Heading out to the auto slums to shoot up some oil

Well, the President just finished his State of the Union address, and as far as presentation goes, it was fairly strong. He spent a large part of the speech talking about how certain issue positions—anti-globalization, anti-immigration, etc—are indicative of “economic retreat.” No problems from me there.

And then, annoyingly, he went on to talk about our “addiction to oil.” So let me get this straight: we’re supposed to stand up to the defeatism of economic retreat, but let’s, er . . . reduce our energy usage? And stigmatize oil? I don't know if you're aware of this, Mr. President, but economies require energy. Growing the economy—an absolute necessity if we want to make true inroads against poverty and hunger—requires expanding energy usage. And right now, that means oil and other carbon-based fuels. If treating our primary energy source as a dirty syringe that we ought to be sent to a halfway house for using isn’t “economic retreat,” I don’t know what is.

If the President equivocates on retreat, though, there’s one man who won’t: Jack Bauer. Apparently Rush Limbaugh read from this list of “Jack Bauer Facts” on the air today (a takeoff of the already old news Chuck Norris Facts), and if, like me, you’re a fan of America’s number one terrorist-killing, torture-advocating CTU hardass from 24, it’s sure to give you that heroin-like kick that we all apparently get when we fill up our cars.

Academy, anything but academic

This is just stupid. I can grumblingly admit that maybe A History of Violence isn’t the sort of thing the Academy wants to deal with—it eschews the sort of swaggering hipster violence-as-irony, a la Pulp Fiction, that the members seem to like in favor of something far more disturbing and convicting—an interweaving of horror and action film thrills with an effrontery moral wrath that doesn’t let the viewer entirely off the hook for enjoying it. Really, if Scott Foundas and the Slate movie clubbers have to remind each other that it’s supposed to be funny, it’s probably too tonally complex for the rigidly staid tastes of the Academy.

But come on—no Squid and the Whale? This is one of the best reviewed films of the year, and also one of the most original. It’s got luxury, angst, familial breakdown, sharp jabs at upper middle class intelligentsia, sexual dysfunction, and showy performances that don’t just wrench the heart—they rip it apart with the entire tool kit.

But no, the Academy members, instead, are too pathetically timid to nominate anything that might question their own urban bourgeoisie sensibilities or their cash cow bearing bloodlust. So instead we get a cornucopia of easy liberal tirades: a heartfelt, overly sincere cry for more good old fashioned liberal journalism, a dimwitted bit of exploitative race baiting, a bone thrown to a favored son to prove he still matters and a movie whose sole basis for popularity is that it’s about gay cowboys. The only film that really deserves to be in the Best Picture category is Capote, and even that film, I suspect, is there more for its percieved homosexual sympathy than its enigmatic brilliance. Why not just rent everyone in the Academy a limo filled with flowers and send them off to a pompous ceremony devoted solely to obscene, ostentatious public self-congratulation. Oh wait…

On cultural libertarianism

What started with a sideline comment by Ross Douhat has quickly expanded, and now, fellow AFF Brainwash contributor Michael Brendan Dougherty and Cato happiness guru Will Wilkinson have also weighed in with responses to my response. Ah, the twisty paths of blogosphere arguments.

Will, in his excellent comment, makes pretty much all the points I would’ve in order to counter Michael’s economic arguments. Globalization and the interdependence through trade creates far more stability than an inwardly focused economy. Technology has been the engine that has exponentially increased the potential for human productivity, allowing faster, cheaper, more available goods to anyone and everyone (goods which, I’ll add, free trade makes even more readily available, eliminating more poverty). China may not be a glittery paradise today, but Thomas Sowell recently published a column in which he quoted undercover economist Tim Harford as saying that “China is lifting a million people a month out of poverty.” While there are still clearly many gains to be made there, this is no small feat. Wealth, trade and prosperity create peace and well-being far better than nationalistic self-centeredness.

Michael lobs a pretty strong bit of rhetoric directly at me, though, on the issue of cultural decline:

Peter says that as a Christian he is concerned about the coarsening of public culture. But is he willing then to do something about it- like regulate pornography? Or even stigmatize the making and buying of it in some way?

The quick answer to this is no. I would prefer to keep any and all content regulations—and other laws fought for on indecency grounds—extremely minimal or non-existent, whether they’re attempting to regulate pornography, video-game violence, offensive stereotypes or annoying liberal tripe. Would I like to stigmatize the purchasing and buying of it? Possibly, but not through any action on the part of the government.

The problem with state-instituted regulations that are designed to uphold some sort of centralized standard of morality is that the state is the worst possible institution one could ask to be a source for moral uplift. As a Christian, I think it’s important to have a secular state, one that neither promotes nor degrades my religion or anyone else’s. Religious freedom is paramount to this country’s success, and the only way to ensure total religious freedom is to have the government stay out of it. All regulations are threats of force, and whether for or against my particular faith, I don’t want the bureaucracy threatening anyone for either holding beliefs or acting on them (I’m excepting beliefs that might require one to engage in violence, of course).

The consequence of having a state that’s a necessarily secular institution is that the state can’t and shouldn’t take sides in religious, moral debates. Moreover, the state, as conservative smoking-rights defenders the world over will join in a chorus to sing, isn’t supposed to protect us from risk; instead, government is supposed to enable human choice and physical safety—and not a lot else. So even if we agree that looking at pornography is a risky behavior, it’s not the state’s job to stop individuals from doing it.

The only way to regulate bad choices is to give the state oodles of power—power which will manifest itself as a threat—that will eventually backfire on those who initially sought to use it.

The way I see it, the state’s ever-growing power has coincided with the rise of secularism. This is to be expected from a necessarily secular state, but the way to fight it isn’t to try to turn the government into a wing of the church. Instead, the church and other social organizations need to realize that as long as people see the government—with its regulations, programs and redistributionary ways—as a tool to fix social problems, their influence will continue to diminish. Why turn elsewhere when the state will fix everything?

The goal, then, ought to be to get the government out of the way, restore the role of privately-funded institutions—whether they’re churches, think tanks, whatever—and dismiss the idea that lack of regulation is the cause for any moral failings in our society.

Jenny Lewis review in The Washington Times

Today, I’m taking the stereo for a spin with a review of the new Jenny Lewis solo album Rabbit Fur Coat. The Rilo Kiley front woman’s first solo record takes a subtler, more refined approach than her previous work, and it's quite a delight; as I say in the review, it’s “a slight, sweet storybook of an album.” Pick up a copy of The Washington Times or read the review online here.

Popcorn and coke

Last week, Slate’s Bryan Curtis wrote an amusing essay on the natty, snob-o-rific annoyances that plague arthouse theaters. As a regular at several of the DC area’s independently inclined houses of cinema, I’ll second much of what he says.

Arthouse crowds are uniquely irritating, and while they’re not prone to the distractingly obnoxious preteen quarreling over cell-phones or who gets to sit by the hot girl, they’re certainly rife with their own brand of snooty, pseudo-intellectual nitwits. Audience members gab, scribble and fold newspapers throughout showings. There’s always a new girlfriend who’s been dragged by her moppy haired, thick-rimmed glasses-wearing boyfriend to a complicated movie and then insists on having him explain every scene, which, of course, causes her to miss more scenes and demand further explanations. The whole thing quickly degenerates into a Monday Night Football style play-by-play, in which the increasing annoyance of the soon-to-be-blissfully-single boyfriend is matched only by the puffed-up, intellectually superior rage of the rest of the audience. Curtis may mock the arthouse for its loner magnetism, but the only thing worse than a room full of movie-geek introverts is a cinematically apathetic girlfriend.

