucian, The Spiritualist, The Allopaths, The 2000 East Indian sects, The Homeopaths, The Electropaths, The Peculiar People, The----

But there's no end to the list; there are millions of them! And all insane; each in his own way; insane as to his pet fad or opinion, but otherwise sane and rational. This should move us to be charitable towards one another's lunacies. I recognize that in his special belief the Christian Scientist is insane, because he does not believe as I do; but I hail him as my mate and fellow, because I am as insane as he insane from his point of view, and his point of view is as authoritative as mine and worth as much. That is to say, worth a brass farthing. Upon a great religious or political question, the opinion of the dullest head in the world is worth the same as the opinion of the brightest head in the world--a brass farthing. How do we arrive at this? It is simple. The affirmative opinion of a stupid man is neutralized by the negative opinion of his stupid neighbor no decision is reached; the affirmative opinion of the intellectual giant Gladstone is neutralized by the negative opinion of the intellectual giant Newman--no decision is reached. Opinions that prove nothing are, of course, without value any but a dead person knows that much. This obliges us to admit the truth of the unpalatable proposition just mentioned above--that, in disputed matters political and religious, one man's opinion is worth no more than his peer's, and hence it followers that no man's opinion possesses any real value. It is a humbling thought, but there is no way to get around it: all opinions upon these great subjects are brass-farthing opinions.

It is a mere plain, simple fact--as clear and as certain as that eight and seven make fifteen. And by it we recognize that we are all insane, as concerns those matters. If we were sane, we should all see a political or religious doctrine alike; there would be no dispute: it would be a case of eight and seven--just as it is in heaven, where all are sane and none insane. There there is but one religion, one belief; the harmony is perfect; there is never a discordant note.

You can listen to this part of Twain's Christian Science, and more besides, here. Where I'm concerned, I try to hew close to what I take to be objective reality, cognizant of the limitations of my grey cells and my senses, and aware at all times that I could be wrong. It seems to me the safest, most civilized course, and it frees my Sundays for football.

The Seinfeld Microsoft Ad

I suppose I'm joining a general consensus here, which makes me itchy. But I just watched the first Jerry Seinfeld commercial for Microsoft, and I think I know what it demonstrates about Microsoft. It's abundantly clear that they still have enough money to hire top talent and put it in the service of mediocre material.



Jerry, I hope you took Bill for a bundle.

Palin's Speech

As I figured, Palin is effective on television. She delivers speeches well, and she knows how to serve the red meat to the crowd. Much of it was made of lies, but it worked in a Young Tory of the Year kind of way:



I did find something curious though. Palin delivered, toward the end of her spiel, a long hagiography about John McCain's military service, and how much we should honor it, and how it proves that his character is one vastly superior to that of his opponent. I'm not surprised McCain/Palin is making this argument. It's the best one they've got. But I think back to four years ago. That time the Democratic nominee was the Vietnam veteran, and many of the people who cheered Mrs. Palin's remarks tonight were there, wearing band aids to mock John Kerry's military service. Later in the campaign their side invested millions in scurrilous ads that purported to show that Kerry's military record was a fiction. I guess the Right's sentimentality about military service kind of comes and goes, doesn't it?

Sarah Palin

Bristol Palin's pregnancy appears to have thrown the political world into a rage. I'm not quite sure why. The only dimension of that situation that is political is that Bristol's pregnancy is yet another symptom of the bankruptcy of one of the right's pet causes: abstinence-only sex education. In the end, I don't think it'll amount to much by itself. The only people who get really upset at this sort of thing--social conservatives--will give it a pass because Sarah Palin's a social conservative. (Imagine if Chelsea Clinton had turned up pregnant at seventeen. James Dobson would have never let us hear the end of it.) Now, if Bristol had been caught with another girl...

That said, I have plenty of better reasons for disliking Sarah Palin. First, she's a Republican, and if the last eight years have taught us anything, it's that Republicans are by and large disreputable creatures. Next, as Wasilla's mayor, Palin tried to ban books she deemed naughty from the library. When the librarian resisted, Palin tried to have her fired. Next, there's the whole matter of her firing the Alaska Public Safety Commissioner because he refused to (improperly) fire her ex-brother-in-law. Then there's the whole issue of McCain's method of picking Palin, which seemed to boil down to right-wing+XX chromosomes=running mate. If that's the way McCain'll pick his potential successor, what about the rest of his cabinet, or his Supreme Court justices? Then there's the matter of her courtship of radical right wing groups like Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum and the Alaska Independence Party. (Yeah, I thought the Civil War closed the question of secession, but I guess since George W. Bush took us back before the legal precedents of the Magna Carta, the question is open again.) Then there's her support of creationism in biology classes. (Another issue that was, for all rational people, closed in the mid-nineteenth century that she'd like to reopen.) Then there's her lying about her fight against the "bridge to nowhere". And there's her global warming denial, and her support for Pat Buchanan. (Has anyone asked her what she thinks about the Holocaust?)

All that's just in four days. I'm sure I'll see other things down the line. But those aren't reasons for her to be dumped from the ticket. The contemporary Republican party seems to like everything that I listed, and though I'm not watching cable news right now, I'm guessing an army of hacks has already fanned out to argue the virtues of book banning, creationism and abuse of power. After eight years, they've grown awfully good at it.

Sarah Palin's apparent failure to see that her children are properly educated about contraception strikes me as irresponsible and stupid, but that falls under the heading of her problem. (I do wish that her public policy choices wouldn't inflict this same problem on people far less able to bear the costs, but that's tantamount to wishing she weren't a Republican.) I dislike her because her policy interests and political goals would place cruel burdens on people I care about, starting with me. I dislike her because she's a symptom of this country's advancing decadence; she's another crackpot that too many people will take too seriously and defend too loudly.

But don't worry about her being dropped from the ticket. The Right will love her whatever she does, or did, for no other reason than that the Left hates her, and that's what counts.

Catching Up

Oh, the places I've been and the things I've seen!

Auditions for Diary of A Superfluous Man: I love holding auditions. As an actor, I always loathed auditioning. Whenever the audition counted for a damn thing, nerves consumed me. Whenever I didn't want the role, I was always relaxed enough to get it. It made for an irony filled career, if nothing else. But I love being on the other side of the table, particularly this time around, when there were more talented actors than there were roles. (So many, in fact, that I changed a character's gender to bring in one actress who I thought was too special to let go.) Auditions are my first chance to see what people can do with my work. Their readings suggest possibilities I hadn't considered, and give me a chance to think anew. I have high hopes that this play will succeed, and help expand my nascent empire.

