BABIES HAVING BABIES

Ah, the agony of heightened expectations.

By no means a "bad" film, L'enfant, the winner of the 2005 Palme d'Or is nonetheless a film I expected to enjoy a great deal more than I did. Indeed, it was this ambivalence that led me to withhold this review for so long (at five days, this was the lengthiest viewing-review gap in this blog's history). I kept hoping that as time passed, I might get something, a niggling feeling in the back of my head that wouldn't go away (as with fellow Sélection Officielle Caché), but the further I get from the film, the less I think about it, and for something so willfully Euro-Arty, this is terrible. I have never seen a prior film by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, the Belgian brothers behind Rosetta and Le fils, and there's enough stylistic flourish here that I'm interested in seeing more; but I can't help but look at L'enfant and conclude that there's no "there" there.

The film follows Bruno (Jérémie Renier) and Sonia (Déborah François), two young people (their ages are not made clear, but I'd imagine around 20), who have a newborn baby, Jimmy. Sonia, while not ready to settle down, is at least aware that motherhood carries with it certain responsibilities and duties; Bruno, however, is a monster of immaturity, unable to save money or entertain the thought of a job ("Only fuckers work," he declares at one point). Instead, he lives from day to day on an unending series of petty thefts.

At first, I found the film to be a reasonably engaging if somewhat unexceptional slice-of-life piece. Bruno steals, Bruno buys something fun, Sonia frets that they're poor but doesn't really mind, because they're both kids. There is an obsessive focus on money in the film: a) the value of things; b) the amount Bruno has or is likely to acquire; c) how much he needs to acquire for b) to equal or surpass a). As a portrait of immaturity it's rather effective, and Renier deserves all of his accumulated praise for creating a frivolous delinquent who's just a little too pleasant to hate.

Then comes the twist that I'd hesitate to spoil, except that it appears prominently in the film's trailer: Bruno sells Jimmy. His logic is that he and Sonia can always have another; unsurprisingly she doesn't warm to this, and so begins the epic quest to retrieve the baby and regain Sonia's affections.

The story falters here and never recovers. For one, Bruno is much less interesting when Sonia's not around. Instead, he's paired with the 14 year-old thief in training Steve (Jérémie Segard), his intellectual and emotional equal. I suppose I understand why- giving Bruno a matrix in which to see that he is himself a child, and needs to grow up before the real children get hurt - but it's not anything new. And despite the critical consensus that this film shows us a redemption, I'm not sure that it does. At the end, Bruno cries out of fear and remorse, but there's no sense that he understands his behavior as wrong in any way other than Sonia's refusal to forgive him for it. I do not claim this as a failure; on the contrary, I imagine that this ambiguity is the point. But it leaves the film without a center: why exactly did I spend 95 minutes watching this? In the nihilistic 60's films of a director like Antonioni (who has clearly influenced the brothers Dardenne), there's a sense of why it's right that the audience is denied meaning, but I get nothing like that here.

I mentioned that I liked the film's style, and it is interesting if not nearly so revoltionary as its fans suggest. Virtually every scene in the film is shot as one unbroken, handheld take. The point is, of course, to suggest a documentary-like objectivity (the Dardennes started their career in television documentaries), but both handheld camerawork and a lack of cuts have long been associated with making fiction films seem documentary. So while I acknowledge the complete success of the style, I deny that it is so revolutionary as to justify the accolades the film has received. Still, in the early part of the film, before the plot gets in the way, it adds to the generally engaging "look at these people and their lives" vibe. Oddly, though, I do wish the film had tilted a little more subjectively at the end. Not that I want to be told what to think about themes, but I'm damned if I can figure out what the themes here even are. It's probably worth seeing anyway; for all it's flaws it's a hell of a lot more challenging than anything you'll see by an American in the near future.

Credit where credit's due: despite their (very) superficial similarities, this film is leagues better than Tsotsi.

7/10

YOU DEFINITELY DON'T SHIT WHERE I EAT

First off, I suspect that in the near future I will be making the great migration to another blog service - WordPress, perhaps, Typepad? Does anyone out there who's done the same have any advice? Because Blogger is bending me over and spanking me - I've been trying, on and off, for four hours to post this.

Anyway, weekly Sopranos review:

-I lack the seething hatred for Artie that so many viewers seem to harbor, so the very notion of a Vesuvio-centric episode doesn't drive me into paroxysms of rage. And I definitely liked it more than last week (which, I think I figured out why I dislike the Vito plot: Joseph Gannascoli is simply not a good enough actor to hold down an A-plot). Still, not as good as the first set of episodes.

-The symbolism paralleling Artie with Tony was a bit heavyhanded, I still haven't figured out the rabbit thing at the end, and Tony needs to stop telling people that they go around in pity for themselves, even if it's true. You know what, Chase? I get it.

-Tired of the Christopher-in-Hollywood plot before it began. Fun to see Sir Ben Kingsley, but Lauren Bacall felt like a cartoon.

-I think the show is definitely reaching a point where it needs to fish or cut bait on Tony's newfound moral center: he keeps saying that he wants to be a new man, and doing things like sparing Vito and agonizing over whacking Rusty, but I really want to see some indication that he's suffering inside. I didn't like that he played a supporting character in the show that bears his damn name.

THE GREAT REVULSION

Today, Paul Krugman promises that the future looks bright for the Blue State forces:

"I have a vision — maybe just a hope — of a great revulsion: a moment in which the American people look at what is happening, realize how their good will and patriotism have been abused, and put a stop to this drive to destroy much of what is best in our country."

I wrote those words three years ago in the introduction to my column collection, "The Great Unraveling." It seemed a remote prospect at the time: Baghdad had just fallen to U.S. troops, and President Bush had a 70 percent approval rating.

Now the great revulsion has arrived. The latest Fox News poll puts Mr. Bush's approval at only 33 percent. According to the polling firm Survey USA, there are only four states in which significantly more people approve of Mr. Bush's performance than disapprove: Utah, Idaho, Wyoming and Nebraska. If we define red states as states where the public supports Mr. Bush, Red America now has a smaller population than New York City.

The proximate causes of Mr. Bush's plunge in the polls are familiar: the heck of a job he did responding to Katrina, the prescription drug debacle and, above all, the quagmire in Iraq.

But focusing too much on these proximate causes makes Mr. Bush's political fall from grace seem like an accident, or the result of specific missteps. That gets things backward. In fact, Mr. Bush's temporarily sky-high approval ratings were the aberration; the public never supported his real policy agenda.

Remember, in 2000 Mr. Bush got within hanging-chad and felon-purge distance of the White House only by pretending to be a moderate. In 2004 he ran on fear and smear, plus the pretense that victory in Iraq was just around the corner. (I've always thought that the turning point of the 2004 campaign was the September 2004 visit of the Iraqi prime minister, Ayad Allawi, a figurehead appointed by the Bush administration who rewarded his sponsors by presenting a falsely optimistic picture of the situation in Iraq.)

The real test of the conservative agenda came after the 2004 election, when Mr. Bush tried to sell the partial privatization of Social Security.

Social Security was for economic conservatives what Iraq was for the neocons, a soft target that they thought would pave the way for bigger conquests. And there couldn't have been a more favorable moment for privatization than the winter of 2004-2005: Mr. Bush loved to assert that he had a "mandate" from the election; Republicans held solid, disciplined majorities in both houses of Congress; and many prominent political pundits were in favor of private accounts.

Yet Mr. Bush's drive on Social Security ran into a solid wall of public opposition, and collapsed within a few months. And if Social Security couldn't be partly privatized under those conditions, the conservative dream of dismantling the welfare state is nothing but a fantasy.

So what's left of the conservative agenda? Not much.

That's not a prediction for the midterm elections. The Democrats will almost surely make gains, but the electoral system is rigged against them. The fewer than eight million residents of what's left of Red America are represented by eight U.S. senators; the more than eight million residents of New York City have to share two senators with the rest of New York State.

Meanwhile, a combination of accident and design has left likely Democratic voters bunched together — I'm tempted to say ghettoized — in a minority of Congressional districts, while likely Republican voters are more widely spread out. As a result, Democrats would need a landslide in the popular vote — something like an advantage of 8 to 10 percentage points over Republicans — to take control of the House of Representatives. That's a real possibility, given the current polls, but by no means a certainty.

And there is also, of course, the real prospect that Mr. Bush will change the subject by bombing Iran.

Still, in the long run it may not matter that much. If the Democrats do gain control of either house of Congress, and with it the ability to issue subpoenas, a succession of scandals will be revealed in the final years of the Bush administration. But even if the Republicans hang on to their ability to stonewall, it's hard to see how they can resurrect their agenda.

In retrospect, then, the 2004 election looks like the high-water mark of a conservative tide that is now receding.

VERY BAD THINGS

If this were invented, and actually used? I would stop watching television.

An apparatus (270) and method is disclosed for preventing a viewer from switching from a channel when an advertisement is being displayed on the channel. The apparatus (270) and method comprises an advertisement controller (270) in a video playback device (150) that (1) prevents a viewer of a direct (non-recorded) broadcast from switching channels when an advertisement is displayed, and (2) prevents a viewer of a recorded program from fast forwarding the recorded program in order to skip past advertisements that were recorded with the program. A viewer may either watch the advertisements or pay a fee in order to be able to change channels or fast forward when the advertisements are being displayed.

Via New Scientist.

CANNES 2006 ANNOUNCED

The official selections for the Cannes Film Festival have been announced.

Without going into everything, the Jury this year is full of people who I love without necessarily trusting them to judge a damn thing about movies (President of the Jury: Wong Kar-Wai).