Curtis also mentions a legendary figure he calls “The Crinkler.” The Crinkler, he says:

…is a mythic art-house figure—perhaps you've heard of him. Or, rather, perhaps you've heard him. As the lights go down, he is the guy three rows back who crinkles plastic wrap, restlessly and maniacally, for the entire length of a picture. I have had the displeasure of watching two films that he crinkled through: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre at Film Forum, and then, a few months later, White Heat, the film noir, at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. The ethical dilemma presented by the Crinkler is that crinkling doesn't have an obvious rejoinder. At Film Forum, a man seated behind me screamed, "If you don't stop that crinkling …" and then trailed off, as if his brain were unable to fully process the problem. The crinkling continued. It is possible, I suppose, that there is more than one Crinkler carrying plastic wrap all over the city, but the taste in movies (he seems to prefer muscular American cinema of the late 1940s) leads me to believe there is a single Crinkler, an omnipresent evil genius.

The article suggests this character may be a single individual, but if that’s the case, then he’s prone to travels between DC and New York. At a recent E-Street showing of The Passenger, I sat next to both The Crinkler and his equally crinklefied wife, cramped into my seat next to them as they passed and opened foil-wrapped chocolates, rooted through their bags (another arthouse staple Curtis nails), hacked and weezed (loudly and wetly), discussed the possible medications that were available from the wife’s bags, and generally found it necessary to comment quite loudly on the film’s action (or lack of, such as it were).

Curtis ends the article, however, with a mildly tongue in cheek praise of the multiplex, finding its acne-ridden, underage crowds to be somehow appropriately energetic. And while I travel to the multiplex often enough, I can’t say I agree. At a multiplex in Destin, Florida—possibly the worst managed theater I’ve ever known—I once reported what appeared to be a pool of vomit that had glopped out over the floor. The still-in-high-school staff gave it a look, proclaimed to me that it was “only coke spilled on popcorn,” shrugged their shoulders and left it be. Clearly adult films are littered with noisy, active kids. Adults regularly seem to feel that the characters on their screen desperately need their advice—“Yeah! Get him!”—or that their fellow theater goers need their comments—“That was awesome!” and “Oooh. He’s bad, isn’t he?” seem to be staples from such filmgoing announcers. Such are the perils of the megaplex. Call me pretentious, but I’ll take the huffy, socially-obtuse arrogance of the arthouse over popcorn and coke any time.

Wax figure comes to life

Via the Cinetrix, New York Times Hollywood reporter Sharon Waxman revealed!

Click on the 'Sunshine at Sundance' video link for low-quality, high-fun film critic and industry writer blather.

Stephanie's Graf

I don't read Salon very often any more, but for several years, I considered it prime reading. After the dot com bust, however, the liberal web magazine looked untenable, and over a short period dropped from more than 70 writers to a pale skeleton of under 30. One of the things I always appreciated most about Salon was its film coverage, but with the departure of Charles Taylor and the general downsizing of the arts and entertainment coverage in favor of ever more shrill political scaremongering, I quit reading regularly.

Since the redesign a few months ago, the site has improved significantly, with a renewed focus on the politically slanted arts and culture coverage they do best. One of the notable things about the publication is that it really uses its web format well, giving its critics room to write fairly long, involved essays that would never appear on the expensive dead tree pages of most print periodicals. Reading Stephanie Zacharek’s review of Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (also reviewed quite wonderfully by the Cinetrix here), especially, I was reminded by how delightfully comprehensive and slightly scattered her essays could be. Look at this thesis:

"Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story" is, among other things, a movie-within-a-movie, a sly meditation on the haphazard, unpredictable nature of creativity, and an affectionate cuff on the nose for actors everywhere, exposing, in good fun, their vanity, insecurities and tendency toward jealousy. The movie's delights unfold like an intricate, exotic puzzle: Winterbottom has built a detailed, miniature universe inside a sugar egg.

Edelstein may be once again reigned in by the strictures of print, but at least Zacharek continues to thrive in the wild jungles of the net.

Box office behemoths and indie darlings

For those interested in the way the financial/production end of the the moviemaking business affects the creative output, The Wall Street Journal’s Sundance coverage yesterday included a useful article on how and why the major studios are trending toward smaller-budget, more adult films. It’s subscription only, but here’s the relevant passage:

Gay cowboys are hot, big apes are not and Hollywood is looking for answers. The most successful films of last year were either super-expensive events like "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe," which cost $150 million to make, or low-budget breakouts like "Brokeback Mountain," which cost $13 million. The conventional mid-range studio film, with a production budget of anywhere from $30 million to $100 million, is in the riskiest zone. Next week, lower-budget films, not pricey blockbusters, are expected to dominate the Academy Award nominations.

With film revenues falling and audience tastes shifting, the clamor for small movies that might have big box-office potential is on the rise. Some of the least-expensive studio offerings of last year managed to make multiple times their cost at the domestic box office. "Walk the Line," the Johnny Cash biopic released by News Corp.'s Fox 2000 label, cost $28 million to make and took in more than $100 million. "March of the Penguins," a nature documentary that was bought for just $1 million at last year's Sundance festival, became a summer family favorite and brought in nearly $80 million for Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Independent Pictures.

The result is the competition for small movies that can break out has become as interesting as the big-budget battles waged by the major studios, putting festivals like Sundance in an ever-brighter spotlight.

Despite Chris Orr’s lament about the dearth of watchable B+ films earlier this week, I think that this move toward the filmmaking scales—smaller on one end and massive on the other—is almost entirely good news. On one hand, we’ll still get those gargantuan, megabudget spectacles—gluttonous celluloid fireworks displays that impress through size and showiness by visualizing the most fantastic, impossible images anyone can imagine. Despite all the caviling about the Big Bad Blockbuster and how it destroyed New Hollywood, blah blah blah, I think we need these. No other medium is so suited to delivering grandiose, imagistic thrills, and it’d be a shame to remove our ability to see what visionaries like Spielberg and Jackson can do with a $200 million CGI paint set.

But on the other hand, it looks as if we’ll see far more of the quirky, uniquely drawn character dramas and other films that aren’t quite so rooted in Hollywood formulas. Whether it’s the comic, surrealist dreamscapes of Charlie Kaufman, Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry, the sad-sack antics of Alexander Payne’s wine losers or amateur-style experimentations of Steven Soderbergh, the fairly low budget (under $20 million) film world has come to represent an artistic freedom that’s simply not available when you’re spending $50 or $70 million. More of these movies is going to mean more experimentation and more opportunities for adventurous audience types, at least those in the major cities, to see something other than bland rehashes and remakes.

Best of all, I think it might convince more prestige directors to go the Soderbergh route of directing both large scale crowd pleasers and microbudget oddities. Currently, the megadirectors and studio-level auteurs are pretty much forced to find some way to take the traditional hot-chicks-explosions-and-life-lessons model of filmmaking and try to put their stamp on it. But, as Soderbergh said in a recent interview, it’s “difficult to find material that is commercial that doesn’t make you feel bad in the morning.” This trend could mean that “commercial” material is no longer something great directors feel compelled to find.

Economy, morality, libertarianism, part more.

Much thanks to Ross for his kind words about my film writing, although recognition for good conservative movie blogging is probably akin to being noted as one of the hottest female players at a Dungeons and Dragons tournament—it's not exactly a high competition field.

Before I respond to the rest of his post, I’ll also say that my comments were primarily aimed at Franke-Ruta; I dragged Ross in to show that smart, sensible conservatives could also be found paying lip service to the idea that, like matches, playing with economic libertarianism can be dangerous.