The convention: I haven't had a chance to watch as much as I'd like. Hillary Clinton delivered a good speech, and Biden surprised me with his performance. I don't fall in love with politicians, but I like his brashness and energy in asserting his ideas, which, mostly, line up with mine. (I'm to the left of Biden, but that's okay. I'm to the left of everybody.) The whole thing seems about as good as a four-day infomercial where everybody's trying desperately hard not to fuck up has a right to be.

The Dark Knight: Bitterspice and I saw it this weekend. We both liked it, though I was slightly more enthusiastic. Neither of us loved it. I admired Heath Ledger's performance, even though it wasn't as iconic as the hype had led me to believe. I thought the acting across the board was strong, and the Joker's antics posed some interesting moral tests for Batman and company (tests they ended up failing, in many ways). That said, I found the ending unsatisfying (maybe the sequel will clear it up, but I don't think it's too much to ask, after 150 minutes, to get a satisfactory conclusion now), and I thought that Two-Face came and went way too quickly--unless of course they're planning him to have a Michael Meyers-esque comeback. I always thought that Two-Face, along with Mr. Freeze, were the most compelling, tragic, Sweeney Toddish Batman villians; why kill him off so easily, or even kill him at all?
I thought the movie was a success, not a triumph. And those who consider it the best movie of all time need to grow up and, along the way, see some of the best movies of all time.

A Brief Encounter With a Con Man

On my way back from auditioning actors for Diary of A Superfluous Man (and a fine collection of actors they were), I pulled into the left turn lane and stopped at the light. As I watched cars rumble through the crowded intersection, I heard someone shouting to my right. It was the guy in a huge black SUV next to me, calling for me to roll my window down. I did, and he told me a tale about some extra speakers he had for an expensive home theater system that he wanted to give me cheap because he "couldn't take them back to the shop." I said no. He pressed on with his pitch, his voice rising with almost-convincing urgency. I said no again. The light turned green, and I was gone.

I figured he was a con man, and that whatever speakers I'd have gotten would have fallen apart upon contact with Earth's atmosphere. What I didn't know was that this con has a specific name: The White-Van Speakers con. Fat Tony was right. Crime boasts a rich lexicon.

There's only one part I think the grifters flubbed. The con calls for them to prowl a high-traffic area for someone who looks flush with cash. I don't know what it was about me--the Costco clothing, the filthy ten-year old Nissan Sentra with a missing right turn signal--that screamed money to these guys, but I think they need to work out a better system for identifying their mark.

Isaac Hayes

It saddened me greatly to hear of Isaac Hayes's death. As a tribute, I've been playing his music here, and I watched his first appearance as Gandy Fitch in the Rockford Files episode "The Hammer of C Block". Wonderful stuff.

Dispensing Judgment

John Edwards has admitted to an affair that he'd previously denied having.

As a one-time supporter, do I feel betrayed? Hmm. Not really. After all, he never told me he wouldn't see other people. Do I think he should get a day or two of shit for having cheated on his wife? No doubt the moral guardians of the nation will hurl shit at him regardless of what I think. That's what society pays them for, when society isn't blowing its mad money on internet porn. I can hear them now, even though I'm deliberately avoiding cable news, "To think this man was almost President! A man who can lie to his wife about an affair can lie about anything!"

Actually, I think we can disprove that one. American history overflows with men who were respectable specimens in private, but lying reprobates in public. America has endured, just in the last half century, a pair of miserable sods who, as Presidents, lied about malfeasance, conspiracy, and fraud in the CIA, the FBI, the Justice Department, the IRS, the Department of Homeland Security, FEMA, the Pentagon, the NSC, the NSA, the Committee to Re-Elect the President, the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth, and the White House. Neither Richard Nixon nor George W. Bush approached a microphone during their respective presidencies without declaiming a dozen hand-crafted lies into it. George W. Bush has lied so profligately during the last eight years that, if he introduced himself to me right now, I'd demand three pieces of identification and a DNA sample. That said, to the best of my knowledge, neither Richard Nixon nor George W. Bush ever cheated on their wives. If asked about that, they could justifiably put up an indignant front and speak truthfully of their devotion to their spouses.

I've always taken it that a man who can lie about cheating on his wife is a man who's capable of lying about cheating on his wife. In this area alone can I assume his credibility is suspect. In other areas I try to assess his credibility by comparing his statements to reality, as I understand it. When John Edwards described the two Americas, he was describing something that matched my experience of how this country operates. When he told me the merits of his health plan, I gleaned from others who know more about the field than I do that Edwards knew what he was talking about. These statements and policies of his retain credibility, even though the man was a jackass where his marriage was concerned.

It's too bad that Edwards has damaged his reputation by lying about sex, because it allows stupid people to conclude that those lies negate everything of value the man has ever said. Ah, well. What's to be done?

The Original Maverick

I understand that John McCain has recently taken to touting himself in his advertisements as the "original Maverick". While a few who probably don't know any better have claimed that the original Maverick should, in fact, be Tom Cruise's character from a movie that helped finance one of Don Simpson's 1980s drug buys, the smarter of us all know that the original Maverick is the gentleman pictured above.

Parenthetically, Mr. Garner is now in poor health, but I'm willing to bet that, should he get a chance to vote, he'll vote for Obama.

Excused Absence

Sorry I've been away so long. I've been busy outlining a movie script so that I can win a bet with bitterspice. (You'll learn not to bet me, Sweetheart.) I've also been preparing Diary of A Superfluous Man for podcast and organizing the auditions for same. And I've been trying to keep out of trouble with creditors and get a short story mailed to an editor who asked for it and...well, I could have just said I've been busy but where's the fun in that.

Thought to chew on:

Ten years ago, we impeached the President for saying, during an official inquiry into the adventures of his penis, that it depended on what the meaning of "is" was. Today we don't impeach a President whose administration asserts a difference between removing a detainee's clothes for "enhanced interrogation" and stripping him naked for torture. I guess it says a lot about what sorts of nudity we Americans prefer.

How Can You Go Wrong With Cute Robots?

Well you can, but Pixar didn't. I realize I'm joining a very large chorus, and taking on all the discomfort that comes with that, but I absolutely adored Wall-E. From its unexpected use of the secondary Broadway song-and-dance number "Put On Your Sunday Clothes" during an animated trip through the galaxy to the final, joyous scene on Earth, this picture owned me. I'd follow Wall-E, this cute little tramp of a robot, just about anywhere, and I'm glad this movie let me.

See it. Live it. Love it. Be it.