The films in competition:
-L'amico di famiglia, Paolo Sorrentino [The Friend of the Family]
-Babel, Alejandro González Iñárritu
-Il caimano, Nanni Moretti [The Caiman]
-Fast Food Nation, Richard Linklater
-Flandres, Bruno Dumont
-Idigènes, Rachid Bourchareb [Natives]
-Iklimler, Nuri Bilge Ceylan [Climates]
-Juventude em Marcha, Pedro Costa [Youth in March]
-El laberinto del fauno, Guillermo del Toro [Pan's Labyrinth]
-Laitakaupungin valot, Aki Kaurismäki
-Marie-Antoinette, Sofia Coppola
-Quand j'étais chanteur, Xavier Giannoli [When I Was a Singer]
-La raison du plus faible, Lucas Belvaux [The Weakest Reason]
-Red Road, Andrea Arnold (first film)
-Selon Charlie, Nicole Garcia [According to Charlie]
-Southland Tales, Richard Kelly
-Summer Palace, Lou Ye
-The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Ken Loach
-Volver, Pedro Almodóvar [Return]

A lot to be excited about, director-wise; mostly it makes up for the extraordinarily dubious choice of opening with Ron Howard's The Da Vinci Code. And as always, I'm extremely jealous that I can't be in attendance.

LET'S DO THE TWIST

In 1973, George Roy Hill directed a script by David S. Ward, and a genre was invented. The film was The Sting, and it told the story of two con men leading a coalition to pull off a Long Con on the man who murdered their friend. The great innovation of the film was that it pulled a Long Con on the audience, too - form and content blending in a perfect display of ingenuity so playful and clever that you feel honored to have been played so thoroughly by such a capable team of entertainers.

The Sting was hardly the first film to use a twist ending, even an ending that revealed much of the film we thought we'd seen was a lie. But it was certainly the first hit film whose entire purpose in life was that twist: no matter what its other pleasures (which are many), the point of the film is that moment of delighted shock when you discover that you've been led down the garden path (it's hard to imagine any other reason for its Best Picture Oscar). And this was the film's ultimate legacy: the creation of an entire class of films whose sole purpose is to fake out the audience.

If only it had led instead to a resurgence of Depression-era buddy films...

All this matters because Paul McGuigan's latest misbegotten crime caper, Lucky Number Slevin, wants nothing more in life than to be The Sting, albeit a version of that film horribly mashed up with Pulp Fiction. Let us ignore for the moment that this particular union has already produced one film, The Usual Suspects, that I really don't care for; it's still a model of screenwriterly brilliance next to Slevin.

The film opens with a scene so incredibly, unfathomably disconnected from the rest of the plot that it cannot help but be involved with a late climactic reveal. Specifically, a strange man in a wheelchair (Bruce Willis) tells a long and rambling story about a gambling-fix-gone wrong in an attempt to explain (poorly) the idea behind a "Kansas City Shuffle" con. Then he kills his listener. The story he tells is a solid ten-minute flashback, and there was only one possible way for it to connect forward, and I figured it out, figured (from the trailer) who the linking character was, and so I knew Josh Hartnett's dark secret before he ever stepped onscreen.

When Hartnett appears, it's as the improbably-named Slevin, who has come to New York to purge memories of his unfaithful girlfreind by crashing with his friend Nick. When he arrives at Nick's apartment, Nick is gone although the nauseatingly bubbly girl across the hall (Lucy Liu) is there, and Slevin begins to flirt with her before one pair of goons takes him to see "The Boss" (Morgan Freeman), a vicious gang lord; no sooner has he returned (all this in a towel, no less), than he is taken by another pair of goons to see "The Rabbi" (Sir Ben Kingsley), a vicious gang lord who is The Boss's archenemy, which is why neither of them leave their penthouses, located across the street from one another, in the film's only cute idea. The Rabbi, in addition to being a crime lord, is an actual rabbi. The film wants to make sure we get this, and so several times we hear the conversation, "Why is he called The Rabbi?" "Because he's a rabbi." Why a tough Jewish gang lord can't just choose to be called The Rabbi is unknown to me. Slevin is contracted by both sides to fill Nick's debts, while Bruce Willis flits back and forth playing both sides, and Stanley Tucci plays NYC's worst detective.

All that, mind you, is the first act. And for a while, it's sort of fun. Jason Smilovic's dialogue is best described as "hyperstylized," and while it's often painfully clear he wants to write his very own Tarantino script, some of the scenes, especially those revolving around Liu, develop a playful rhythm. But it does bog down after too much tweeness, especially Slevin, a character who continues saying things that will clearly get him beaten a lot for no reason other than the screenwriter thought his dialogue was clever.

When the plot reveal comes, about an hour in, it's agony. Not even in The Usual Suspects does a twist so thoroughly invalidate everything the audience has sat through. It was a twist I resented, something I have never done before. It makes the rest of the movie an empty exercise in style and plot mechanics, and at the end of the film it all adds up to a huge "so what?" I didn't have fun, and nothing happened, the end.

Not that the style or the plot mechanics are that interesting. After the reveal, the plot becomes a rote and predictable procedural (not that it wasn't already predictable; but at least I got to wonder how long it would take until the house of cards collapsed). And the style is unmistakable the work of a Guy Ritchie/Danny Boyle wannabe; Paul McGuigan is now 4 for 4 in making movies mostly unlike each other, all of them slavishly retreading styles better directors have perfected. Here, it's an editing scheme taken wholesale from Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. The set design is just about the only intriguing element of the film's look, and only then because it is so inexplicably 1970s-style.

All of this would be forgivable if it were any fun, and it almost is - look at that cast! Willis, Freeman, Tucci, Kingsley, all old hat at this sort of thing. Although it shows. None of them give anything they can't do in their sleep, although it's cute how Kingsley drops his accent from time to time. Amazingly, Lucy Liu is the one bright spot in the cast (I know!). Her role is so aggressively cutesy and cod-girl Friday that you'd think you'd like to smack her; but Liu sells it.

No, the big black hole at the center of this woeful failure is Josh Hartnett. I would beg of anyone to tell me what possible reason their can be for finding him desirable to put in a movie. He is not simply a bad actor, he is a vacuum of anti-talent so profound that not only does he bring down the actors around him, it is observable that the cinematography, editing, and make-up design become noticably worse when he is onscreen, like the very art of the cinema is trying to reject his presence. He is acceptable - barely - when playing villains. But as an heroic lead, he is a colossal failure. He is unpleasant to look at, and he cannot speak. He has three films in the pipeline right now. God is dead.

A final complaint: at one point, a character compares Slevin's predicament to Cary Grant in North by Northwest. Set aside that the comparison is inapt, given what the audience knows at this point, set aside that Grant outclasses Hartnett so completely that it's hardly fair pointing out that they work in the same industry; this is just a perfect example of the MST3K rule that you never remind the audience of a good movie in the middle of your bad movie.

4/10

ERRATA

Updated the blogroll, finally adding some sites I should have had since day 1, kept forgetting about. Look to the right, play around.

Also, welcome Norbizness readers, and I'm sorry I have nothing interesting to say right now.

SCOTT FREE

McClellan has just resigned. More as it comes.

Update 9:01 AM: NYT has more. White House says it's McClellan's choice. Also, Rove has stepped down as Deputy Chief of Staff to focus on election strategery.

THINGS THE PRESIDENT PROBABLY SHOULDN'T HAVE SAID

Bush throws a hissy over the "Rumsfeld's leaving" rumours:

"I listen to all voices, but mine is the final decision," he said. "And Don Rumsfeld is doing a fine job. He's not only transforming the military, he's fighting a war on terror. He's helping us fight a war on terror. I have strong confidence in Don Rumsfeld.

"I hear the voices, and I read the front page, and I know the speculation. But I'm the decider, and I decide what is best. And what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the secretary of defense."

When I first read this, I was just kind of dazzled by the phrase "I'm the decider," which is grammatically correct and just sounds really off. Like those sentences that take nine clauses to avoid ending in a preposition. But upon rereading, what really struck me was the admission:

"I hear the voices..."

Well, Mr. President, we've all known that for years, but it takes a strong and brave man to admit it. I hope you find the courage to seek treatment.

A COME-FROM-BEHIND KIND OF GUY

Overcoming a severe case of the Mondays to weigh in on last night's surprisingly aimless Sopranos (and I am not pleased we had two such episodes in a row):

-Enough with the gay jokes! Christ!

-Vito in the gayest town in America. I do not believe for one instant that a wiseguy, whoever he fucks, would have an eye for antique pottery.

-Too much meta. Tony's snark about TV rubbing homosexuality in your face was cute, but the line where he chews out the people who want melodrama, or at least random people getting whacked? Frankly, Chase, you're writing a fucking mob show. Yes, I do want to see people get whacked.

-Angie Bonpensiero is the awesomest person in life.

-The best Melfi scene of the season. "I'm sensing an ambiguity"...hee.

-Meadow working at a white collar defense firm is clearly going to pay off somewhere down the line. Prediction: she insinuates herself as a surrogate consigliere.

-Christopher with his silly stupid terrorist-love. I see him going to the Feds, being wrong, getting in trouble for bringing too much attention to...something.

I got the distinct feeling this was a "transitional" episode: setting ducks in a line in order to make plot happen later. Time will tell.