In many ways, I think Ross and I agree (which is not all that surprising, actually). He starts by saying that “Economic growth is good for society, and economic stagnation is bad, and the best ticket to economic growth is a reasonably libertarian economic system.” So far so good (although my version of the statement might excise the word “reasonably”).

But I do have some quibbles. He makes the argument that libertarian trends like globalization have been better for higher-skilled Americans than lower-skilled, and that wages have fallen for those without college degrees. There’s no debating either of these points as fact, but I think they still miss the larger point, which is that low-skilled workers may have been helped less than the higher-skilled, but they’re still generally better off.

More importantly, economic liberalization (free markets) has helped more people become higher-skilled, and indeed, education (and the higher-skill levels it brings) has become increasingly available and attainable. Higher education has, over the past century, gone from being a extreme rarity to an upper middle class luxury to a mass market phenomenon—and much of its increased availability can be attributed to economic growth. The wealthier a country, the more likely it is to be generally well educated.

Ross’s comments about happiness indicators don’t do much for me either. As one of his commenters noted, Will Wilkinson suggests here that the increase in these indicators from mental health pros is probably due primarily to a change in classification standards, and I don’t put much faith in anyone’s ability to accurately judge, must less their willingness to truthfully respond to a poll about, their own personal happiness level. It’s absurdly subjective.

As for Friedman’s benefits, of which—except for “tolerance”—Ross doesn’t see much evidence, I think the availability of education and the desire of so many to immigrate to the U.S.—even at great personal cost—speaks to our provision of opportunity, and the rise in our country’s general standard of living has done a great deal of providing for the disadvantaged. And public institutions, whether it’s the Wednesday morning meeting conservative establishment, free market think tanks, the environmentalists or the evangelicals and the megachurch phenomenon, have certainly become more solidified, prominent players in the debate about our national direction.

Like Ross, I’m a Christian, and I find the coarsening of culture somewhat disturbing. However, it seems to me that a society in which government is given more power to push and prod the prevailing social mores, or attempts to influence them indirectly through economic means, is one that will inevitably end up having its culture shoved in the wrong direction by the please-everyone, offend-no one muddle of bureaucracy. The government, as an entity that must remain secular, simply isn’t the right institution to decide upon or enforce universal social mores, because it will inevitably get them wrong. This means that if Ross is worried about the “pornographication of the public square,” a more libertarian approach that lets those aforementioned institutions—churches, policy groups and other private organizations and individuals—work without government intervention is really the better way to raise our cultural standards.

One of the more amusing posts I've seen on The Corner as of recent. Derb says:

I'm not a libertarian myself, and NR is not a libertarian publication, but they are generally regarded as a species of conservative. I think so, anyway. Ask Jonah--this is the kind of thing he could knock out a 1,200-word essay on while simultaneously watching three different TV programs and juggling chainsaws.

Nothing to add except this would seem to be material--a TV watching, essay-writing, chainsaw juggling, conservative magazine editor--ripe for some sort of absurdist sitcom.

This man used to be my hero.

Caryn James' new movie trailer column in The New York Times proves its mettle today, decimating the sorry, redundant and enormously dissapointing trailer for the sure to be sorry, redundant and enormously dissapointing new Harrison Ford movie, Firewall. As I've already mentioned, the trailer's only good feature is that it pretty much diagrams the whole movie out, turned tables and all, making it wholly unnecessary to waste your hard earned entertainment dollars and time on what's undoubtedly little more than a woeful rehash lusting for Ford's megastar glory days. Here's the relevant section:

The idea of high-tech security is about all that doesn't seem creaky in this trailer, which reveals the entire trajectory of the plot and invites viewers to make jokes at the movie's expense.

"I don't deserve you," Jack tells his wife at the start as he kisses her and heads off to work. Presumably he means that in a good way, but he looks so cranky you really can't tell.

Before long, Jack, his wife and their two kids are sitting in the living room while the villain — played by Paul Bettany, last in a long, unoriginal line of British villains — threatens them. And, no surprise, Mr. Ford soon goes into action-hero mode, defying the criminals and somehow turning into a guy with a gun and an explosive temper, the kind who can turn a coffee pot into a lethal weapon.

There's no evidence that seeing that transformation will be interesting. It was actually more fun to see him wander onto the Golden Globes stage, carrying a drink, which he handed to Ms. Madsen — she held it up and posed — while he opened the envelope to announce that "Brokeback Mountain" had won a screenplay award. At least there was the promise of something unexpected happening.

Sigh. I used to love the sound of Indy's whip cracking, but the closest we'll get to that now are Ford's creaky old joints. I suppose there's always some hope for the nebulous, perpetually-delayed prospect of Indy IV, but with childhood memories rapist George Lucas reportedly producing and writing, I suspect there's not much to look forward to there either.

Economic Growth in Mortal Combat with Morality?

Over at everyone’s favorite bastion of devoted liberalism, The American Prospect, Garance Franke-Ruta has a new essay about trends in American culture and how they’ve affected the country’s voting and value. The well-written essay, which is worth reading in its entirety, contains a wealth of interesting analysis and some suspiciously familiar ideas about the American "values matrix," but for now I want to focus on a single idea from the introduction.

American voters have taken shelter under the various wings of conservative traditionalism because there has been no one on the Democratic side in recent years to defend traditional, sensible middle-class values against the onslaught of the new nihilistic, macho, libertarian lawlessness unleashed by an economy that pits every man against his fellows.

And, suggesting that the libertarian-economy-equals-declining-social-mores idea isn’t a purely leftist phenomenon, Ross Douhat also mentions this notion in passing in his response to the piece.

A more libertarian economy does have something to do with the breakdown of "sensible middle-class values" over the last few decades, even if conservatives are sometimes loath to admit it.

I suspect this is a somewhat prevalent notion in a lot of circles, and even many conservatives have been guilted into feeling as thought they have to choose between economic freedom and moral rectitude. In so many cases, whether it’s the environment or cultural values, the left has convinced the public—even many conservatives—that there’s a sliding scale between righteousness and economic growth, and that, consequently, the job of government is to set policies that try to balance between the two allegedly opposite ends.

This is clearly flawed in too many ways to go into here, but one recent heavyweight entry into this debate that needs to be noted is the book The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, by Harvard Economics Chairman Benjamin Friedman. The book’s main argument, as laid out in a recent presentation at a joint AEI-Brookings event, is that, contrary to prevailing ideas like Franke-Ruta’s, economic growth actual produces a society of sounder morals. Friedman singles out four specific developments that occur in response to stronger economies: 1) Provision of opportunity 2) Tolerance – racial, religious, and otherwise 3) Greater willingness and ability to provide for the disadvantaged and 4) Strengthening of public institutions. His point is that, while so many people try to place economic growth and moral correctness at opposite ends of the spectrum, the two are really one in the same. And, of course, economic growth happens best in exactly the sort of libertarian, free-market economy that Franke-Ruta says erodes traditional values. The correlation simply isn’t there.

The other problem with this idea is that many of the community values that people pine over were really just indications of poverty and poor living conditions. I hear wistful comments about the days when everyone knew each other’s names and other such nonsense, but they forget what sorts of dire situations those communities were in. It’s true, of course, that in pre-industrial America and in the wilds of today’s third world countries, it may have been (or may be) more likely that communities would come together to, say, build houses or take care of crops. But would anyone actually say these technologically-lacking, generally resource-poor communities were better off?

Comments like these come from folks who would love to return to the idealized small town communal atmosphere of Fiddler on the Roof—and in doing so they forget that even in its idealized musical form, little Anatevka was poor, hungry and oppressed. These Luddite, primitivist nostalgia trips forget that technological development fueled by economic growth has eliminated massive amounts of human poverty, hunger and suffering—surely that’s better, in the end, than knowing the name of the butcher.