The Many Faces of Bad

As longtime readers, all three of you, already know, I'm come to know bad movies of many kinds and styles. And today I've decided, for my amusement, to break bad movies down by arbitrary categories, in hopes of groping toward my bad movie aesthetic.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin.

(This post, incidentally, is dedicated to the late Jesse Helms, a beacon to bigoted halfwits everywhere, whose long political career is one of the many things that North Carolina will have to spend the next ten thousand years apologizing for.)

Worst Movie I've Ever Watched on a Premium Cable Channel: The Lonely Lady

Because I was actively repressing my memory of this movie, I almost put Glitter here. Now Glitter is a singularly awful, cheesy, and exploitive look at the ugly side of show business; but nobody tried to rape Mariah Carey with a garden hose, or marry her off to an impotent guy who carries said garden hose around whenever he really needs to win an argument, or place her spread eagled on a pool table while some sleaze shoots pool balls up her crotch. Mariah Carey, even in the delicate mental state she was in during the making and promotion of Glitter would never have agreed to such humiliations. Pia Zadora, however, being of sound mind, agreed to it straight away. Indeed, her billionaire husband financed it. The Lonely Lady could be used in aversion therapy. Anyone who watches it will shun show business, movies, pool tables, typewriters, eurotrash, garden tools, or human sexual organs for at least ten years. This movie made me ashamed to be a multi-cellular organism.

Worst Movie I've Ever Watched on Basic Cable: Jaws: the Revenge

I will give this movie credit for this much: it gave me a catch phrase to use whenever someone does something impossible in a movie. In this picture, the shark attacks a plane that Michael Caine's character has crashed into the ocean. The plane goes under, and presumably Caine does to; but a moment later his cast-mates are fishing him out of the drink, intact, and wearing dry clothes. When they ask him how he evaded the shark and made it to the boat (they don't notice his dry clothing), he says "It wasn't easy!" I say that all the time when I watch wild, inexplicable action in pictures now. Thanks, Jaws 4! Basic plot of the movie? Mrs. Brodie suspects that the shark who attacked her husband in the first movie is now after her and her family. (Apparently, somewhere on the Paramount lot, the shark and Michael Myers merged into one.) So she flies to the Bahamas to be with her son and flirt stupidly with Michael Caine. Eventually, to save everyone else--because everyone else can't just pick up an move to Nebraska where the shark would have a really hard time--she decides to sacrifice herself to the shark. There she has flashbacks to moments in previous Jaws movies, and this is odd because she wasn't present for the moments she flashes back to. Eventually, the black guy dies, the shark roars, and the movie ends.

Worst Movie I've Ever Watched on Video: Monster A Go-Go

This movie contains two lies in the title alone. There's no monster, and there's no a-go-go. There's a lot of black screen to make you think your television is broken. There's a lot of tedious dialog that never goes anywhere. There's a long scene where an actor leads the camera away for a long walk down a long hallway, so that it won't see the "monster" tearing up the room the actor has left. There's an actor who, before he answers the phone, makes a "Brrring-Brrring" noise. There's a full cast change in the middle of the movie.

Roger Ebert once described a movie as being no improvement over a blank screen. This movie was a blank screen, occasionally interrupted by visible tedium. Stay away.

Worst Movie I've Ever Watched on An Airplane: Armageddon

Because I'm tired of bitching about this picture, I'll turn it over to the fabulous Bad Astronomy and the equally fabulous Roger Ebert. My only addition to what they'll say is what I said when I first saw this piece of shit: "I wanted to walk out of this movie, and I was on a plane!"

Most Morally Degrading Picture I've Ever Seen: tie Sidehackers, Amityville 2: The Possession, The Lonely Lady

Okay, in Amityville 2, a possessed teenaged boy barges into his sister's room one night and asks to take naked pictures of her. Eeew! Right? Y'know what's even more disgusting? She shrugs and whips her top off. The boy's possessed. I want to know what her excuse was supposed to be. Five minutes later, the two are having sex. Why is she involved in that? Is she supposed to be evil too? I thought the point of the movie was that this family was fine before they arrived in this house. It looks to me like they were pretty fucking evil to start with. I would have thought that Satan, or whatever evil hell beast held sway over the Amityville house in the movie, would have seen that and said, "Whoa! Okay! You motherfuckers are too sick even for me! You ought to be ashamed of yourselves, Mr. and Mrs. Caligula! Keep the damn house, and may you rot in the filth of your incestuous fornication!" Repugnant!

(Also, there's a moment in the movie that just defies explanation. The demon has possessed the teenaged boy in the movie, yet the demon also barks instructions to the teenaged boy through his Walkman. Why would this be necessary if he's possessed the boy? Does the demon just need to think out loud a lot?)

The Sidehackers starts out as a pointless, but harmless movie about a ridiculous sport called sidehacking, in which a team involving a motorcycle rider and a guy who hangs off one side of the motorcycle, race around. Soon we meet two sidehackers. One sidehacker's girl tries to seduce another sidehacker, fails, and for revenge claims she was raped. In revenge, the aggrieved sidehacker kidnaps the other sidehacker and his girl, beats him, and rapes her to death. And then it gets grim. By the end, you wish that humanity would just curl up on the floor and die.

You know how I feel about The Lonely Lady.

Respected Film That I Dislike Intensely: Happiness

I respect many things about Todd Solondz's Happiness. Solondz gets good performances from his actors. His dialog is frequently witty and sharp. He has a good eye. But I came away from this film feeling as if it was saying to me that sexual desire inevitably makes people hypocritical, mean-spirited, neurotic, and violent. The characters felt over-determined, which might not have been a problem if they'd been over-determined in service of a picture whose theme struck me as true. Instead, his movie's view of sexuality brings to mind that over-celebrated twit Camille Paglia, whose view of sex the late Molly Ivins dissected in the following fashion:

Paglia's view of sex--that it is irrational, violent, immoral, and wounding--is so glum that one hesitates to suggest that it might be instead, well, a lot of fun, and maybe even affectionate and loving.

I don't know if the fun, affectionate, or loving aspects of sexuality had ever occurred to Solondz; or if he decided to ignore that reality because it wouldn't help him build his case against the upper-middle income suburbanites he apparently loathes. Either way, his denigration of human sexuality leaves me thinking of Happiness as a well-made picture that is also deeply wrong.

Worst Movie I've Ever Seen in a Theater:

I hate to punk out at the end like this, but because I know one of the people who was in this movie and wouldn't want to piss him, or her off, I'm going to demur on this one. (That person, if he or she has guessed which movie I'm talking about, should know that I thought that he or she was the best thing in it, for whatever that's worth.) Those who know me and promise not to tell tales out of school can email me for the offending movie's moniker.