FRIDAY RANDOM TEN: AFTERNOON OFF EDITION

1. "The Night Descending," Iron & Wine, 2003. From the "one guy in a basement recording lo-fi" era of the group, when it was awesome (it's still awesome, but too polished - there's something wonderful about the mix of Southern folk and buzzes and pops). 8/10

2. "Jigsaw Puzzle," The Rolling Stones, 1968. Totally forgettable filler from Beggar's Banquet, which a lot of people consider filler-free. Good for them. 5/10

3. "Father and Son," Cat Stevens, 1970. He's still embarassing, right? I like this one, anyway. There's something a little wanky about "I shall sing both parts of a duet!" And some of the lyrics are ponderous. 6/10

4. "Dark as the Dungeon (live)," Johnny Cash, 1968. From At Folsom Prison, the finest live album ever. This one sounds pretty generic as a song, but it has some really fun interplay between Cash and the inmates. Don't laugh during the song, please. 8/10

5. "Train in the Distance," Paul Simon, 1983. When he goes bad, it's really bad - witness the 1983 album Hearts and Bones. Thankfully, this one is just boring; some of the songs on this album are massively bad. 4/10

6. "Pretty Girl Why," Buffalo Springfield, 1968. The band was being held together with spite and bile at this point, and it shows: perfunctory, "I don't want to be here" instrumentation. How the mighty have fallen. 4/10

7. "My My Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)," Neil Young, 1979. Eleven years after drama-queening his way out of Buffalo Springfield, along comes Young with the single finest song about being a musician ever composed (and yes, I prefer this one to its sequel). If that weren't enough, Cobain quoted it in his suicide letter - "It's better to burn out than to fade away." How much cooler can it get? 10/10

8. "Grimsby," Elton John, 1974. Utterly useless album track with a truly annoying synth guitar thing going on. Still, he's done worse. 3/10

9. "Boy! What Love Has Done to Me!" Ella Fitzgerald, 1959. From The George & Ira Gershwin Songbook. Very sexy recording of a minor Gershwin tune, with some absolutely great horns. So why just 8/10? That - fucking - title.

10. "Turning Backs," Vashti Bunyan, 2005. The story of how Bunyan came to record Lookaftering - after 30+ years of silence, is much more interesting than any of the sleepy folk on the album. Like Enya for those with taste. 6/10

Average: 6.2/10. Something's wrong. Or was I just that lucky?

Bonus Track: "Marrakesh Express," Crosby, Stills & Nash, 1969. Lot of fucking folk this round.

THE REAL REASON I'M STEALING FROM TIMES SELECT

It's so I can post Krugman articles for all the world to see them.

(This is so much easier than actually "writing.")

Now it can be told: President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney based their re-election campaign on lies, damned lies and statistics.

The lies included Mr. Cheney's assertion, more than three months after intelligence analysts determined that the famous Iraqi trailers weren't bioweapons labs, that we were in possession of two "mobile biological facilities that can be used to produce anthrax or smallpox."

The damned lies included Mr. Bush's declaration, in his "Mission Accomplished" speech, that "we have removed an ally of Al Qaeda."

The statistics included Mr. Bush's claim, during his debates with John Kerry, that "most of the tax cuts went to low- and middle-income Americans."

Compared with the deceptions that led us to war, deceptions about taxes can seem like a minor issue. But it's all of a piece. In fact, my early sense that we were being misled into war came mainly from the resemblance between the administration's sales pitch for the Iraq war — with its evasions, innuendo and constantly changing rationale — and the selling of the Bush tax cuts.

Moreover, the hysterical attacks the administration and its defenders launch against anyone who tries to do the math on tax cuts suggest that this is a very sensitive topic. For example, Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa once compared people who say that 40 percent of the Bush tax cuts will go to the richest 1 percent of the population to, yes, Adolf Hitler.

And just as administration officials continued to insist that the trailers were weapons labs long after their own intelligence analysts had concluded otherwise, officials continue to claim that most of the tax cuts went to the middle class even though their own tax analysts know better.

How do I know what the administration's tax analysts know? The facts are there, if you know how to look for them, hidden in one of the administration's propaganda releases.

The Treasury Department has put out an exercise in spin called the "Tax Relief Kit," which tries to create the impression that most of the tax cuts went to low- and middle-income families. Conspicuously missing from the document are any actual numbers about how the tax cuts were distributed among different income classes. Yet Treasury analysts have calculated those numbers, and there's enough information in the "kit" to figure out what they discovered.

An explanation of how to extract the administration's estimates of the distribution of tax cuts from the "Tax Relief Kit" is here. Here's the bottom line: about 32 percent of the tax cuts went to the richest 1 percent of Americans, people whose income this year will be at least $341,773. About 53 percent of the tax cuts went to the top 10 percent of the population. Remember, these are the administration's own numbers — numbers that it refuses to release to the public.

I'm sure that this column will provoke a furious counterattack from the administration, an all-out attempt to discredit my math. Yet if I'm wrong, there's an easy way to prove it: just release the raw data used to construct the table titled "Projected Share of Individual Income Taxes and Income in 2006." Memo to reporters: if the administration doesn't release those numbers, that's in effect a confession of guilt, an implicit admission that the data contradict the administration's spin.

And what about the people Senator Grassley compared to Hitler, those who say that the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans will receive 40 percent of the tax cuts? Although the "Tax Relief Kit" asserts that "nearly all of the tax cut provisions" are already in effect, that's not true: one crucial piece of the Bush tax cuts, elimination of the estate tax, hasn't taken effect yet. Since only estates bigger than $2 million, or $4 million for a married couple, face taxation, the great bulk of the gains from estate tax repeal will go to the wealthiest 1 percent. This will raise their share of the overall tax cuts to, you guessed it, about 40 percent.

Again, the point isn't merely that the Bush administration has squandered the budget surplus it inherited on tax cuts for the wealthy. It's the fact that the administration has spent its entire term in office lying about the nature of those tax cuts. And all the world now knows what I suspected from the start: an administration that lies about taxes will also lie about other, graver matters.

LET MY PEOPLE GO

Shorter David Brooks: "Hebraic mythology, ergo neoconservativism."

"The Past Meets The Future":

Mr. Past: Your big problem is you don't understand the limits of what governments can achieve. Before this whole Iraq thing, you should have read Elie Kedourie's essay on the British occupation in the 1920's. This isn't history repeating itself, it's the same unbroken pattern.

Kedourie shows the whole history of Iraq is a story of "bloodshed, treason and rapine." He shows how Iraqi politics have always been marked by "murderous currents," "demonic hatreds," "grisly spectacles," Sunni violence and Shiite fanaticism. He shows naïve Westerners who thought they could change all this. He even quotes a memo from a British officer saying Britain should threaten to withdraw because then the Iraqis will be forced to behave responsibly. It's all the same.

The central lesson of the past three years is that societies are not that malleable. Evils do not grow out of manageable defects in the environment that can be neatly fixed. We need to change our mentality, scale back to more realistic expectations.

Honestly, to this point I thought he was writing a mea culpa, and admitting that Iraq was a failure. I had no clue what "Mr. Past" was referring to, but I figured it might be some sort of fucked-up Reservoir Dogs homage.

Mr. Future: Actually, I did read Kedourie, but last night I also reread the Exodus story. The Exodus story reminds us that human beings can transform themselves and their situations. It reminds us that people who embark on generational journeys are the realistic ones, because they are the ones who see all the possibilities the future contains.

The what, now?

Looking to the Exodus story for practical geopoltical advice is realistic?

The finest things humans have done have been achieved in an Exodus frame of mind. This country was settled and founded by people who adopted the Exodus mentality. The civil rights movement was also led by such people.

Martin Luther King learned from Exodus that it is not enough to sit back and let history slowly evolve. It's sometimes necessary to venture into the hazardous wilderness.

There are times amid the journey when the Promised Land can seem a long way off, when the words "next year in Jerusalem" seem unrealistic. But those are the times when the words mean the most. So of all the lessons to learn from the past three years, the worst would be to settle back into your cold-hearted acceptance of the status quo.

It's not Jerusalem. It's Iraq. And he's definitely getting his metaphor a little twisty - it's already clear that he's agitating "stay the course" because change doesn't happen overnight, but the exact point of the civil rights movement was that we didn't want equality in 60 years. We wanted it fucking now.

Mr. Past: You had no right to force others to sacrifice for your distant visions of milk and honey. How long is the young woman in Najaf supposed to be oppressed while you wait for the Arab journey through chaos to end?

Your problem is that in your innocence, you have no idea how long historical processes take to work themselves out. You have no idea of the deep cultural continuities that stretch back over centuries and shape behavior. The people who suffer for democracy should see the wages of their labor sometime in their own lives.

Mr. Future: Because you are so arrogant, you assume I am an idiot. The Exodus story prepares us for all that. It is not the story of liberation, but of the long, troubled march to freedom.

"Because you are so arrogant, you assume I am an idiot," is totally going to be my new catchphrase. Also, this is the point at which I lost the ability to follow the column. Basically, he's saying, "I know it's going to take forever, we all know that!!!!1!" Except for the bit when it was going to take, like, a week. But then he goes on this fucking amazing tangent about how it's fine that it will take us years to maybe establish democracy in Iraq, because a group of legendary Jews were in the desert 3500 years ago. This is where I had to go back and make sure I hadn't missed something at the start, like it was really WorldNetDaily and not the New York Times, or something.

The Israelites had been damaged by their own oppression. They longed for freedom but were not ready for it. There were fights and divisions.

Moses told his men to "slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbor," thus ordering the murder of 3,000 Israelites.

Tocqueville gets at this when he writes that freedom "is ordinarily born in the midst of storms, it is established painfully among civil discords, and only when it is old can one know the benefits." The adolescence of freedom is painful, but what is the alternative?

A) Moses is a dick.
B) de Tocqueville was not talking about Exodus, you tool.

Mr. Past: The alternative is to develop a mind-set in which you don't try insanely to solve great historical problems, but you understand that history is one unexpected thing after another. You seek balance. You navigate through the storms to keep some reasonable order intact for one more day. It never ends.