Milking your birthplace for every word

My colleague Isaac Post is from Canada, dammit. Today, he reminds us of this fact. Twice.

Let no one ever say that all we got from Canadialand was bacon, maple syrup, and a former baseball team inexplicably named The Expos.

Galactica 2.13: 'Epiphanies' about life

Another week, another hour of high-intrigue, pressurized space drama on Battlestar Galactica. This week’s episode was one of the most blatantly political yet, mixing and matching plotlines that seemed to allude to the war on terror and violent activism as well as abortion and stem cell research. Again, I don’t see the show as explicitly conservative or liberal, but simply as accurate and dramatically interesting—it’s unwilling to simply show one side as all bad and the other as all good.

The key to the episode is life, and the value of life in any form: human or cylon (ie: yours or your enemy's). Inherent in the issue is a slew of competing, even contradictory ideas, all of which suggest some sort of sacrifice is necessary to preserve the largest amount of life.

The show gives us its first contradiction in its nutty protestors. They’re violent pacifists—extremists who think that political violence will bring peace. It gives us the officers and leaders of the Galactica, all of whom care deeply about President Roslin's life, but it contrasts that desire with their willingness to kill Sharon’s half-Cylon baby. And then, to further muddle things, it reminds us that the children of our enemies, much as we might want to kill them (and might even be totally justified in doing so), may also be the key to our future and our survival—their blood will literally save us.

The cause of life, the show seems to be suggesting, is hardly as simplistic and one-sided as so many on each side want to make it: everyone, in the end, is willing to trade some sort of death for their desired ends. There's always a trade off, always a sacrifice, and nearly everyone, no matter how bonkers they are (and the show, thankfully, makes no bones about the peaceniks being totally bonkers), really has good intentions at heart—they're all convinced that their sacrifice is one that's most necessary to save the most lives in the long run.

I’ve also heard complaints that Roslin’s willingness to engage in dialog with the terror pacifists is somehow liberal and softy. But as far as the negotiations go, I think her stance was essentially reasonable. Again, the issue is the value of life, and in Roslin's fleet, life is extremely precious. Sure, the U.S. is not going to negotiate with Al-Qaeda, period, but I think that most of us would support some sort of dialog—or at least an airing of grievances, which is all Roslin promised—between the Israelis and Palestinians, provided the Palestinians totally halted all violent activity. And she made clear that any return to violence would be met with an extreme military reaction from Adama and company; it's hardly a Spielbergian equivocation.

And it’s worth pointing out that Roslin isn’t exactly in the same circumstances a contemporary leader is: the human race, in her world, is nearly extinct, meaning extra care must be made to preserve whatever is left. It’s a far more weighty decision for her to wipe out a terrorist cell or movement than it would be for any current leader—scarcity, as we all know, creates value, and on this show, humanity itself is the most precious natural resource.

High Sign returns! (almost)

The departure of movie critic David Edelstein from Slate has left a gaping hole in the publication’s critical line up. Admittedly, it’s a tough theater seat to fill: In many ways, Edelstein pioneered internet criticism, mixing the shifting lengths, irregular posting and smarmy remarks of the blog world with his incisive critical observations to create one of the most intelligent yet readable spaces for movie commentary either in print or on the web. Now, with Edelstein gone, Slate seems to be holding off on labeling anyone a permanent replacement. Stephen Metcalf has turned in a handful of articles, but he’s still listed only as “a Slate critic” – not quite Edelstein’s listing: “David Edelstein is Slate’s movie critic.”

And while that tagline is sadly a thing of the past, the good news is that New York Times 4^th string film reviewer and Slate TV critic (surely the best TV critic currently writing) Dana Stevens is getting a chance to opine on mega budget, high prestige cinema in a big league setting. Her New York Times articles are generally confined to 400 word summaries, plus a sly line or two and a summary judgment. But those of us who’ve been Stevens fans since her days as film-blogger extraordinaire at The High Sign know that her thousand word entries on both indie darlings and blockbuster spectacles deserve the largest possible audience. And if there were any doubt, she proves it again with this review of isolationist-nutso auteur Terrence Malick’s The New World.

The review is sharp, witty, and full of the blend of academic musing and comedic populist skepticism that made her THS work so endearing. Check out these gems:

The Thin Red Line (1998), Malick's return to filmmaking after 20 years, was generally received as a failure, but it was a fascinating one—a World War II epic that eschewed conventional plot and character in favor of endless nature shots and overlapping, dreamy voice-overs. "Why does nature contend with itself?" asked an off-screen Jim Caviezel in the opening frames, over an image of tree-suffocating vines. No doubt a less compelling question to most soldiers than, "Where's my body armor?" but that obliqueness was part of Malick's point—to step back from the immediacy of battle and ponder the strangeness of war itself.

[snip]

But the Smith/Pocahontas affair is like the erotic equivalent of the Thanksgiving story: It is true as a metaphor, a condensation of fantasies about colonization and first contact.

[snip]

Malick is obsessed with Eden or, perhaps more precisely, obsessed with America's obsession with it. All of his films contain these paradisiacal, usually erotic interludes. But even as the lovers cavort in their makeshift treehouses or smooch by the river, they realize that their idyll is fragile, threatened by the imminent reality of work, or winter, or war.

With luck, the editorial bigwigs at Slate will give Stevens a go at more prominent releases, but until then, check out her THS archive – and especially don’t miss her classic review of The Brown Bunny.

All work and no play makes 24... completely awesome

When stuff blows up on screen, you can pretty much count me in. Whether it’s Jerry Bruckheimer and his formulaic festivals of pyrotechnic wizardry or any of the other gloriously shallow cinematic marvels that explode into summer multiplexes, I like stuff that goes bang. And that’s true even on the small screen, hence my new article on 24, the show that takes ridiculous spy-thriller action to inspiring new levels of absurdity. National Review Online has the goods on the series I call “a bloodthirsty soap opera disguised as a technothriller.”

Pontificating on Cable Television in The Washington Times

It’s no secret that I love seeing movies in the theater, but as Slate’s Edward Jay Epstein is constantly reminding us, Hollywood is shrinking—at least in screen size. The film industry now derives the vast majority of its income from small screen endeavors. And, seeing as I’ve recently confessed my affinity for a certain spacefaring TV show, it’s safe to say that the idiot box is an important component of the filmed entertainment equation—meaning I've got an interest in it. With that, I’ll make the cumbersome transition to noting my most recent article in The Washington Times, which explains why “a la carte” cable regulations—which would require cable operators to sell individual channels rather than in the bundles they currently serve—are, counter intuitively, a bad idea. Buy a copy of the print edition or read the article online here.

On "conservative" art and entertainment

Reading through the emails I’ve received regarding my NRO Battlestar Galactica piece, it seems like there may be some minor confusion about what I’m claiming about the show. The piece was not intended to suggest that the show is overtly conservative (although I do think some of its ideas might lean right), certainly not in the way, say, National Review or The American Spectator can be considered “conservative” or even in the way that The Constant Gardener might be considered liberal.

What I am saying, however, is that the series is accurate, in the non-literal way that science fiction can be accurate, about the labyrinthine interrelationships and unrelenting procession of power grabs that both connect and put at odds the major institutions of societal development. The show’s biggest strengths are twofold: it absolutely nails the way a society’s pillars of power quarrel and make truces and generally work as much toward gaining influence as toward societal good, and it also nails the human dynamic that drives those institutions—the way personal histories, peer pressure, individual duty and traditional belief combust and react to shape the people who make up those power centers.