Until next time, kiddies.

The Lighter Side of 007

Daniel Craig is brilliant in this sketch for British TV in which he is besotted with a woman who has no idea that he's the actor who plays James Bond.

Best Line: "She doesn't know what I do, but she knows who I am."

Longer Carlin Post

Because I live in Seattle, I got an extra treat the last couple of times George Carlin came to town. Seattle was either the first stop or one of the earliest stops on Carlin's last two tours, and, because he always showed up with new material, I was among those who heard it first. He'd come out to great applause, place a notebook or a stack of cards on a stool or tabletop, and tell us that, because he was still shaping and refining his material, he'd be referring to these notes throughout the show. I loved the idea that I was, in a small way, a part of his revision process, and that the work he was doing here would eventually shape his performance in an HBO special nine months or a year down the road. When I watched his last HBO special, I thought back to his performance at Seattle Center and, in between laughs, took note of the differences--what he left in, what he cut, where he changed cadence, where he added or subtracted pauses or looks. Yeah, I can forget my wallet or my keys any day, but I've a great memory for voices, and Carlin's was one of my favorites.

What amazed me most about him was his ability to stay fresh as he aged. Most comedians last, if they're lucky, five or ten years before their acts go stale and force them into talk-show hosting or some other menial occupation. But Carlin kept going. From middle-class observational comic to hippy to cantankerous old man, he both changed with the times and remained himself. It's an almost impossible feat, but he pulled it off. His material ranged over a universe of topics. Pick a subject. Carlin had something to say about it, and it was smarter and funnier than anything you'd say about it. His Tacoma show ten years ago (or so) made me laugh so hard that my ribs ached for a week, and kept me thinking long after the ache subsided.

Losing him hurts. He was something to look forward to on a planet that sorely lacks things to look forward to. I'm glad I got to see him as often as I did, but I'm a greedy person. I never got enough, and I guess I never will.

Goodbye George

Sadly, not Bush; Carlin.



Yes, George, something is fucked up. You're not here anymore. I'll miss you.

Dave Allen Talks Religion

One of my favorite comedians, Dave Allen, on growing up Irish Catholic:

Tut-Tutting As the First Refuge of A Scoundrel

Michael Gerson, Washington Post columnist and former speechwriter for George W. Bush, wags his finger at Al Franken for his satirical piece in Playboy:

In the razor-close and nationally important Senate race in Minnesota, Republican incumbent Norm Coleman is presented with a unique political problem. Should he raise in his ads the issue of comedian Al Franken's offensive vulgarity? Or would this risk a backlash against Coleman for coarsening the public conversation? Remember that when Ken Starr detailed Bill Clinton's most repulsive antics -- stained dresses and such -- it was Starr who was accused of sexual obsessiveness.

Franken's defenders explain that his edginess is the result of being a "satirist" -- a term he embraces. "My work, dare I say, is provocative, touching and funny," Franken has explained. "It sounds immodest, but I now have a brand name in political satire."

Satire has been called "punishment for those who deserve it." Writers from Erasmus to Jonathan Swift to George Orwell have used humor, irony and ridicule to expose the follies of the powerful, the failures of blind ideology and the comic weakness of human nature itself.

So what is Franken's "provocative, touching and funny" contribution to the genre? Consider his article in Playboy magazine titled "Porn-O-Rama!" in which he enthuses that it is an "exciting time for pornographers and for us, the consumers of pornography." The Internet, he explains, is a "terrific learning tool. For example, a couple of years ago, when he was 12, my son used the Internet for a sixth-grade report on bestiality. Joe was able to download some effective visual aids, which the other students in his class just loved." Franken goes on to relate a soft-core fantasy about women providing him with sex who were trained at the "Minnesota Institute of Titology."

Well, I've always felt that since most of us have done the "repulsive act" that results in stained dresses, or sheets, or other household fabrics (Billy Mays is ready to start shouting about a new cleaning solution, isn't he?), the vulgarity does lie with the blue-nosed twirp who insists on invading our private lives, parading the stained fabric before the public, and harping on it for months on end. But let that pass.

The clip Gerson quotes from the Franken piece doesn't strike me as the most original comic idea in the world. Still, it does offer an amusing take on the way we hype the internet as a learning tool even as we use it, mostly, to polish our tools. Does it fail to live up to the dignity we expect from members of the U.S. Senate? I dunno. Considering that Dick Cheney, current president of the senate, once invited a senior member of the senate to violate himself in a highly impractical fashion, I'd say it actually rises one or two notches above the apparently acceptable standard. At least Franken was kidding.

Is Gerson finished? Nope:

Our popular culture, of course, violates even these expansive boundaries of tastelessness with regularity. We laugh at comedies featuring the C-word and at cartoons of foul-mouthed third-graders. In the cause of relevance and realism, our common life is already decorated with excrement. Why should political discourse be any different?

For at least one reason: Because vulgarity is often the opposite of civility. This is not, of course, always true. I know a brilliant and large-hearted academic with roots in south Philly who uses the F-word with the frequency of "like" or "and." But the vulgarity of "The Jerry Springer Show" or misogynous rap music -- the cultural equivalents of Franken's political "satire" -- generally expresses contempt and cruelty. Franken is not content to disagree with Karl Rove; he calls him "human filth." He is not satisfied to criticize Ari Fleischer; Franken terms him a "chimp." The objects of Franken's humor -- including political opponents and women -- are not merely mocked but dehumanized. His trashiness is also nastiness. Rather than lampooning the emptiness and viciousness of our political discourse -- a proper role for satire -- Franken has powerfully reinforced those failures.

Hmm...I'm not sure that someone who looks down his nose at people who get a laugh out of South Park, one of the cleverest satirical shows of the last twenty years, should be in the business of determining the "proper role for satire". As for Franken's calling Rove "human filth", I think that when speaking of a man who has gleefully accused opponents of child molestation without evidence, who has used push polling to intimate that Ann Richards's staff was dominated by lesbians or that John McCain had a black child, and who has helped build the most corrupt and criminal presidential administration in history, calling that man "human filth" is actually a bit tame.

I'm suspicious of people who call for civility in public discourse because the Bush administration used those calls as a euphemism to cover their true wish: "Let's stop arguing so that I can do whatever the hell I want." Underneath all the Gersonian tut-tutting was the Dick Cheney "go fuck yourself".