I don't like Mr. Past as my straw man. He's supposed to be a rabid atheist. Rabid atheists don't believe in Exodus. And even as a straw man, he's entirely more reasonable than Mr. Future.

Mr. Future: You will be surprised by the habits of mind you fall into. You will stop trying to end tyranny and pretty soon you will stop condemning it. You will develop a hardheartedness that flatters your moral vanity because it seems mature.

Remember, fewer Iraqis have died in the second Iraq war than in the first, when Saddam crushed the Shiite uprising we fomented. The world wasn't bothered by that extermination — there were no rallies in the streets. We were all being realistic.

The nation will adopt one mind-set after the trauma of Iraq, yours or Moses'. Right now, the public mood is with you, but I can't imagine yours will long prevail.

So, the war is only immoral if we top the first one's death toll? And wanting to end a war is hard-hearted? Wait, we're bleeding-heart liberals! We're the ones who chicken out because we feel too much!

I also dig his certainty that America will adopt some monolithic worldview as a result of this war, because if there's one thing that's a horrifying new development in American politics? It's partisanship.

HEART OF DARKNESS

Never tried to hide the fact that film noir is probably my favorite genre, ever. Three reasons: the first is its unrelenting nihilism; the second is the quality of visual narrative (and just how damn beautiful a good noir looks); the third is the wit of the characters and dialogue. Okay, "wit" maybe overselling it, "soul-dead sarcasm" is a bit better. But a good noir isn't just villainous dames and harsh black lighting: it's the recognition that the only way to handle a world in which Goodness isn't just absent, it was beaten in an alley and shot, is to laugh scornfully.

By all these tokens, Brick is the best film I've seen in 2006 and likely to remain that way.*

A man gets a call from an ex-lover, desperate. She talks about a "brick" and a "pin" and a "tug." He asks around, finds out she was involved pretty deep with a heroin ring. He just starts to pull aside the curtain on this ring when she ends up dead in a drainage ditch. He gets angry. All of the characters are in high school. Classic noir scenario.

You did know it was about high-schoolers, right? I feel that's the most important element of the film in some ways, and also the one that's been discussed the most. And amazingly, almost everyone seems to regard it as a gimmick.

I'll concede readily that it's like no real-world high school; but when did any film noir take place in the real world? It is and has always been a highly stylized type of storytelling. And casting a noir with adolescents is hardly a gimmick, at least in this case. Almost inevitably I find myself thinking of Veronica Mars, the other great contemporary high school noir. In that case, high school is a metaphor and shorthand: the noir hero is by necessity an outsider, and who doesn't feel like an outsider during those four years? Here, the high school setting is key to establishing the total nihilism of the piece. Like last April's great neo-noir, Sin City, this film takes the moral world of the classic noirs to their logical extreme.

Imagine, if you will, Humphrey Bogart's Sam Spade as an 18 year-old. I like to think that he's a hopeless romantic, and it was only a lifetime of disappointment that turned him into the hard-boiled cynic of The Maltese Falcon. Not so for Brendan Frye (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who at that age has long been a ruthless bastard. Thus Brick's genius: it assumes a world in which the nihilism of film noir has become so pervasive it even infects kids. There's no innocence, no safety, and that total lack of a safe place pushes the movie where even the bleakest classics couldn't go.

What makes this all work is how totally director Rian Johnson (in his feature debut, talented sonofabitch) hews to the template of the genre. Everything a noir needs is here, logically corrupted: instead of a bent cop, we have a crooked vice principal;instead of a loyal whore hiding the villain, we have his single mother; instead of a smoky, seedy bar, we have a run-down pie shop. The cinematography is just about as bleak as a color film can get (and the use of color, especially red, is striking in this film, if one of the few ways in which it's not a true noir), and the striking, strange angles and lighting make this one of the most faithfully Expressionist films since the noir heyday. And of course, the dialogue - where the "fun" comes in - with its outlandish, made-up argot, full of lines so hard boiled you could drive a nail with the egg: "I've got five senses and I had a full night's sleep, so that puts me six up on you"; "Make sure you really wanna know what you wanna know"; I'm not going to ruin it for you.

None of this would work without a cast that knew how to sell it, and the film has one. Gordon-Levitt is amazing as the lead, with a look and voice so grim you'd think that smiling would crack his head open. Lukas Haas (where's he been?) is slimy and pitiful in the right measures as the heroin pushing villain (although "villain" is such an arbitrary word in film noir). Best of all is Noah Fleiss (who has been in things, none interesting) as the dumb muscle, who like all good dumb muscle lets the audience see the exact moment that he realizes he's just dumb muscle, and good God does he feel betrayed. Johnson has made it clear that his chief inspiration was the work of Dashiell Hammett, and Fleiss calls to mind nothing less than Wilmer Cook from The Maltese Falcon, in his horror at finding just how expendable he really is. The last key to the cast is Nora Zehetner as the femme fatale; from the moment she first appears in a red kimono she absolutely owns the sexual force that any such character needs to exude.

The really important part of the whole endeavor is that at no point do the actors or the script wink. Having set up the giant wink of "high school noir," Johnson and his cast and crew treat it with the utmost seriousness. I don't want to make it sound like it's not fun; it's a hell of a lot of fun, just like the genre has to be. Remember what I said up top? The best part of noir is how it laughs at total nihilism. Make no mistake: for all the death and drugs and lies, this is a joyride.

9/10

*Of course, having made the rounds of the 2005 festival circuit, calling it a "2006 film" is a little disingenuous. Also, quick whine: I could have seen this six months ago. I even remember reading about it in the Chicago Film Fest guide. "Joseph Gordon-Levitt?" I thought. "That Third Rock kid? Um, pass." Fuck you, me-of-the-past.

APOCALYPTO

I'll assume by now that everyone has read Sy Hersh's rather grim evaluation on the likelihood of going nuclear in Iran. Or, at least, that we've all heard about it.

I bring this up now because of a truly nightmarish and plausible post by Billmon (via Digby). Too much and too good to excerpt - this one's required reading, y'all. Though I must admit, I don't think that Hersh makes as great a case for the inevitability of nukes as a lot of people seem to assume - no matter how little I think of the White House, I can't imagine that they're that stupid.

Still, there's something horrifyingly rational about Billmon's musing that a nuclear strike would result in basically no negative ramifications for America. If a nuke goes off in a hegemony, does anyone care...that sort of thing. I'm not totally convinced. I choose to believe that if the U.S. and U.S.S.R. both managed to avoid playing the nuclear card in the 60's or the 80's, Iran isn't the place for it now.

Somewhere in the past couple days, I read something that I can't find now (and so can't correctly attribute) to the effect that this is all an elaborate ploy to reframe the debate to "nuclear vs. conventional," and so effectively concede that war in Iran is inevitable. I am not entirely persuaded this was intentional, but it seems to have been the effect anyway. Thoughts?

EVERY GUY, GRAB A GIRL

My continuing quest to see everything now leads me to Take the Lead, a film whose considerable charms would be a great deal easier to appreciate if they weren't bogged down in grotesque and inconsistent libertarian propaganda.

...sorry, wrong film.

One of the most consistent genres in cinema history is the "noble liberal teacher who comes to bring a group of troubled ethnic youths to realize their full potential by regarding them with respect, something their 'real' teachers never do, for reasons probably related to race, even though the 'real' teachers are themselves minorities and the noble liberal teacher is white" film. I say consistent, and I mean it; no film in this (sub-)genre is particularly bad, and none of them are really at all interesting.

I should probably back up and admit that in a lot of "troubled youth/inspiring teacher" movies, race isn't an issue, and sometimes the noble liberal teacher is in fact a minority member, but in Take the Lead, neither is the case. The teacher, Pierre Dulaine, is half-French, half-Spanish. The Spanish half is played by Antonio Banderas, a man with considerable screen presence and class; he is actually able to deliver a line such as "love is a universal feeling" and make you believe: a) you haven't heard it before; b) it's true; c) it's an appropriate defense of Gershwin music.

So yes, the plot: Dulaine works for a swanky dance school, when a Chance Encounter with a Troubled Youth with a Secret Heart of Gold brings him to a run-down high school, where he volunteers to teach the lost causes in the detention hall how to dance. This will teach them respect for each other and themselves, a fact he proves by dancing with the principal at a school board meeting. The Lost Causes don't trust him at first because his music is older than they are. One multi-thousand dollar Mac sound mixing computer later, he has extracted the baseline from "They Can't Take That Away from Me," and they're all well on their ways to winning the High Society Dance Competition.

Oops, I spoiled the ending. Except not. Have you ever seen a movie? Good, you know just about every scene in the entire bloated 108 minutes of Take the Lead.

I want to make one thing clear: Banderas is a delight to watch, and his dancing is, if not Astaire-good, at least enough to entertain. But virtually no other aspect of the film does anything, good or bad. None of the other performers have any sort of chemistry, and frankly, none of them can dance better than a normal person with a few months' experience - deadly for a dance-based movie. And the plot keeps repeating itself, so the whole thing gets boring, especially in the putatively-exciting dance competition finale.

Technically, it's a mixed bag. There's nothing special to the cinematography, altough some of the exteriors have a nicely washed-out feeling that does not, surprisingly, glamorize the ghetto (there are a couple of crash zooms I really wish weren't there; it's not a rap video, folks). The editing, however, sucks. Perhaps in an attempt to liven things up, there are needless cuts from one angle to a slightly closer framing of the same angle, and in a couple places some truly hateful slow-motion crops up, to focus on "impressive" dance steps that are barely distinguishable from the rest.

And despite the name-dropping of some of the best jazz and pop singers of the mid-century, the kids still hate it all at the end. That's the arc I would have liked to see: Banderas teaches a group of inner-city toughs how to appreciate Lena Horne while sitting still.