And as for the argument that the show's producers see it as less than favorable to religion or other traditional societal structures, well, that’s fairly superfluous as far as I’m concerned. Ronald Moore can think whatever he wants about the show. His opinion about its meaning and message isn’t any more important than yours or Laura Miller’s or Dave Kehr’s. (If anything, Kehr’s means more—that man knows him some movies. Anyway.) Once a writer, director, producer, whatever, releases his show into the wild, it’s no longer his. It’s the same as with legislation: Congressional staffers and committee members can talk all they want about what a bill means or doesn’t, but in the end, it’s the actual text that matters and not much else.

And what this goes back to is the idea that I’ve talked about before, which is that good art and good entertainment don’t necessarily have to be overtly conservative—or even neutral—to be good. This is something that many conservatives and traditionalists have trouble dealing with, and it’s one of the reasons that the right has long dismissed (and been dismissed by) Hollywood and the mainstream entertainment establishment. The right desperately needs to get away from the idea that good art is an op-ed for our side (not that the left doesn't occassionally succomb to that faulty notion as well).

Still, I don’t even think there’s much evidence that Battlestar Galactica has it in for conservative ideals. Oh sure, it equivocates on prisoner treatment issues, and it doesn’t always present religion as positive, but those are contested issues even within conservative hotbeds. If anything, the show’s portrait of a decisive, strong military and a compassionate, but ultimately cunning and tough-minded president (“You have to kill her.”) comes awfully close to falling in line with some of conservatism's current rallying points, at least far more than most of what we see on TV.

Battlestar Etc...

A few additional points that didn’t make it into my Battlestar Galactica article:

Adama holds the show together, and I am thrilled to see a protagonist who is willing to make tough, unpopular decisions and stick to them unapologetically. While I can get behind the tortured hero that’s become so popular in Hollywood these days, it’s great to see a leader who isn’t vilified for making politically divisive decisions – it’s an acknowledgement that sometimes there is no third way, and leaders have to choose an option and live with it.

I’m also impressed by really fine-grained moral shading with which the show sketches the Cylons. Ross Douhat mentioned recently that good drama ought to take the phrase “and everybody meant well” to heart. So the show lets us in on the Cylon’s motivations – God, reproduction, human feeling – and even has the courage to let us identify with some of them. Yet it also never judges Adama or Roslin when they’re willing and ready to take out a life-giving Resurrection ship, killing perhaps hundreds, maybe even thousands of the biological Cylons. The enemy, it willingly admits, isn’t merely some grotesque villain, but that doesn’t for a moment mean that one shouldn’t take every opportunity to wipe them out if that’s what it takes to protect one’s own civilization.

And also, and perhaps most important, 6 (Tricia Helfer) is hot.

Article related update: I've just become aware that the "anarcho capitalist" link in the article goes to the wrong place. No one to blame--just an error. However, it ought to point to this blog by long time anarcho-capitalist theorist David Friedman.

Flashing some unrated teen film flesh

Slate's Josh Levin confirms what I long suspected: horny teens aren't getting much softcore bang for the minimum wage buck when purchasing HOT AND WILD edition unrated DVDs:

An exhaustive Slate investigation of 15 unrated sex comedies has revealed that unrated does not necessarily equal boobs. All an "unrated" sticker really means is that some of the "totally out of control" new scenes you've been promised were not submitted for the MPAA's approval.

That's journalism I can use.

Antonioni

A few weeks ago, I shuffled downtown to the E-Street to catch the recent reissue of Antonioni’s 1975 film, The Passenger. I was suitably shaken and awed by the film, a mysterious, coolly unnerving thriller about the destabilization of identity, and made a mental note to see some of his other pictures. Last night, after much delay and distraction (unrelated to the current House leadership dilemma), I finished watching his earlier masterpiece Blow-Up. I can’t say that either are light viewing, and neither work hard to make themselves clear, but both have a sort of transfixing distance about them, a pent up paranoia so anxious it doesn’t know what to do with itself.

Antonioni’s worldview strikes me as a more anguished, uncertain Kubrick, or perhaps even Woody Allen, if you replaced cynicism and self-laceration with despair and near-paralyzing uncertainty. He presents life as an unknowable charade, a surrealist, made-up game played by mad mimes—one that, despite being patently empty and false, can sweep you up in its absurdist unreality all the same.

And where Kubrick gave the world a cold, merciless staredown, Antonioni watches with apprehension and reticence. He’s hoping. I think, to find meaning and connection within the vast, muddled sphere of human relationships, but he fails at every turn. Events, people and meanings are not just unstable, but unknowable. Disconnection and anticlimax, meaningless fragments of time are all anyone has. His characters lives’ are spent in pursuit of some unknown force that reveals itself only as void, if it reveals itself at all.

It’s essentially bleak, hopeless and post-modern, a stew of fear and vagary. Antionioni gives his films a kind of eerie stillness and silence, accenting the distance and disconnection of it all. Nicholson’s initial desert trudge in The Passenger is cruelly uneventful, and the gloriously long single-shot finale gains much of its power from an absolute refusal to show any more than is necessary. Even Blow Up’s central moment—the photo development montage—suggests that the salient details of life and death are hidden in plain sight, surrounded by a cultivated wilderness of misdirection--in this case a city park. If anything matters, the films seem to suggest, it's the small things, the miniscule details and easy-to-miss minor moments--but even those are an illusion, a glimpse of hope in a vast sea of anxious uncertainty.

The Earth shatters! Hell freezes over! Etc, etc.

Star Trek on the Corner - and in a post by K. Lo! (And just above, Kirk name-dropped in another post by my colleague Iain Murray!) I feel like second season Tony Soprano after eating too much Indian food (or was it those nasty mussels from Vesuvio?). What's next - Al Gore hawking global warming at Grover's place? Oh wait...

A Critical Coming Out Party for Alarm’s Favorite Film-Reviewing Debutante

After a brief appearance over at his buddy Tony’s regular haunt, David Edelstein settles down in his glossy new digs and instantly makes the place recognizably his own. After nine plus years as the internet film world’s most consistently amusing and insightful jabberjaw at Slate, he’s back to ink and dead trees in the luscious New York Magazine.

His first review, which scours the muddled mediocrity of Albert Brooks’ new film Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, is characteristically trim, witty and thoughtful. I haven’t seen the film (and it looks too only be playing out in hill country, er, Maryland, and, as a proud resident of the Commonwealth, there’s little chance of me hauling off to anti-Wal-Mart land for this film), but that hardly matters: Edelstein isn’t just a remarkably solid arbiter of the good, bad, and awesomely bad in Hollywood, he’s also a breezily brilliant wordsmith. A few scrumptious tidbits from his sparkling, glamorous New York debut:

Brooks is a pioneer in the cinema du squirm, an artist who tracks his romantic illusions—and neurotic delusions—so obsessively that he becomes his own White Whale.

These days, Brooks wants to humiliate himself before anyone else can, and he’s making a fetish of it, devoting so much energy to demonstrating what a loser and a fool he is that he sucks up all the oxygen onscreen.

The character of “Brooks” is clearly meant to represent the solipsistic Ugly American, but the way the writer-director handles the Indians (and a few Pakistanis, in the course of a furtive border crossing) gives no indication that he explored the culture himself.

What if it were about a gay, Israeli cowboy assassin?

Ridiculous, baseless, absurdly presumptious bit of analysis of the day - of the year, even:

"Gay romance is easier to sell to the academy than a complex study of an Israeli assassin."

I'm stupified almost to the point of paralysis.

Blogging in short, babbling bursts

Edelstein! Hoffman! The New York Times! Alarm's favorite critic shows that he's starter-level in every spot on the field with this superb profile of everyone's favorite tubby character actor, Philip Seymour Hoffman.