If civility is your bag, the courts of renaissance princes were truly wonderful places. There was a lot of calumny and murder, of course. But the slander was always elegantly whispered, and the daggers were always polished. I prefer my politics straight and down-home. That means more open fights and naughty words, but it also means that the peaces are more genuine, and the compromises are more inclusive. When I see M.P.s in the British Parliament yelling at each other during question time, or the House of Commons slamming the door in the Queen's face every year, I say, "There's a country that's all right."

Do You Ever Feel Like Crying But You Don't Know Why?

I know why. You must have sensed it, this ineffable, dark presence that looms over all our lives, suffocating our hopes, strangling our dreams, sapping our collective will to live and think and do. A presence so terrifying that none but the boldest of us dare whisper its name.

Yet I'll whisper it.

Come closer.

Closer.

Okay, Casanova, back off a little.

Here it is.

They're bringing the Smurfs to the big screen.

Last one to leave civilization, turn out the lights.

The Eternal Question

Now that Indiana is under water, we return to that age-old question. Which is worse, George W. Bush doing something, or George W. Bush doing nothing?

The Ten Films I've Seen Most Often

10. For Your Eyes Only (1981) Roger Moore, Carole Bouquet, Topol. Until I was twelve years old, I wasn't aware that anyone other than Roger Moore had played James Bond. This was one of the first Bonds I remember seeing in the theatre, and it's the one I watched most often on cable or video. Though in later years I found other Bond pictures I've liked better, this was for a long time my favorite, and it's still in my top five. The ski stunts alone are worth the price of admission, and watching Bond have to elude his would-be murderers in the world's wimpiest Peugeot cinches it for me.

9. Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb 1964 Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden: "You can't fight in here! This is the War Room!" This is one of my favorite pictures to quote, and of all of Stanley Kubrick's films--and I love them all--this is the one that most often finds its way into my DVD player. In this picture he gives Peter Sellers a workout that would have killed just about any other actor, and I love every minute of it.

8. Superman: The Movie and Superman II Christopher Reeve, Margot Kidder, Terrance Stamp, Gene Hackman. I find it easier to consider these films as a unit. For some people, Sean Connery will always be James Bond. For me, Christopher Reeve will always be Superman, and all others will be pretenders to the throne (yes, Brandon Routh, I'm looking at you). Reeve managed to find ways to be compelling and charismatic as both Clark Kent and Superman, and, in the sequel, revealed that, for Superman, the wish-fulfillment fantasy is to be Clark Kent--though he sours on the reality of being Clark Kent awfully fast. It's amazing how much the Superman character develops in these two pictures, and after that, almost anything would have been a letdown. (Though they didn't have to let us down quite so far or so fast, did they?)

7. Tootsie (1983) Dustin Hoffman, Jessica Lange, Bill Murray. Sydney Pollack. There were summers where I'd watch this picture two or three times in a day. I used to know it from memory, and would run through the first scene between Michael Dorsey and his agent, George Fields, in my head while on walks. "YOU WERE A TOMATO! A TOMATO DOESN'T HAVE LOGIC! A TOMATO CAN'T MOVE!" "That's what I said! So how can a tomato sit down, George?" I'd quote it as well. "I don't believe in hell. I believe in unemployment, but I don't believe in hell." I loved the writing. I loved Hoffman in a dress. I loved Bill Murray's entire role. Goddamn it, I love it all!

6. Wargames (1983) Matthew Brodderick, Ally Sheedy, Dabney Coleman. So many of my favorite movies involve Dabney Coleman in some way. (A couple of my favorite TV shows too.) There was never a man so good at being wrong about everything. Coleman raised being wrong to an art in Tootsie, 9 to 5 and this film about a computer that, because it doesn't know the difference between games and real life, tries to destroy the world in order to win a game. Though the film's ideas of what computers can do seems more fanciful now than when the movie was released, its message and its method are still compelling.

5. The Empire Strikes Back (1980) Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, James Earl Jones. The best of the Star Wars pictures, which used to mean more than it does now, Empire boasts character development, witty dialog, outstanding special effects, and the most dramatic lightsaber duel in the series' history. Favorite line: "Hey, your worship. I was only trying to help." "Would you stop calling me that?" "Sure, Leia." Never again was the series that funny.

4. Airplane! (1980) Leslie Nielsen, Robert Stack, Julie Hagerty, Robert Hays. Everybody knows this film by heart, so I won't bother quoting it. It's impossible to explain in a synopsis how funny it is, so I won't bother to summarize. I'll just say that never have I laughed so hard, for so long, at one piece of film. However many times I see it, I can't stop giggling.

3. Goodfellas (1990) Ray Liotta, Lorraine Bracco, Paul Sorvino, Joe Pesci, Robert De Niro. Whenever students ask me how to open a story or an essay, I refer them to one of the first lines of this movie: "As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster." The movie gets right to the point, and it stays on the point, unraveling The Godfather's myths about the mob to reveal how much of it had to do with just getting the best bread in the store and the best table in the club. From Ray Liotta on the front lawn to Joe Pesci's "Funny Guy" scene to, well, everything else, the movie never strikes a false note. Once it starts, I can't stop watching it.

2. Real Genius. (1985) Val Kilmer, Gabe Jarret, William Atherton. I first caught this movie on cable. My mother was watching it, and I, at first, wasn't too impressed. By the middle, however, I was hooked on this story about socially awkward genius's who were trying to prevent a crooked professor from using their laser as a space-based assassination weapon. This was partly because I thought of myself as a socially awkward genius, and partly because I wanted to be Val Kilmer's version of a socially awkward genius. I think I watched this movie roughly seven-trillion times. But I still haven't seen it as much as I've seen...

1. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Ricardo Montalban. Star Trek movies have never been, and likely can never be, better than this one. Do you hear me, Mr. Abrams? Nicholas Meyer took a Star Trek episode, "Space Seed", that was decent but not brilliant, and turned it into a meditation on revenge and the necessity of accepting loss that I still need to watch every now and then, even though I've committed the film to memory.

So that's it. The final proof that, in spite of my best efforts, I'm trapped in the 1980s. Oh, well, like all the rest, I'm a prisoner of a time. Cover my face.

Sydney Pollack Died

"Life goes on. It always does, until it doesn't."
Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack) Eyes Wide Shut

Indiana Jones

I just returned from a late screening of Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull. Is it a fun picture? Yes. Does it have great action sequences? You bet. Is it as good as Raiders of the Lost Ark? Get serious. My reason for feeling that way? I don't want to spoil it, but you'll find a lot of dangling plot threads in this movie, more than I'd expect from a story that's been through as many revisions as this one has.

Still, it's great to see Ford back in the hat. It's great to see Karen Allen anywhere. And it was especially great to see Indiana Jones try to survive a nuclear test. That alone is worth the cost of going to the theater. So go.

