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.