This weekend, Jack Bauer returned with more fury, more regulation-flouting and another high terrorist body count in what definitely ranks as one of (maybe the single) best four episode sequences in the 24's history. I'll have more on this, possibly at another venue, later, but for now, head on over to AICN for ranting, raving, rumors, and talkbackers with not-so-platonic Jack Bauer mancrushes.

James Cameron's next film may not be 3D live action anime after all, which is sort of a dissapointment. After nearly a decade with no new cinematic wizardry from filmdom's most self-important, dictatorial genius, anything less than the spectacle to end all spectacles will probably be a little bit of a let down. Still, at least it isn't Aquaman.

Wolfgang "I'm going to string you along about directing Ender's Game till I die" Peterson still likes boats. A lot. Bonus grizzled Kurt Russell in a tux macho shots.

And finally: forget Star Wars, Harrison Ford's sad slow descent into finger-pointing hackery is what really raped my childhood. More evidence of that descent is on display here, in another one of those trailers that does the favor of giving away the entire damn movie, conveniently making it utterly unnecessary to purchase a ticket.

Not exactly the 95 theses, but...

Joseph Bottum has, to absolutely no one's surprise, a fantastic article on Catholicism, religious influence on politics and Samuel Alito in this week's Weekly Standard, and I almost don't need to say it, but read the whole thing. I would, however, like to tweak just one of the article's speculative conclusions:

There's an interesting question whether the leading evangelicals would grant Catholicism its current role if Catholics still had the kind of ethnic-voter unity they used to show. We may be seeing the emergence of one of those uniquely American compromises: A Catholic philosophical vocabulary is allowed to express a moral seriousness the nation needs, on the guarantee that the Catholic Church itself will not much matter politically.

He bases this statement on the fact that in 1960, Catholics voted overwhelmingly for JFK; these days their voting is far less cohesive. I think the compromise is far less stern, at least from a Protestant, than his statement suggests. It's not as if Protestant leadership (which is by no means as unified as the phrase "Protestant leadership" or continual invokations of some militarized column of the "Christian Right" suggests) has decided en masse to allow the Catholics their brainy rhetoric, provided only that they vote in bickering clumps. I think that credits Protestants with far too much deliberation; this is more a natural outgrowth of diverging styles than any formalized agreement.

Instead, it's that Proestant churches are concerned with reaching the American public in a very different manner than much of the Catholic world, and Protestants are perfectly content to have Catholics go about the very theoretical and painstaking work of grouding religion in solid intellectual thought. And even more than that, it's the recognition on both sides that they have essentially similar political goals -- few of which get much traction from the left. It would be incorrect for me to suggest that American Catholics and Protestants are a single entity, and it's likely that this will remain the case for quite a while. But to a significant extent, they've come together in the political arena in realizing that what benefits one side benefits the other.

Jack Bauer's bad days return

This recent CNN article on the upcoming season of 24 is a pretty typical puff promo piece: producers and cast members talking up the surprises and newly intense narrative trickery, er, arcs, the show has in store for the legions of Jack Bauer fans. I gave up on taking the show seriously as soon as Kim landed in CTU, but I’m a sucker for the utterly unhinged suspense it offers. Dumb, laughably absurd and always ready to spit out a harddrive’s worth of idiotic, meaningless tech jargon to explain away any problematic plot point, it’s still the best pure adrenalin rush on the idiot box. What’s funny is that some of the quotes in the latter half of the article actually hint at a lot of this. Newcomer Samwise Gamgee, er, Sean Astin, says:

"The main challenge was memorizing all the techno-talk. There are five- or six-page scenes full of dialogue! 'Yeah, that's television,' I was told," he laughs.

And right afterwards, producer Howard Gordon gleefully cops to the rather outlandish nature of the show’s plot:

Gordon notes that the series -- which plays out in real time, with each season covering 24 hours -- doesn't "go after big names just for their reputations. Our material is deceptively challenging to deliver (credibly), some of these outrageous twists and turns ... and it requires the right amount of seriousness, intelligence and emotion. And Kiefer, of course, sets the tone."

That’s a rare find – a major market preview piece that actually gets a producer of a semi-serious show like 24, which at least began with pretension towards doing something other than cooking up suspense like McDonald’s cooks burgers, to admit that the show’s plot lacks credibility. Even that, though, is a Big Mac sized understatement; saying 24’s narrative twists lack credibility is akin to saying Air America has a few differences of opinion with Rush Limbaugh.

Still, Gordon is right to highlight Kiefer Sutherland’s performance as all-purpose special agent Jack (of all trades) Bauer. No matter how ludicrous the situation, Sutherland's steely seriousness anchors it in a violent, determined sobriety, laying out the always-ridiculously-high stakes like warnings from God himself, or at least Donald Rumsfeld. He’s driven by an absolutely unrelenting focus on one goal: catch the terrorist, whatever extravagant measures that may require. And to the show’s credit, those measure reach into extremity on a pretty regular basis.

In the final tally, I think, it’s the show’s willingness to take its outrageous storylines to their most heart-rattling, violent, preposterous ends that makes it work. Think about it: how many other action/suspense/sci-fi/adventure shows actually dangle the possibility of genuinely catastrophic outcomes – characters dying, bad guys scoring major victories, etc…? A few come to mind: Battlestar Galactica, The Wire, The Sopranos. But for the most part, the standard television format of unrelated, standalone episodes doesn’t allow for the setup and situation to change, and as such, there’s never any real suspense. Despite delving into credibility-straining silliness and garbled tech talk at nearly every opportunity, 24 works because it actually builds in real possibilities for disaster and failure into its nerve-strangling format.

Apparently Jerry Bruckheimer doesn't find me funny

Apparently, Jerry Bruckheimer has now read my list: "Guide to Determine If You're in a Jerry Bruckheimer Movie." Some CNN writer - Todd Leopold, to be exact - leads his profile of the mega producer by handing him a copy and waiting for a reaction. This is highly amusing.

ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- Jerry Bruckheimer does not laugh.

Handed a "Guide to Determine If You're in a Jerry Bruckheimer Movie" -- a gently mocking list that appeared in the Internet journal McSweeney's ("7. You are a cop or scientist, but could be a model"; "17. Everything that has not yet exploded explodes") -- the producer's face clouds. He peruses the list as if it contained family secrets. Only when he finishes does he suddenly brighten.

"Hey, it's all fun," he says, smiling, sitting at a table in an Atlanta hotel room during the December press tour for his new film, "Glory Road." "As long as they spell my name right, it's fine."

Yes, Jerry, I imdbed your name before writing the piece. Sorry it didn't make you laugh. If it makes you feel any better, that list was written out of (mostly) pure love. For serious: Days of Thunder, The Rock and both Bad Boys films are bone-crunching testosterone warheads. and I mean that in as awesome and gleefully juvenile a way as it sounds.

Pearl Harbor sucked though. But that's not exactly news.

The Year’s Worst Movies

Every year there are bad movies, a slew of them, in fact, engaging in a mad tussle to hit every category of filmic badness that exists: Forgettably bad, outrageously bad, amusingly bad, depressingly bad and all sorts of other types of adverb-preceded bad. I managed to miss most of what looked to be obviously bad, but especially in the former part of the year, when I was reviewing a film every week, I did end up at some real stinkers. Here, then, are the films that riled me most, starting with the least offensive and moving to the most heinous.

Hostage: An execrable foray into wanton violence of the least redeeming sort, it’s the sort of film that sends you of the theater seething with anger at the callousness of the producers who put you through their amoral attention ploy.