It's Up

After a month of sporadic, poorly organized labor, I'm ready to launch the soft, supple, surprisingly limber and sexy website to be known forever as The McCroskey Memorial Internet Playhouse. It's the new portal for all my past and future audio projects, including Let Us Sit Upon the Ground and Christian Science. Bookmark it, link to it, stick out your tongue and lick its shiny boots, marry it and move to the kinds of suburbs populated by upper middle class neurotics who hold key parties and carry on cold, detached affairs (all-in-all, The Ice Storm was a pretty good picture), or, if you're more conventional, click the damn link.

New Stuff

You'll notice if you look in the right column that I have links to feeds for both Let Us Sit Upon the Ground and, the new podcast, Christian Science. I'll soon be able to direct you to a new website, the McCroskey Memorial Internet Playhouse, where you can find all my audio projects in one location.

Ah, my expanding empire!

Pirates of the Carribean: At World's End

Three hours...

Three mindbendingly dull hours...

Three mindbendingly dull hours I'll never get back...

To understand how I feel about Pirates of the Carribean: Blah, Blah, Blah... all you need to know is that a major plot point involves all of the Pirate Lords converging on a place called Shipwreck Island to engage in...A MEETING! A ROUNDTABLE FRIGGING DISCUSSION! They could have booked a fucking Marriott in Singapore or wherever the hell they were, but they go instead to Shipwreck Island, a name which promises, but fails to deliver, actual shipwrecks. (I understand in the first draft of the screenplay of INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM, Mola Ram holds a thirty-minute seminar in the Temple of Doom--complete with slides and a generous Q&A session--about the votive objects of the Kali Cult and the veracity of heart-removal legends. Impatient, Indiana Jones cracks his bullwhip and asks several pointed questions about Mola Ram's scholarship.) This is the key symptom of POCBBB's mortal disease. There isn't a promise that this movie makes that it doesn't break. Instead of a streamlined, amusing comic adventure starring Johnny Depp as the world's feyest buccaneer, we get nothing but a parade of special effects, rambling psychotic explanations, and battle scenes notable for their lack of actual battle.

In this movie, two huge fleets of warships line up to have a fight that promises to make Trafalgar look like a sculling contest between the Harvard and Princeton alums. Do they do battle? Keira Knightley gives a speech that supposed to be a rousing, St. Crispin's Day/Braveheart style address to the pirate sailors to prepare them for such a battle. But in the end, only two ships fight. They then carry the battle to a third ship--the one carrying the movie's major villain. Does the Major Villain fight back? No! Does he call upon his big ass fleet to help? No! He stands there and lets the two ships blow him off the water. Why? I don't know!

And it's not as if the movie didn't try to explain! The first two hours consist of little besides explanations, endless, painful, impenetrable explanations whose every word added another layer of confusion. The el-cheapo-stinko movie The Cave Dwellers has a famously bad scene in which a boring old guy calls time out on the movie he's in to summarize, for twenty minutes or so, the previous movie in the series. But with the bigger budgets that Jerry Bruckheimer can muster, everybody gets a whack at being the boring old guy. The result is a narrative so convoluted, so unfocused, that for all its supposed intricacy it feels more like a story a four-year-old is making up as he goes along.

If I were religious, I'd want to know just how much penance this movie counts for.

Blowing Way Past the Point

Do I doubt that Salon's Cary Tennis is a friendly, helpful, courteous, kind, shirt-of-your-back sorta-kinda sonofagun? No. But I sometimes wonder why he's paid to give people advice. This letter in Salon struck me. It's from a guy who wants to know how to cope with his disgust at his friend's openness to teaching young earth creationism in a science class (at a Christian school, presumably). Here's a snip of Tennis's response:

As I walked around Stern Grove in San Francisco this morning, I thought of my own early exposure to the science of single-cell organisms, atomic theory and geology. I was given a solid foundation in how the earth was formed, how elements are structured and how life processes occur. What I cherish most about that early exposure to science is that it gave me a coherent story of creation. It started with simple things and proceeded in an orderly and gradual way toward the more complex, revealing, in the end, literally everything under the sun.

What I loved about science was the story it told. It provided a creation myth.

I do not mean to say that science rests on belief, that it is not factual. What I mean to say is that our attachment to science, and our deep need for what it gives us, can cause us to act unscientifically in its defense.

So what would a true scientist do when confronted with this situation? Let's say a true scientist is visiting us from another planet, trying to observe and record significant phenomena so he can better understand what is going on in the universe.

Would a true scientist experience revulsion and nausea at the scenes of our culture that you describe? Would a true scientist observe the teaching of mythology to children and label it child abuse? Would a true scientist refuse friendship with another person because that person engaged in the teaching of these strange and wondrous mythologies to children?

If a true scientist came upon a pre-modern culture living right in Manhattan, would he be revolted and nauseated? Would he claim that in transmitting its mythology to its children this pre-modern culture was committing child abuse?

Why is it that colorful beliefs and mythologies are fascinating in other cultures, but considered pernicious in our own?

To answer Tennis's question, yes I think a scientist from another planet, Mr. Spock, let us say, would be appalled if a science teacher used his class to teach mythology as if it were science. He would come away mystified about why a species that had spent centuries accumulating evidence and testing theories against it to determine how life developed on this planet, and how this planet developed in this universe would decide to toss all of that over the side and teach an ancient fable as if it were confirmed theory. He'd then recommend that we be kept out of the Galactic Federation until we matured as a society (or blew ourselves up, or proved an impediment to the construction of a hyperspace bypass).

I have no objection to teaching the Bible in a literature course, or a course on religion, or even (with some caveats) a course on history or western thought. Only recently, I had to crack open The Book of Revelations to give a student some context for understanding Yeats's "The Second Coming". I was careful to explain that I wasn't proselytizing--when my student asked me about my religion, I told him I was an atheist. I went on to explain that, whether he chose to believe in some, all, or none of the Bible's stories, a working knowledge of them is essential to understanding much of western literature.

But a science class is not the place for the Bible. The Bible has no science content. The Genesis story is a poem about the creation of the world. It's built on metaphor and fantasy, not data or observation. Teaching Genesis in a science class will leave students unable to understand what the scientific method is or how it works. The same goes for every other creation myth humanity has told itself. And it's not an issue of preferring more exotic cultures to North American fundamentalist ones, as Tennis charges. Mr. Spock and I would be just as appalled if someone proposed to teach the Bakuba creation myth, which holds that a god named Mbombo vomited up the universe during a series of bouts of indigestion, as if it were science. I dearly love Ovid's account of the formation of the world in The Metamorphoses, but if a rich eccentric seriously proposed digging for evidence of the Age of Gold and the Age of Brass, I'd back slowly away from him while suggesting he get the counseling he so desperately needs.