5/10

THE GREAT COPYRIGHT-INFRINGEMENT EXPERIMENT

As a service to my readers, and in recognition of the fact that I've been able to steal TimesSelect from work for several months now, I have decided to use this space for a bit of skullduggery: herewith, and with questionable legality, I shall post any and all of the exciting columns that we have come to expect from such intellectual titans as David Brooks and John Tierney - in full and uninterrupted!

Of course, "uninterrupted" will drop by the wayside as soon as I realize how hard it is to mock these people when you don't go line-by-line ("fisking," I think the kids call it these days, but when you work in a journalism building named Fisk, you get a little twitchy about using that bit of slang).

Inaugural edition: from 9 April, 2006, David Brooks with "Virtues and Victims."

"All great scandals occur twice, first as Tom Wolfe novels, then as real-life events that nightmarishly mimic them. And so after 'I Am Charlotte Simmons,' it was perhaps inevitable that Duke University would have to endure a mini-social explosion involving athletic thugs, resentful townies, nervous administrators, male predators, aggrieved professors, binge drinking and lust gone wild.

"If you wander through the thicket of commentary that already surrounds the Duke lacrosse scandal, the first thing you notice is how sociological it is. In almost every article and piece of commentary, the event is portrayed not as a crime between individuals but as a clash between classes, races and sexes.

"'This whole sordid party scene played out at the prestigious university is deeply disturbing on a number of levels, including those involving gender, race and the notion of athletic entitlement and privilege,' a USA Today columnist wrote.

"'The collisions are epic: black and white, town and gown, rich and poor, privilege and plain, jocks and scholars,' a CBS analyst observed.

"The key word in the coverage has been 'entitlement.' In a thousand different ways commentators have asserted (based on no knowledge of the people involved) that the lacrosse players behaved rancidly because they felt privileged and entitled to act as they pleased.

"The main theme shaping the coverage is that inequality leads to exploitation. The whites felt free to exploit the blacks. The men felt free to exploit women. The jocks felt free to exploit everybody else. As a Duke professor, Houston Baker, wrote, their environment gave the lacrosse players 'license to rape, maraud, deploy hate speech and feel proud of themselves in the bargain.'

"It could be that this environmental, sociological explanation of events is entirely accurate. But it says something about our current intellectual climate that almost every reporter and commentator used these mental categories so unconsciously and automatically.

"Several decades ago, American commentators would have used an entirely different vocabulary to grapple with what happened at Duke. Instead of the vocabulary of sociology, they would have used the language of morality and character.

"If you were looking at this scandal through that language, you would look at the e-mail message one of the players sent on the night in question. This is the one in which a young man joked about killing strippers and cutting off their skin.

"You would say that the person who felt free to send this message to his buddies had crashed through several moral guardrails. You would surmise that his character had been corroded by shock jocks and raunch culture and that he'd entered a nihilistic moral universe where young men entertain each other with bravura displays of immoralism. A community so degraded, you might surmise, is not a long way from actual sexual assault.

"You would then ask questions very different from the sociological ones: How have these young men slipped into depravity? Why have they not developed sufficient character to restrain their baser impulses?

"The educators who used this vocabulary several decades ago understood that when you concentrate young men, they have a tropism toward barbarism. That's why these educators cared less about academics than about instilling a formula for character building. The formula, then called chivalry, consisted first of manners, habits and self-imposed restraints to prevent the downward slide.

"Furthermore, it was believed that each of us had a godlike and a demonic side, and that decent people perpetually strengthened the muscles of their virtuous side in order to restrain the deathless sinner within. If you read commencement addresses from, say, the 1920's, you can actually see college presidents exhorting their students to battle the beast within — a sentiment that if uttered by a contemporary administrator would cause the audience to gape and the earth to fall off its axis.

"Today that old code of obsolete chivalry is gone, as is a whole vocabulary on how young people should think about character.

"But in 'I Am Charlotte Simmons,' Wolfe tried to steer readers back past the identity groups to the ghost in the machine, the individual soul. Wolfe's heroine is a modern girl searching for honor in a world where the social rules have dissolved, and who commits 'moral suicide' because she is unprepared for what she faces.

"Many critics reacted furiously to these parts of Wolfe's book. And we are where we are."

Shorter: "'Class privilege'? What is this 'class privilege'? All boys are natural sadists."

I'm not going to dwell on this (I'm depressed enough without fixating on annoying people, thank you), but I want to say that I enjoyed, very much, the notion that "when you concentrate young men, they have a tropism toward barbarism." Um...that's true. And you used "tropism" right, but I still don't think you know exactly what it means.

Seriously, how is "there must be social pressures causing this to happen" more offensive than "white boys are just plain ee-vil?" Or is it "sexually active girls make boys ee-vil?" I have a hard time paying attention at the end.

Also, I Am Charlotte Simmons : college life : : HMS Pinafore : the Pacific Theater in WWII.

"HAVE YOU READ GQ IN THE LAST THREE YEARS?"

The weekly Sopranos review, for fans of the show and admirers of stream-of-consciousness bullet points.

Definitely a letdown after the last four weeks. The episode lacked focus; I wanted a lot more about Tony's new worldview, instead of just a couple scenes where he prevents violence. And that godawful scene with Melfi-as-consigliere didn't do it.

Enough with the Ginny Sack fat jokes! Although the joke about "eight pounds to goal" got a giggle out of me.

Christopher is getting stupid this season, with the whole guns-for-Arabs plot just weeks after discussing terrorism with the Feds. Although I loved his reference to the movie One: confused the hell out of me until I realized that for Chrissy, there are no movies that are not Godfather movies. Also, the cold medicine line was classic.

I "got" why Tony picked a fight with the driver more than I liked that he did it. Yeah, yeah, assert dominance. Felt very off.

Vito in a leather bar, scene I could have lived and died without seeing. Nice gay stereotyping there, Chase.

Wow, Junior's still a character! And I feel sorry for him!

Overall, too little focus on the characters I like. I mean, Johnny Sack is well-played, but I'd rather he be used to reflect the main characters, and not be the primary agent of plot. And not nearly as much happened as has been the case. Which is cool, I guess - taking a breather.

FRIDAY RANDOM TEN: 164 PAGES EDITION

My screenplay is 21 pages less than it was initially; let us celebrate by listening to music! And let it be random!

1. "Belleville Rendez-Vous," M+S, 2003. The French version of the Triplets of Belleville theme. One of the best songs in the history of time. 10/10

2. "When Love Comes Knocking at Your Door," The Monkees, 1967. From their second album, AKA, "the cheapo cash-in one." A little bit better than utterly typical, but not by much. 4/10

3. "The Loner (live)," Neil Young, 1979. From Live Rust, the Rust Never Sleeps soundtrack. Pretend it makes sense. A great example of a live performance adding nothing, and I don't love the song. 5/10

4. "All Things Must Pass,' George Harrison, 1970. A great album, a so-so title track - but as good as the best stuff is here, so-so is still pretty good. 7/10

5. "It Never Entered My Mind," Ella Fitzgerald, 1956. From The Rodgers and Hart Songbook. Feels a little Cole Porter-y (that's a good thing). Hey, it's Ella. 7/10

6. "Let's Burn Down the Cornfield," Randy Newman, 1970. A weird-ass little number about pyromania. The mumbly singing takes it down a bit. 6/10

7. "No Reply," The Beatles, 1964. Yawn. To the Fab Four as "When Love Comes Knocking" is to those other dudes. 4/10

8. "Good Morning Heartache," Billie Holiday, 1956. Songs from Lady Sings the Blues are an automatic 10/10. I shouldn't have to explain why.

9. "Gold in the Air of Summer," Kings of Convenience, 2004. Jesus, their music is all alike - sleepy and atmospheric. Good make-out music if you're stoned, I guess. 4/10

10. "Crime of the Century," Supertramp, 1974. Oh dear. Dull as hell proto-prog. One of my very least favorite Supertramp songs; and while I do like a lot of their stuff, that's still an insult. 2/10

Average: 5.9/10

Bonus: "Blistered Heart," Badly Drawn Boy, 2000

GLIBERTARIANS

I'm not sure exactly how to talk about Thank You for Smoking, a film specifically and unavoidably about politics that is politically infantile. Yet it seems harsh to take it to task for that, given the degree to which politics are given short shrift in favor of genial comedy.

It's about Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart), a tobacco lobbyist. I'm not sure what else to say about the plot, because there really isn't one; it's mostly just a series of vignettes showing what he does in love, and how he does it. The original book, by William F. Buckley's son Christopher is unread by me, but I imagine a man with that sort of Washington inside is probably mostly right in his depiction of the lobbying life.

Vignettes include: bedding a reporter (Katie Holmes) mostly to prove he can; taking his son (Cameron Bright) to California for an interview with a movie exec (Rob Lowe); a visit to The Captain (Robert Duvall), the oldest and most revered of all tobacco executives; a showdown with a senator (William H. Macy) on an anti-smoking crusade).

I need to get this out of the way: despite his daddy's solid conservative persona, Christopher Buckley is, to judge from this story, libertarian. And despite his daddy's solid liberal persona, writer/director Jason "Son of Ivan" Reitman is, too. Now, I have libertarian friends, but that doesn't mean that I don't find libertarianism to be just about the most inconceivable of all American political positions (that's right, I think neoconservativism makes more sense, on its face, than libertarianism). The movie is a perfect example of why: it is a film whose ultimate theme is best expressed as, "the American people deserve to be allowed to choose what's right for them" (which I guess is a hard statement to disagree with), but this theme is peppered in a story about a man whose entire existence is predicated on the truth that the American people are really fucking stupid. Or at least, that it's really easy to make us believe lies. I wouldn't harsh on a film just for being libertarian (I love South Park), but when a movie refutes itself, that's a problem.