Hide and Seek: A Robert DeNiro paycheck that stretches the limits of cute-kid terror and twist endings past absurd and into the realm of the godawful. I actually left before the credits rolled, the first time I’ve done that in years.

Aeon Flux: What might have been a subversive little sci-fi flick turned out to be a lumbering, dumb-as-Paul Anderson futuristic monstrosity burdened by inept direction, an incomprehensible, platitudinous script and a serious case of hokey science fiction cliche disease.

The Legend of Zorro: A film so desperate to entertain I almost felt sorry for it; like an awful street musician on a $65 million budget.

Melinda and Melinda: Lacking nearly all forms of cleverness, this pedantic bit of shoveled out tripe is one of Woody Allen’s worst efforts and the pinnacle of the whining, pretentious, self-pitying decay that’s befallen much of his recent work.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: Tim Burton’s biggest foible, it’s a self-indulgent, soulless rehashing of the classic flick that trades in hallucinogenic zaniness for an unworkable combination of carefully obsessed over creepy décor and groan-inducing bathos.

Kingdom of Heaven: Ridley Scott’s meandering pretentious, self-righteous take on the Crusades epitomizes the clueless liberal’s approach to religiously motivated violence as well as history. And to top it off, the movie is boring, bloated and marred by Orlando Bloom's insipid stubbornness.

Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith: Visually stunning and narratively dead, no film has ever exemplified all that’s supposedly wrong with post-Star Wars blockbuster filmmaking than this wretched, nearly worthless assault on movie lovers’ wallets. Beautiful, yes, and sometimes exciting in a vicarious, rollercoaster sort of way, there’s still no disguising the fact that it’s also tremendously dull. Star Wars fans may cling to this movie in desperate hopes of proving that all the energy and excitement they’ve put into the series over the past decade (or more) was not in vain, but Lucas’ film is hedonistic image worship at its worst, and the biggest film letdown in a decade.

2005 and my inevitable foray into listmaking

Always late to the party, that’s me. So this week, after all the bigshots have filed and discussed their lists and generally moved on, I’m going to be running through the previous year in movies, with missives on my favorites, my least favorites, prominent motifs and a look to the future.

My Favorite Movies of 2005

When I started writing this, I initially titled it “The Best Movies of 2005.” But that’s not accurate. I have no idea what the “best” movies of this year, or any other year, are. I suspect, in fact, that no does. AFI can make all the top 100 lists it wants, but the label “best” is far too vague to be terribly useful. There are, as far as I’m aware, no rigid criteria that one can use to judge “best” movies (or any other artform) in anything remotely approaching a universally agreed upon manner, so I’d caution against anyone who claims to have all the answers. Or even several of them.

That said, there were some movies that I quite enjoyed this year. As several critics have pointed out, despite the failings of the box office, 2005 was quite a good year for movie fans. I’ve made my list in order of preference (with my favorite film at the end), but with the caveat that on any given day the order might have been (or might turn out to be) different. So here are my favorite films, the ones that struck a personal chord, the ones that seemed to have been crafted with the deepest, most layered emotional or intellectual textures, the ones that thrilled me and delivered gleeful jolts of rollicking entertainment with the overwhelming fury that can only be summoned by the best of the silver screen. Where applicable, I've included links to my reviews of the films in question.

The Aristocrats: A.O. Scott had it right when he referred to this film as an essay. A riotous, precisely-edited take on the world’s bawdiest joke, the film is far more than a collection of clever euphemisms and naughty offenses; it’s a detailed and delicious diagnostic of the art of joke telling -- a treatise on the pernicious humor of wildly vulgar language.

Land of the Dead, Serenity, Batman Begins, Sin City: For those of us who relate to this trailer far more than we’d like to admit, 2005 was a very good year. Each of these films is a better than solid entry into its respective genre; Land of the Dead a frightening, sickening and tense bit of socially-aware zombie horror; Serenity a delightfully light-footed and clever sci-fi romp; Batman Begins very nearly the gloomy, serious superhero movie every Dark Knight reader imagined; and Sin City the gold standard in brutal adolescent noir.

Munich: I feel as if I should reject this film, but I can’t. It’s simply too overwhelming, too pointed and too immaculately crafted to forget. Its human sympathy for terrorists isn’t quite the attempt to legitimize their actions that some have suggested, but it certainly borders on the reprehensible. And true, it’s not likely that the Mossad agents involved in assasination ops would have been so wracked by unbearable guilt. But despite all this, Spielberg and Kushner offer a gripping take on the psychological scars of necessary, moral violence that is simply too well-made for me not to include.

Broken Flowers, Funny Ha-Ha, Capote: Sadness comes in many forms, from subdued middle-aged despair to buried, vainglorious panic to quarter-life uncertainty. These three films showcase individuals at various life stages dealing with the sort of undefined, inwardly-focused, insurmountable longing and uncertainty that is a defining characteristic of contemporary life. Whether in Andrew Bujalski’s cast of trip-tongued youngsters, Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s selfish quest for writerly fame, or Bill Murray’s eerily still, silent Don Johnston, each provides a glimpse into a life (or lives) desperately groping for purpose amidst the fog of life's ephemeral chaos.

King Kong, War of the Worlds: Despite those moronic prequels, which may or may not show up on my Worst of 2005 list, we are all George Lucas’ children now, and nowhere is this more evident than in these two mammoth, overpowering films. Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg are auteurs of spectacle with the power to dazzle and wow, utterly enveloping us in fantasy – all without sacrificing character – like no other working filmmakers. True, both of these films have problems: Kong’s first hour should have been cut to 20 minutes; World’s final scene undoes most of the film’s earlier emotional impacts. But by and large, they’re both on target for most of their running time, and they are without question two of the most ballsy, brain-rattling entertainments to grace the big screen in a long time.

A History of Violence: David Cronenberg breaks down both social and genre trappings in this eloquently violent tale of despairing revenge. While the film lacks the literal flesh-stripping and psychosexual terror of The Fly or Dead Ringers, it nonetheless pierces the derma of both societal structures and individual civility, exposing the thin-skinned layers that enclose man’s essential ferocity.

The Squid and the Whale: No, I didn’t grow up in New York and I’m not a child of divorce, but more than perhaps any other film, this movie bores an agonizingly direct opening into the heartache and anguish that occur when the brilliant-but-fallible start families together. It’s a tragedy of a great family, fractured and broken by individual weakness. Jeff Bridges, especially, gives the year’s best performance, as a strong-willed, intellectually superior man whose fragile nature is exposed and further undone by his sad, self-lacerating choices.

Other notables: Constantine, Downfall, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Syriana, Good Night, and Good Luck, Ong-Bak, In Good Company, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Movies I didn’t see due to my generally dormant, listless spirit that might have made this list: 2046, Match Point, The New World, Will Eggleston in the Real World, Grizzly Man, The Girl From Tuesday.

And the award for...best use of speed metal in a movie trailer

Is is still called The Passion of the Clerks?

File under: late reviews of movies with annoyingly long titles

I wrote this a while ago, but for any number of reasons, it was only recently posted. As if to prove my article's point, the film already seems to have faded on from public discourse. However, if you're still interested, here's my take on Andrew Adamson's wafer-thin, barely vanilla adaptation of The Chronicles of Narnia: the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Terror in the skies... and on film

The trailer for the first 9/11 film is up and running at Apple. No, it's not for the sure-to-be-abrasive Oliver Stone take on the events in New York; instead it's for Paul Greengrass' smaller film which looks at the events onboard the least-covered of those four ill-fated planes, Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania after passengers rushed the cockpit. The trailer is minimal, just graphics and sound, but it's potent nonetheless. Because there's really no footage, it doesn't suggest much about the film, though this Chud interview, which I previously mentioned, gives some clue as to where Greengrass is going with the movie.