It's a dangerous thing to confuse myth and science, or myth and history. And we don't even have to look a humanity's major disasters (World Wars, inquisitions, genocides, witch burnings) to see that. The Bush administration is evidence enough of the perils of willful delusion. Encouraging children to substitute fables for realities is an insult both to fable and reality. It is a form of abuse, and while, if I were the letter writer, I'd try to couch my objections delicately, I'd certainly make it clear that teaching lies to schoolchildren could cost the teacher at least one friend.

Do We Know What We're Talking About When We Talk About Movies?

You know what bothers me? Well, plenty of things. But what's bothering me at the moment is imprecise writing. Case in point, Armond White's essay in the New York Press called "WHAT WE DON’T TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT MOVIES". What starts as an essay bemoaning the proliferation of bad writing among internet film critics goes on to make a series of hasty, and increasingly bombastic, generalizations about all film critics.

Example:

What we don’t talk about when we talk about movies these days reveals that we have not moved past the crippling social tendency that 1990s sociologists called Denial. The most powerful, politically and morally engaged recent films (The Darjeeling Limited, Private Fears in Public Places, World Trade Center, The Promise, Shortbus, Ask the Dust, Akeelah and the Bee, Bobby, Running Scared, Munich, War of the Worlds, Vera Drake) were all ignored by journalists whose jobs are to bring the (cultural) news to the public. Instead, only movies that are mendacious, pseudo-serious, sometimes immoral or socially retrograde and irresponsible (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Army of Shadows, United 93, Marie Antoinette, Zodiac, Last Days, There Will Be Blood, American Gangster, Gone Baby Gone, Letters From Iwo Jima, A History of Violence, Tarnation, Elephant) have received critics’ imprimatur.

I'd like Mr. White to show me just who ignored War of the Worlds. If he felt like it he could spend a day reading the reviews listed for it at the Internet Movie Database. The same goes for Munich and World Trade Center, both wide-release pictures by two famous directors (Spielberg and Stone, respectively). Akeelah and the Bee, lacking a big name director or a blockbuster budget, still managed to secure good notices, including a four-star review from Roger Ebert, who also conferred a special jury prize on the picture when he released his Ten-Best list. While it's true that he didn't finance a ticker tape parade for the movie along Chicago's Wacker Drive, I don't think anyone can say he ignored the movie or gave it anything less than his complete support. Instead, it puts the lie to White's second claim in the paragraph that "only movies that are mendacious...have received the critics' imprimatur."

I bring Ebert up here because Mr. White goes to considerable lengths to attack the various things Ebert has allegedly done to destroy film criticism, and film, and indeed the entire moral structure of the universe as we know it. (That last bit was an exaggeration. I apologize for it, which puts me one up on Mr. White.) White contrasts Ebert's era with that of Sarris and Kael in order to demonstrate that, by making film criticism accessible to the unwashed, Mr. Ebert has...well, I guess I'll have to quote Mr. White to explain:

To discuss movies as if they were irrelevant to individual experience—just bread-and-circus rabble-rousers—breeds indifference. And that’s only one of the two worst tendencies of contemporary criticism. The other is elitism.

This schism had an ironic origin—the popularization of film criticism as a consumer’s method. A generation of readers and filmgoers were once sparked by the discourse created by Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris during the period that essayist Philip Lopate described as ìthe heroic era of moviegoing.î The desire to be a critic fulfilled the urge to respond to what was exciting in the culture. Movie commentary was a media rarity in those days and relatively principled (even the Times’ Arts & Leisure section used to present a forum for contrary opinions). And then the television series At the Movies happened. Its success, moving from public to commercial broadcast (who can tell the difference anymore?), resulted in an institution. Permit an insider’s story: It is said that At the Movies host Roger Ebert boasted to Kael about his new TV show, repeatedly asking whether she’d seen it. Kael reportedly answered “If I want a layman’s opinion on movies, I don’t have to watch TV.”

Kael’s cutting remark cuts to the root of criticism’s problem today. Ebert’s way of talking about movies as disconnected from social and moral issues, simply as entertainment, seemed to normalize film discourse—you didn’t have to strive toward it, any Average Joe American could do it. But criticism actually dumbed down. Ebert also made his method a road to celebrity—which destroyed any possibility for a heroic era of film criticism.
At the Movies helped criticism become a way to be famous in the age of TV and exploding media, a dilemma that writer George W. S. Trow distilled in his apercu “The Aesthetic of the Hit”: “To the person growing up in the power of demography, it was clear that history had to do not with the powerful actions of certain men but with the processes of choice and preference.” It was Ebert’s career choice and preference to reduce film discussion to the fumbling of thumbs, pointing out gaffes or withholding “spoilers”—as if a viewer needed only to like or dislike a movie, according to an arbitrary set of specious rules, trends and habits. Not thought. Not feeling. Not experience. Not education. Just reviewing movies the way boys argued about a baseball game.

I won't mock too hard the idea of a "heroic era of moviegoing". I was once moved to write an epic poem about my experiences watching Goldeneye "'Twas Brosnan's steely gaze 'pon the dish of fire that roused me 'gainst self-slaughter..." Sorry. I won't, however, drop one thing. Mr. White, Andrew Sarris's "era" isn't over. He's writing for the New York Observer and you can read his reviews on current releases whenever you're of a mind to do so. His rival, Pauline Kael, went to the great box office in the sky, but Sarris is still with us.

As for criticism dumbing down...well...I'm not sure about that either. Were daily newspaper reviewers ever writing to people other than "Average Joe American"? After all, Mr. White, and I hate to tell you this, lots of people do just like or dislike movies, and many of them would prefer to know before blowing money on a film whether it's likely to entertain them or not. That's why they're reading the paper or watching television. Those with more sophisticated tastes will gravitate toward The New Yorker or Film Comment. That's why they're there. They have room to publish longer articles and can assume a certain level of reader knowledge. What Ebert did was broaden the audience for film journalism, with all the costs that this involves. It was ever thus that those who talk to the uninitiated have to speak their language, and say things that they'd find interesting. Mr. White can feel free to dislike Ebert for doing that, but before the next time he wants to start a harangue about how Ebert doesn't educate his audience, he should remember that lots of "Average Joe Americans" would never have heard of Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, or Stanley Kaufmann if Roger Ebert hadn't, from time to time, mentioned them in his columns.