I promise I won't keep railing on politics, because I've already given more thought to it in this review than the film does.

The film's success, which is considerable, is due entirely to its cast. Okay, that's not fair, there's a lot of fun to be had in the screenplay. But almost all of the performances are perfect beyond the written word, and Aaron Eckhart is chief among them all. It's not his best work (see: In the Company of Men), but it's a perfect character for his style: an smug asshole who knows that being a smug asshole is the very core of his appeal. Rob Lowe and Adam Brody (as his assistant, with the very best lines in the film), nail the distracted airy shallowness that means "movie exec" in the movies; et cetera et al ad infinitum. Only Holmes (who needs to be so hot that no man can resist her even at the risk of ruining his life) fails to fully sell her role; and then there's Cameron Bright, who is the least charismatic child actor in the history of cinema. By the end I couldn't even look at the screen when he was on.

This is nobody's idea of great satire - it's far too simple and broad. Example: the movie agency Naylor visits has the initials E-G-O; har har, movie execs work for ego! Or the clumsy way that Macy is made a strawliberal (he wears socks and Birkenstocks! har!) and Duvall is made a good ol' boy conservative (he actually chomps on a cigar, the only character in the film to use tobacco; when you're stealing iconography from the Bolshevik revolutionary cinema, you need to freshen your playbook). But if you can turn off your brain for a little bit, and let the dialogue wash over you. It's satire for people who know nothing about business or politics, but it's good simple fun.

Unfortunately, Reitman isn't a very delicate filmmaker. It's his debut, so I can forgive a little bit, but there's a continuous tendency to oversell jokes that don't need it, mostly through the use of cloyingly playful editing. I grew tired of cutting from a punchline to a visualization of that punchline, and I started out tired of the use of subtitles and cute little floating images.

The film is also ugly. It looks all brown and nasty, sort of like a 70s movie (why yes, there were gorgeous films in the early 70s, just not many). There seems to be no reason for this to have been a choice, and it made the film mildly unpleasant to look at. Basically, it looked like a film made for its budget, which I shouldn't grouse about. But I've seen a lot of cheap horror films recently, and whatever their other sins, they usually look great.

What I keep returning to is the film's unclear moral tone. It clearly doesn't want to lionize Naylor, but it's in no hurry to demonize him, either. Satire should go for the jugular, and this doesn't really. It's just poking fun at easy targets. But I laughed. I won't lie. I laughed a lot, in fact.

7/10

GOOGLE AWESOMENESS

Google "ecstasy in amsterdam nightclubs." I'll wait.

Apologies to any and all X-using tourists, but I hope you enjoyed the review; it's one of my favorites.

SOMETIMES I GET TIRED OF BEING RIGHT

Quelle surprise, we learn today that President Bush not only knew about the Miller leak, he approved it.

Josh Marshall raises the question of the degree to which this was or was not illegal. Like so many of the adminstration's acts in the last six years, it appears that it was really just shady and unethical, but still just barely on this side of the law. To which I refer you to an entirely reasonable point raised by Atrios.

This is the sort of thing that by itself isn't really terrible, but really just adds more evidence to case that Bush et al are corrupt liars. Which means that after about 36 hours, it will be off the news media's radar.

THAT IS SOME FUCKED UP SHIT

If you're the type of person who would enjoy Slither, you likely don't need me to tell you to see it, because you already know who you are. I don't mean to absolve my critical responsibilities, but facts are facts, and B-movie fans don't need to be told, "hey, there's an awesome new movie about killer space slugs!" If you enjoy movies about killer space slugs, you have known about Slither for weeks or months, and you have likely already seen it.

That said, I enjoy movies about killer space slugs.

For a reason that is not particularly clear to me, horror films with a good sense of humor tend to be more effective than deadly serious ones, and Slither has such a sense of humor that I would almost tend to call it a comedy; it follows in the tradition of Tremors (which is better) and Eight Legged Freaks (which is much worse). The story in brief: a meteorite of some sort crashes in the woods near a small southern town, and a beastie crawls out. Said beastie manages to inject local horndog Grant Grant (Michael Rooker) with a larval worm, slowly turning him into something resembling a squid. Grant's wife Starla (Elizabeth Banks) and her old flame Sherriff Bill Pardy (Nathan Fillion) tear ass across the countryside trying to stop Grant from overtaking the world with foot-long slugs that turn people into zombies. Along the way they save a teenage girl (Tania Saulnier) with a psychic link to the slugs. Vast quantities of reasonably realistic gore effects ensue.

See, that's why I started the way I did. I should feel ashamed that I was capable of writing the phrase "foot-long slugs that turn people into zombies," and yet I'm not. The fact of the matter is, Slither is a hell of a lot of fun to watch.

This is because writer-director James Gunn (writer of the Dawn of the Dead remake, and the atrocious Tromeo and Juliet) does not commit the sin of nearly every horror film of the last 25 years: he respects the genre. It is easy to watch most splatter films and come to the conclusion that the makers not only hate their film, but also the audience. Gunn clearly does not. His camera lovingly glides over images of carnage and blood and gore without seeming to sneer at the audience (you want fucking gore? Here!), but instead with joy: isn't that cool? Ew! Wow! Not only does this make the film easier to watch, but scarier, as well - it's the first horror movie that I actually found creepy in a rather long time.

The cast is also important in making the film work, especially Fillion. More and more, cult movie fans are calling him the second coming of the indispensible Bruce Campell, and while this is impossible (there can be only one), it's also true that Fillion shows a flash of what Campbell brings to his best films: a sense that the only way to handle death and destruction and unspeakably grotesque scenes of Hell is too laugh at them; because dammit, you're going to die anyway. And the script gives Fillion plenty of perfect one-liners, and a couple of morbidly funny bits of slapstick. I will not give these away, nor any of the film's other significant pleasures, because they are so rarely found in contemporary horror. I will merely restate that the film is full of respect - for its audience, its plot and even its redneck characters - and that makes all the difference.

So that's that. It's pretty empty (want a good time? Check out the Village Voice review that soberly calls this "a critique of the American heartland's boundless gluttony") and a lot of fun, and probably the only genuinely scary thing that will get theatrical release in this country in 2006. It also has my new all-time favorite onscreen vivisection. If you're into that sort of thing.

7/10 (and not for lack of wanting to give it 8)

HER INDIFFERENCE IS REAL. SHE IS NOT.

From Norbizness, a new toy: Eliza, the world's most famous artificial-intelligence psychotherapist. Heard about it years ago, forgot about it, finally decided to try:

> Hello, I am Eliza.
* I am Tim
> Do you believe it is normal to be Tim?
* No, that's my name
> Names don't interest me.
* Fuck off

And they say therapy doesn't work.

IN WHICH WASHINGTON BECOMES 0.001% LESS EVIL

I suppose I'm the last person to find out (morning news scan came later than usual), but there's some fine news out of Washignton for a change: Tom DeLay is falling on his sword. He gives his reasons why in a Time interview, basically admitting that he has no chance in hell of winning re-election, especially if he spends November in prison (okay, you have to filter out the politicalese bullshit to get to that point, but it's what he's saying).

Not hard to find more on the subject, but firedoglake and Daily Kos are good places to start.

For myself, I am characteristically unoptimistic (pace georgia10), and I think that this is going to be sold and reported as the expiation of all the GOP's sins. Sure it's satisfying to see a man so utterly without merit as a person pay for it, but I'm sick of moral victories. So good riddance, DeLay, you festering blight. Have fun watching your party, which you still cling to like an abusive lover, do everything it can to forget you ever existed.

And since everybody else is doing it, a bit of fun for y'all - John "Hinderaker" Assrocket writes what might be the least-correct paragraph ever composed in English:

It's too bad, I think. DeLay was an effective leader, albeit too liberal in recent years. It's possible, of course, that he did something wrong along the way. But there is no evidence of that in the public domain; as I've often said, the politically-inspired prosection of DeLay by Travis County's discredited DA, Ronnie Earle, is a bad joke. As far as we can tell at the moment, DeLay appears to be yet another victim of the Democrats' politics of personal destruction--the only politics they know.

At a certain point you just have to step back in awe.

IF THERE'D BEEN A T-REX IN THE GARDEN OF EDEN...

The Sopranos last night was a bit of a letdown from the three preceding it; no mistake, it was better than half of season 5 and all of season 4, but something felt a bit off.

For one, it was simply too melodramatic. I loved seeing Paulie turn into a being of pure evil rage, but the mother plotline was mostly unbelievable. I know where they're going with it - family lets you down, and the Family lets you down too - but that doesn't mean I have to like it right now.

(The Barone kid plotline has a similar "family betrays" feel to it, and mostly just bored me).

The worst moment was easily "Take Your Son to the Trash Route Day." A little much, non?

Enough great stuff to compensate and then some, though. Loved Hal Holbrook, even if his character seemed more What the #$*! Do We Know? than actual physicist. The contrast between him and the psycho-Christians worked for me, if only because I'm glad to see fundies openly mocked in the current cultural atmosphere (by the way? Fuck McCain). Last scene was beautiful, even if a little obviously symbolic.

Also worked, despite obvious symbolism: the dinosaur book, giving Christopher another fine chance to be a laugh-out-loud dumbass.

The Bobby and the Rapper subplot was a fine one-off, but it needs to end here.

Mostly, I really enjoyed the implication that Tony's coma experience is giving him a new outlook on life and morality et cetera et al. His next scene with Melfi is going to be awesome.

And "One of These Days"? Best end-credits music choice ever.

J'ECRIT

At 12:30 AM CDT, 3 April 2006, let it be known that I have finished the first draft of the screenplay for my second feature film. Which is different from the first draft of my second feature screenplay, but that's another tale.

I've spent 185 pages describing three days in the lives of five young people in Chicago. I need to cut 65 of those pages, and about 10 of the 26 speaking roles. It would also make my life easier if there were fewer than 30 interior locations (I haven't counted the exteriors). I shall write constantly about my editing travails, not because I think anyone is interested, but because I am (contra Warden Stephen Gentiles) one of those people who is always going on about his screenplays.

Right now, though, I have work in the morning, and even though my body still thinks it's 11:37, 6:30 AM will come in six hours no matter what.

FRIDAY RANDOM TEN - 2.4 MEELION DOLLARS EDITION

1. "You Took Advantage of Me," Ella Fitzgerald, 1956. From The Rodgers and Hart Songbook. Totally unremarkable, though she gives it her best. Officially establishes the lowest score Ella can reach. 6/10

2. "Social Disease," Elton John, 1973. Utterly pointless track from the generall good Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. 3/10

3. "Sisters of the Moon," Fleetwood Mac, 1979. I think this is the strangest song Stevie Nicks ever wrote. Go ahead and re-read that sentence. Yeah. 3/10

4. "Tears of Rage," The Band, 1968. Unspectacular in the extreme. It's the first track of its album, and it definitely plays like a warm-up. 5/10

5. "Free Life," Neil Diamond, 1970. There's a neat little flute thing going on, but it's an early example of the stodgy Adult Contemporary trap he'd fall into later in the decade. 4/10

6. "Tomorrow Never Knows," The Beatles, 1966. John goes nuts to close Revolver. I'm always glad when it starts, but I usually get bored before it's over. 6/10

7. "Procession," The Moody Blues, 1971. For all it's proto-prog spoken word glory, there's something I adore about this one. Anyway, it's the first non-dull song of the bunch. 6/10

8. "When the Ship Comes In," Bob Dylan, 1964. Filler, pure and simple. It sounds like 50 other Dylan songs. 4/10

9. "Step Aside," Sleater-Kinney, 2002. Whoa, culture shock. I liked One Beat a lot more before The Woods, but it's still a good, raucous album, and if I'm not mistaken, they're still a cred-enhancing band. 7/10

10. "Bridge Over Troubled Water," Simon & Garfunkel, 1970. Just about the prettiest vocal track in pop history. A point off because everyone has heard this song about 400 times. 9/10

Average: 5.3/10, and I must thank Paul Simon for making even that happen.

Bonus Track: "You Really Got Me," The Kinks, 1966.

HEH. INDEED - LIBERAL ATHEIST EDITION

Prayer doesn't work. Read the whole thing.

Okay, now, it's not nice to pick on the religious. I know that, and the diligent reader will remember a bit of a dustup a while back to that effect. But there's a reason I called the blog Antagony & Ecstasy, and not Friendly Funtime Ecstasy, and that's because dammit, I enjoy taking the piss of people who I'm fairly certain are wrong.

In this case, it's a test that shows intercessory prayer has no apparent health benefit after heart surgery. Which is old news. What's so awesome to me is that people who knew they were getting prayed for did worse. Now, there are lots of possible explanations - they got nervous when they were told; they got cocky when they were told; God doesn't exist but Satan does; but I'm not worried about that. Frankly, I just want to be a smug asshole and bask in the fact.

The question remains, though: why exactly is research money being spent this way?

(hat tip to Jack for the link)

UPDATE: a proper scientist weighs on the study (via Pharyngula).

APRIL MOVIE PREVIEW

First, an observation: at the start of April 2005, I had not seen one decent movie. So far this year, I've seen three. Does this mean 2006 will be better than last year? Hard call: last April brought us Sin City, and I don't see anything of the calibre coming up soon.

7.4.2006
So much bad, but nothing likely to be worse than The Benchwarmers, starring the unholy trifecta of David Spade, Rob Schneider and Jon Heder, and produced by Satan himself. Moving right along is Mo'Nique in Phat Girlz, a warm and fuzzy type comedy about a fashion designer; Jennifer Aniston, Frances McDormand and Catherine Keener in Friends with Money, which looks like it shall be wasting a 66% good cast on a film whose guiding principle seems to be "Interiors? Yeah, that film had too much going on." Oh, and Antonio Banderas in Take the Lead, AKA the fictional version of Mad Hot Ballroom.

I want to single out Lucky Number Slevin because I'm pissed off at it; Ben Kingsley's return to crime drama, with the likes of Bruce Willis, Stanley Tucci and Morgan Freeman, and some studio asshole decided to cast Josh fucking Hartnett as the central character.

Also, the one hope I have for the entire damn month, the high school noir Brick. Not clear if it's just NY/LA, or if it drifts to Chicago this weekend.

14.4.2006
Why even bother complaining that Scary Movie 4 will suck? They have to stop making them eventually. And I must admit, I find the poster sort of amusing, with its "The funniest thing you ever sawed" tagline and the shocked Hello Kitty bandaid.

What else? Disney's reverse-Madagascar, and the last in their line of "hey, CGI is r0x0rs!" attempts to steal some of the Pixar magic (have you heard, Lasseter wants to bring back 2D animation? And the Pixar guys are killing all of the in-progress Disney projects? Awesome), The Wild. Also Gretchen Moll as The Notorious Bettie Page, a film that looks like it could go anywhere quality-wise, and that's kind of exciting to me, in this age of hugely predictable everything. Kinky Boots, a Britcom about drag queens and shoemakers whose sole reason for being is the presence of Chiwetel Ejiofor as a woman. And Hard Candy, which has an awesome trailer and looks real damn creepy, but is getting bad reviews.

21.4.2006
American Dreamz: the new Paul Weitz comedy (and five years ago, that would have made me very scared, but hey, always give a guy a chance to knock a couple out of the park), and broadsided satire of American culture (poster: "Imagine a country where the president never reads the newspaper, where the government goes to war for all the wrong reasons, and more people vote for a pop idol than the next president"). I don't know why Hugh Grant is in the cast, and I fear it will be too dumbed-down to have anything real to say, but I maintain an open mind.

Otherwise: the gorgeous Radha Mitchell in a "missing child" thriller, Silent Hill, likely to be the next horror film that completely disappoints me; The Sentinel, which looks like a tarted-up In the Line of Fire with Michael Douglas as a Secret Service agent (who really needs to stop making movies if he's going to age this vulgarly); and believe it or not, another damn Secret Service movie, starring Mariel Hemingway (!): In Her Line of Fire. My money says it's going to be glorious trash - Brian Trenchard-Smith (he of Megiddo!!!!) directs.

28.4.2006
Okay, the big deal is obviously United 93, the first-ever 9/11 movie, which I really think is going to suck hard. The trailer makes it look a little too written, like the passengers know that they are Actors In A Larger Drama in a profoundly fake way. I might see, might not, but I'm definitely looking forward more to Oliver Stone's World Trade Center.

A new Robin Williams road-trip family comedy (God save us) with a miserable trailer, R.V. managed to wrangle both Will Arnett and Tony Hale, and if this is what a post-Arrested Development world is going to look like, I think it's probably just time to die (off-topic: Michael Cera and Alia Shawkat on Wednesday's Veronica Mars? Awesome, and if it gets renewed they'd better come back). Akeelah and the Bee is another damn spelling bee drama, but it looks infinitely better than Bee Season, which I refused to see; and Deepa Mehta's Water, a drama about gender roles in India which I probably shouldn't see - it doesn't look like a good place to start watching her films - but it has a truly beautiful trailer.

BLOGROLL UPDATE

A few people have asked me, so I wanted to point out the new address of Dave Weigel's blog, http://daveweigel.com.

To those who haven't been there, a quick bit of pimping: in addition to being a friend from a while back, Dave is one of the smartest writers I have on my blogroll, and even though there's not a whole lot of overlap in our politics, I still think he's got an unerring ability to be completely sensible about nearly everything. Definitely the sort of well-reasoned moderate libertarian that gives centrism a good name (he's a newly-minted assistant editor at Reason).

Plus, he has mad music crit skillz.

A LITTLE SOMETHING FOR THE CONSPIRACY BUFFS OUT THERE

First up: a San Francisco Chronicle opinion piece (can I just say I'm falling in love with this paper? It's no Minneapolis Star-Tribune, but it's pretty awesome), praising a New York Magazine article synopsising the 9/11 conspiracy theory subculture.

Next: the New York article, which is full of reasonable and balanced reporting and generally leaves me a little nauseated. Many of the questions raised are things I have often pondered, and always assumed made me paranoid.

Bonus: another New York article about grown-ups who aren't. My own private hell: the article describes two kinds of modern day adults - the arrested development hipster and the office drone - and I'd rather cut off my remaining testicle than turn out to be either one. Like all New York pieces, it's very NY-centric, though, and the author makes no real effort to look outside his own zipcode for trends.

WHAT WON'T THEY GIVE AN OSCAR TO THESE DAYS?

Perhaps none of what I'm about to write will remain true. My thinking in the last twelve hours has flipped a little bit; for a few hours after walking out of Tsotsi, the South African winner of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, I was prepared to say it more or less worked in spite of its considerable flaws; now I wonder if it doesn't fail in spite of its considerable successes.

I will start out by saying something nice: Presley Chweneyagae, who plays the titular character, is very good in his film debut. He has to make the arc of a young criminal who finds redemption believable, and he succeeds. You can see it in his face and in his posture, that this character is slowly learning how to be honest and open and moral.