There are plenty of other errors and faults in Armond White's essay. I doubt he'll take advice from me, but if he does I'd tell him that a quick read-through of Orwell's Politics and the English Language would be a good use of his time. Nobody who has a lick of sense and one good eye should allow a sentence like "The love of movies that inspires their gigabytes of hyperbole has been traduced to nonsense language and non-thinking" into print. The love of abstract and polysyllabic words that plagues Mr. White's prose tells me that he might have something to learn from Roger Ebert. I may not find the secrets of the cinematic universe in a Roger Ebert review, but at least I can figure out, after the first reading, what the man is trying to say. I've read Mr. White's essay four times now, and though I'm an educated man with a master's degree in English and several awards for fiction writing, I'm still unsure what Mr. White's problem is. The first three times, I thought it might be might be my fault, but the fourth reading left me wondering and now...well...here were are.

The Days of Wine and Roses

I can only guess how audiences who were accustomed to Jack Lemmon in comedies reacted to his performance in The Days Of Wine and Roses. What I do know is that there were moments watching it where I was in this queasy space between wanting to laugh at some of his antics as a drunk and feeling sick at his character's rapid descent into degradation. For this reason, Blake Edwards was exactly right in casting him. An actor better known for serious work might have taken the role so far into pathos that I would have judged his character instead of being invited to share in the humor that Joe Clay (often wrongly) sees in his own drunkenness. Lemmon's performance took me from a kind of guilty laughter to crushing pain sometimes within a ten second period. Lee Remick, whose character starts as Joe Clay's teetotaling wife and ends up sinking even lower than Clay does, is equally effective. The more I see of her work in the late 50s and early 60s, the more I wish I could see.

The movie isn't one for lovers of linear plots. The Days of Wine and Roses meanders from moment to moment, observing Joe and Kirsten's fall in to alcoholism without forcing them to jump through the hoops of a conventional story. Sometimes this hurts the film. I wasn't clear on just how many jobs Joe had been fired from until he mentioned it in an argument with Kirsten, but now that I think of it, maybe this isn't a flaw. Maybe in some ways the meandering and fogginess about specific plot events is meant, like Lemmon's performance, to put me in the head of a drunk.

It's a good movie. See it.

There's No Place Like Rome

Bitterspice and I spent the afternoon at the Seattle Art Museum's presentation of the Louvre's Roman art pieces. Of course, it's impossible to be comprehensive in any one space about a culture as long-lived and diverse as the Roman Republic and Empire, but damn it if this exhibition doesn't give it the best possible shot. From ancient gladiator action figures to a discussion of changing women's hairstyles as depicted in Roman portraiture, from gods to slaves, the exhibition has a lot. I still haven't processed it all, but what I saw was a knockout. Any readers in Seattle who have yet to catch the exhibit have one week to scrape together twenty bucks and go.

Getting Things The Hell Out Of My House

A list of things leaving my house this week:

Let Us Sit Upon the Ground: submissions to three theaters; two in New York, one in L.A.
The Ice Age: Fifteen query letters to agents in New York and environs.
Michael St. John and the Race for the African Stone: prepared for the Nicholl Gee Screenwriting Fellowship.

So many stamps...

Mad Max

It's sometimes amazing how much can be done on a budget that can conveniently be measured in pennies. Mad Max is one such case. This is a raw, elemental, strange, and unpredictable action picture that begins as a cops vs. street punks movie, and transforms into a revenge picture of surprising power. Mel Gibson plays Max, a cop facing a vicious gang of street thugs on the long and desolate roads of the Australian outback. The story begins with Max as a contented man, secure in his job and happy with his family. But after the gang robs him of both his partner and his wife, Max sets out to even the score.

The chase sequences in Mad Max are the movie's highlights, and the level of excitement George Miller manages to extract from his limited resources is impressive. Watch the chase sequence. Miller never lets us lose sight of who's chasing whom, and clues us in on the strategies of the players. This allows us to feel as if we're participating in the action instead of merely observing it. Michael Bay has had budgets many orders of magnitude higher than Miller had in Mad Max, but he's never achieved 1/10th as much.

This movie was dubbed into Mid-Atlantic English for the U.S. market, but I can't imagine it in any accent other than Australian. American accents just don't fit this bizarre landscape and these equally bizarre denizens of the landscape. While my memories of many U.S. action films tend to run together, it'll be hard for me to forget what made Mad Max so different.

Gotta Love That Media Expertise, Boy

It no longer amazes me that people who don't really know what they're talking about can get on TV as experts. It does, however, still burn me. Take the case of Patricia Cornwell, the mystery author whose foray into non-fiction accused Victorian artist Walter Sickert of being Jack the Ripper. Experts on the ripper case have largely debunked Cornwell's case, which oscillates between puffing up weak evidence and glossing over enormous evidentiary gaps.

To sum up:

1. Cornwell claims that she has discovered a mitochondrial DNA link between Sickert and one of the letters that supposedly came from Jack the Ripper. Sounds impressive, doesn't it? But, according to David Cohen, who researched the issue for Slate, mitochondrial DNA samples can be matched to anywhere between .1%-10% of the population. So the sample Cornwell extracted to the letter could have come from Sickert, or from thousands to millions of others. And considering that many, many people have handled this letter over the years, from the sender all the way to Patricia Cornwell and Francis the Talking Mule for all we know, the sample she recovered could have come from any of them.

2. Even if she were to demonstrate a link between Sickert and the letter, this proves nothing about Sickert as a suspect. Scotland Yard received hundreds of letters purporting to come from the Ripper. All but three are certainly hoaxes, and those three are only potentially Ripper letters. Even the "From Hell" letter, which seems to be the most promising (because it came with half a human kidney--like the kidney Ripper victim Catherine Eddowes lost), could easily have been just a medical school prank. Faking Jack the Ripper letters seemed to be, briefly, the national pastime of England. So Sickert could have just been joining in the macabre fun. That makes him weird, but not a killer.

3. Finally, the best evidence tells us that Sickert was in France during the murders. Cornwell supporters like to claim that he could have made a run into England by train and boat to commit his murders, but have yet to produce a scintilla of evidence that he did so. And honestly, why would he bother? A man who derived sadistic pleasure from killing prostitutes could certainly find targets in France. Traveling all the way to Whitechapel doesn't seem like a game that's worth the candle.

Cornwell has surely heard this before, but she still goes on the air to make her claims. That's understandable, I suppose. What bothers me is that so many people who work on TV fail to notice that this woman doesn't deserve the mic. She should be on public access with Kurt Cobain conspiracy theorists, not on national TV, and certainly not without rebuttal.