I am not sure the screenplay can back him up, though. The story concerns a young man (his nickname Tsotsi is slang for "thug"; his real name is revealed so early and so anticlimactically that I'm not sure why the film makes an issue of it, but there we have it) who jacks a car and shoots its owner, only to find her baby in the back seat. He is not so cold-blooded as to abandon an infant, and he finds himself taking care of it in between flashbacks that make it clear that the reason he's so screwed up is because his own father was a prick.

We've all seen plenty of redemption stories, and they practically write themselves. The problem here is that Tsotsi hasn't - it relies on the audience making a few too many connections. For one, it's not at all clear how Tsotsi's redemption works: the last few minutes of the film are ambiguous in a bad way (I simply don't know what he would have done if the guns weren't there), and throughout, every "redemptive" action he takes can be read on a surface level as trying to do right by the baby, something he clearly commits to early on. So if there is a redemption there, it takes place at the end of the first act and the rest is all gravy (yes, yes, I know, there's the contrast in how he treats his friend Boston in the opening and middle of the film, but other than that I cannot name one "redemptive" act he performs). Also, the "Tsotsi's father sucked" angle seems pitched entirely at the audience, not the characters, and it never seems to tie back to Tsotsi's actions. Its only real effect is to soften Tsotsi's villainy - "oh, he was unloved, poor thing" - and cheapen the redemptive arc.

The other thing that really got to me was the cinematography. Every shot of the film is absolutely perfect and gorgeous - you could mount any given frame on your wall - and I give the film a great deal of credit for that. But I'm not convinced that the cinematography and the script exist in the same place. Most of the images play with a fairly conventional "dark is bad/light is good" motif, with lots of shots of Tsotsi's silhouette blocking out the light, Tsotsi stepping into the light, etc. The problem is that these shots are only csually related to the chronology of Tsotsi's redemption. Much like the script asking the audience to jump from Tsotsi's father issues to his adopting the baby, and from the baby to his redemption, the cinematography makes the audience do most of the work - we know what this visual language means in other films, so let's assume this film does the same things.

A shame, because what it does well it does very well indeed - the performances, the depiction of daily life in Johannesburg, and particularly relating the indoors and the outdoors (outdoors is violent but emotional, indoors is peaceful but constricting) to Tsotsi's development.

Anyway, it's better than Joyeux Noël.

6/10

I KNOW YOU SAW DOG DAY AFTERNOON

I keep coming back to the cinematography. Despite a cache of fine performances and one of the smartest American heist scripts in years, I can't help but come back to the look of the thing, and how much fun it is - rare indeed is the film whose camera movement is enough to keep me enraptured all by itself.

Thus did I enjoy Inside Man, the best film of the first quarter of 2006, not that it has a whole lot of competition for the title. It is not a flawless film, and it suffers from a lack of thematic clarity, but it is so boundlessly energetic that watching it is a treat despite whatever holes in conception or execution you might care to point out.

And so: the cinematography. This is a visually noisy film, with nearly every frame full of movement and distracting mise en scène, and this is a very good thing. Moreover, the camera is constantly moving and often handheld, and this is a better thing - simultaneously, the film seems chaotic and laid back, meticulously planned and lazily spontaneous. This mood is crucial to the film's depiction of a singularly precise bank robbery which nobody seems very much to worry about.

Ah yes, the plot: the spine of any good crime movie, or any bad one. Here, a weirdly calm and intelligent man named Dalton Russell (Clive Owen) informs us, the audience, that he has recently masterminded the perfect bank robbery. We then hop backwards - or sideways (it's hard to tell) - to the execution of this plan, and the attempt by Detective Keith Frazier (Denzel Washington) to figure out what the hell is going on when Russell's gang seems to perform no crimes while waiting for a plane.

It's convoluted but not impossible to follow, even with a massive side plot involving Madeline White (Jodie Foster, in her first good American role in a decade), a mysterious fixer hired by the bank chairman (Christopher Plummer) to secure an undivulged secret. Madeline's identity and the chairman's secret both seem to be MacGuffins; one is revealed and matters, one is not revealed and does not matter. I will say that at a certain poitn I was certain Madeline was permanently leaving the film and I found her character a pointless if entertaining red herring; later she returns and I discovered I was entirely wrong.

Inside Man is a good example of the fact that a great director can't help but make an interesting film, even if he's just trying to make a frivolous entertainment. The great director here is Spike Lee, who has made significantly better films than this one, but none nearly so much fun to watch. It is customary for white critics to observe that Lee is obsessed with race to such a degree that he forgoes argument in favor of polemic; this is only partially true, but certainly it is easier to appreciate Lee's technical mastery when it's in service of a fairly nonconfrontational story.

That is not to say that the movie does not make an argument about race; merely that its argument is subdued. Ethnicity is forgrounded (a lengthy scene involving the difference between Slavic countries; a Sikh refusing to cooperate because the police thought he was an Arab and took his turban; not to mention Madeline White), but Lee and screenwriter Russell Gewirtz seem to be reminding the audience that racism exists, rather than expounding on it. The closest the film comes to argument in this regard is a scene in which Clive Owen takes a violent videogame apparently titled Kill Dat Nigga away from an African-American boy, suggesting aloud that the boy's father needs to keep a closer eye on such things. A late reveal implicates one of the 20th Century's most significant acts of racism, but even here it seems more a pretext than a theme.

The film's laissez-faire approach to race is endemic of its approach to the world. The cops on the case lack any sense of real urgency - three times, Frazier is seen in a coffee shop relaxing, and at the end he's even told to forget about the case, which nobody much cares about. In a way, it's like Dog Day Afternoon, a film it name-drops: crime is a spectacle for idle New Yorkers, who ultimately have only a sporting investment in the outcome. It's all very observed and detached.

Where the film comes close to foundering is that it really has two themes running parallel, never once coming into contact. The one is the sense of "whatever" that informs its society and racial angle - New York will go on. The other has to with knowing and seeking knowledge. Time and again, Clive Owen's Russell is praised for his intelligence and planning; the plot of the film is basically watching Denzel Washington solving a puzzle. It's interesting to be sure, and it pays dividends, especially in the twist ending. At the beginning, Russell tells us that he chooses his words very carefully, and indeed we find that he does. Like any good crime film, Inside Man piles on delicately hidden clues and demands that we find and juggle all of them. But none of this has anything to do with race, and at times it feels like there are two films happening at once because Lee couldn't quite decide which one he'd rather make.

But still: the cinematography. Lee and Matthew Libatique have followed the rule of "form equals content" to a degree hardly ever seen in American cinema since the 1970's. It's fun, and it's messy, and it's been choreographed to a T. I don't remember the last time a dolly around two actors made me sigh in delight, but I did here. Sometimes, a remarkably self-assured visual cool is all you need, and the rest follows suit.

8/10

HANGS HEAD, CHARLIE BROWN MUSIC STARTS TO PLAY

Arrested Development is over.

Saith Tim Goodman.

And Variety.

It's a great day for being sad.

AN AFFIRMATION

I was away from the news this weekend.

Not, "I was away from the internet," which I was; no, I lacked all contact with the world outside of a small town in central Illinois that I was visiting.

Work was kind of grueling, so I didn't have much time to scan the headlines, and I had a headache anyway, so I kind of wanted to avoid anything that would stress me out.

I've read the news now, and what do I find:

-An immigration bill in Congress that's shoring up divisions between those who want to reward and those who want to penalize illegal immigrants. What happens doesn't matter: it's all a dog-and-pony show and the end result is whatever will be most valuable to the corporate owners of legislators on both sides of the aisle.

-Iraq continues hellishly.

-All that lies between Bush and accountability for the NSA wiretapping scandal is a bloated, timid Congress.

Nothing changes. People come, people go.

It's hard not to wonder sometimes why I bother. What good does caring do, what good does it do to want things to be better when the only people with power are useless idealogues at best and zealots at worst.

Why not just drink the kool-aid adn agree that things are great in the Middle East, them uppity women need to get over their abortion fetish, we were all created 6000 years ago by a omnipotent God who loves us all very much, and the government has nothing in mind but our best interests and economic freedom?

This picture is of one of the most exceptionally cute kittens I have ever seen. It is cheering. The cuteness of kittens is a sort of empirical constant, transcending politics or morality. They are pure innocence and pure delight.

Besides that, I met a 9 month old named Brendan this weekend. His parents are my age - 24. They live in a house with five rooms that costs $300 a month in rent. His dad works a full time job and part time at a grocery store, his mom stays at home to take care of him. They are all white, and they live in a poor but not impoverished community two hours from Chicago and 45 minutes from the Quad Cities. Brendan will never go hungry, even if he never lives a life of pure ease and idleness.

He is one of the most perfect and amazing human beings I have ever met, and in a very real way I was humbled by him. I felt honored when he smiled at me with his 9 month old, barely toothy mouth.

I bother because of Brendan and a round, fluffy, sleeping kitten.

It's a start.

A ROOM FULL OF WRITERS, AND YOU ALL DID NOTHING!

Thoughts on last night's episode of The Sopranos:

-A letdown from last week; it felt like Chase & Co. were just trying to rush through the coma plotline as quickly as possible. Sort of...trite.

-The triumphant return of Steve Buscemi was great. Best scene in the episode.

-Although I loved the pitch meeting, I do not look forward to another "Christopher wants to make movies" arc.

-The supermarket scene with Carmela and Dr. Melfi was grim. If that's the only way they can get Lorraine Bracco in an episode, I remember thinking, it might just be smartest to cut the character.

-Then the second Carmela/Melfi scene came along, and it was awesome.

-Vito is creepy in a not-fun-to-watch way. But I enjoyed the look on Carmela's face when she figures out Vito and Paulie's game.

-They had better not drop the plotline about Silvio's panic and asthma attack.

-Shut up, A.J.