The obvious question, as Ross already pointed out, is whether or not this is an appropriate topic for a film that will be shown in the popcorn and chintz-laden atmosphere of the multiplex, especially so soon after the attacks. No matter how respectful the film is toward the events of that day, I think there are going to be people who feel it’s a crass commercialization of tragedy and nothing else. As a nation, we're still ultra sensitive about that day; those wounds will take a long, long time to heal.

I suppose, in theory, I'm not opposed to films about that day, even from Oliver Stone. This isn't to say that these films won't bother me, that I won't rail against whatever inaccuracies, insults or mediocrities they peddle. But I'm not opposed to films on the subject purely out of principle. Films, however mired they may be commercial interests, are art, and a necessary part of vibrant contemporary art is its ability to tackle difficult, controversial subject matter.

Few bat an eye when novels, theater, performance art, etc... broach difficult topics; I don't see why the rules should somehow be different for film simply because it's more commercial and therefore perceived as a lesser art (a belief with which I obviously disagree). As with those other mediums, we should let the substance, not the form, be the issue of debate. Tony Kushner's Angels in America doesn't generate outrage that a mere stage play (well, however "mere" a 6 hour production can be) attempts to address the scourge of AIDS in the 80s; the debate is about what his play says. When it comes to the cinema, it seems to me that the rules ought to be the same; let's see what Greengrass has to show us before we cry out against the medium he's using to do so.

A record of Munich

Jonah Goldberg adds to his recent criticism of Munich today with this remark:

I got the sense that what Spielberg and Kushner were trying to communicate was that "vengeance" is expensive not just morally, but financially as well. We could be spending the money on better things, in other words. But one has to wonder whether in the rest of the world that message (as intellectually and morally bankrupt as it is) will rise above the more superficial message that Jews are always concerned with money.

Well, sure, but I think that's a fairly reductively literal reading of the scene. Yes, clearly Kushner is trying to remind us that violent retribution has a physical cost – resources as well as morals. And I don’t doubt that he and Spielberg both felt mighty clever about how this half-alludes to the massive expenditures on our current fight in Iraq. But when I saw the scene, it seemed to me that it wasn’t so much about the cost of vengeance, but the records of it.

The primary moral issue in the film, as far as I’m concerned, is Avner’s attempt to reconcile his anguish with his duty. He no doubt understands that he is doing something that must be done – there can be no questioning its validity or necessity. But because he can’t question the actions he’s being assigned, he is forced to internalize them; thus every assassination tears him further apart. Even as his duty keeps his country together (look how his mother and the other soldiers praise him), it makes him less whole.

Subsequently, the receipt comment, it seems to me, is most poignantly about the permanence of Avner’s actions. Not only is he forced to do these things, but he is forced to live with them, forever. His country will honor him, but that honor – another sort of record – will stain his existence. The Israeli government forces him to keep records of his actions, and they are a symbol of that with which he cannot part. In effect, he becomes a living record, a human receipt, for the deaths he caused.

Now, there are all sorts of reasons to think that Avner’s equivocations are unrealistic, that his doubt, his guilt and his moral uncertainty aren’t what Mossad agents felt, but instead what Spielberg and Kushner feel, or think their audience should feel. And politically, I’m inclined neither to despise the film nor to praise it, for I think it teeters on the edge of some fairly unsavory ideas without fully endorsing them. And so I don’t want to judge the historic veracity of Spielberg’s narrative or characters, but I think that from a human standpoint, his movie does zero in on some rather potent conflicts.

The idea that duty – to country, family, God, whatever – could be good and necessary as well as personally painful, is present throughout the film, and it’s that aspect that I found most compelling. How, the film wants to know, can we do what we know we must do when it seems to be eating away at our very being? Undoubtedly, there is valor in heroic sacrifice of the self for a greater cause, and Spielberg dealt with this in Saving Private Ryan. But now he turns the focus inward: how do those making the sacrifice do it, and what must they be feeling, thinking, saying, as they let their duty claw them apart?

Munich is both a great movie – perfectly paced and executed – and a deeply troubling one. I have no praise for its sympathy for terrorists, and the film could’ve used a bit more healthy wrath, but neither can I ignore its anguished, wrenching portrait of a man in violent confrontation with himself.

Salon is almost reasonable on Wal-Mart

This recent bit on Wal-Mart in Salon, which emanates from my old stomping grounds of North Florida, is both surprising and welcome. My feelings on the store and its critics aren’t exactly a secret, but it’s always nice to see someone from the other side acknowledging that, far from hurting lower-end workers, Wal-Mart gives them a way to stretch their dollars even further. Speaking of my former state’s residents, Andrew Leonard writes:

Don't the throngs of North Florida residents flocking to Wal-Mart bear at least as much responsibility for killing their downtowns as Wal-Mart does? And shouldn't the cash that they are saving be part of the discussion as to how much money is being "sucked" out of the local economy? If, as Fishman points out, Wal-Mart's prices are 10 to 15 percent lower than those of other stores, then consumers may well have saved as much as $7 billion or $8 billion in November and December by shopping there. That's a fair piece of change.

Indeed it is. And by many counts, the savings are far bigger than that. In a recent Washington Post essay, Sebastian Mallaby argued that Wal-Mart was nothing short of a progressive success story that saved Americans more than $50 billion on food alone – more than $10 billion more than government food stamps.

I grew up just a few miles South of the first Super Wal-Mart (built in Crestview, Florida), and later, near another location which would, for a little while, carry the honor of being the U.S’s largest Wal-Mart (second in the world only to one in Mexico). The new stores are, of course, much larger, and there are persistent rumors of even larger, double-decker Wal-Marts, which will no doubt include amusement parks, farming and apartments, these being the only general consumer markets left for Wal-Mart to take over. I’m waiting for a Wal-Mart search engine, and when they get bored with retail, I expect to see Wal-Mart missiles and bombers. Really.

It’ll be a cookie-cutter Mall of America for every town in the U.S. And being pro-capitalist, I’m basically fine with this.

Being used to (and generally supportive of) the permanent, massive expansion of the retail giant, I’m clearly aware of the store’s positive economic impacts. But many of the store’s critics also complain that when the store comes in and wipes out an old, economically stagnant, inefficient downtown, it also wipes out that downtown’s character. And sure, Wal-Mart will never replace the cozy little coffee and bagel joints that it crushes with its megasized homogeneous boot, but then again, it’s not as if those lovely little cafes were much more than boho-marriage-destroying money pits* anyway.

And, contrary to what anyone seems to think, Wal-Mart actually builds its own community. Yes, you read that right. Now, this is purely anecdotal, and I’m sure it’s different in the major metropolises, but in small town Florida, small town Kentucky, and even in Jacksonville (usually ranked in the top 15 U.S. cities, population wise), Wal-Mart becomes one of the default places for youngsters, especially those too young to drink, to hang out.

Now, I know this seems totally bizarre to most mid-Atlantic city dwellers, but in small Southern towns where the only places open to a 17 year old at 11pm are Wal-Mart and Waffle House, maybe a Denny’s, traipsing the aisles of Wal-Mart till all hours of the night has become the modern equivalent of cruising the strip. I know that at the small liberal arts college I went to for a few years, one professor actually expressed mock-disapproval at arriving at Wal-Mart on the weekends only to find bands of freshmen roving around, milling the cheap DVD racks and maybe picking up some chips and soda.

While there’s nothing wrong with a thriving downtown, and Why Wal-Mart Works actually makes a case that Wal-Mart encourages “funky” shops by taking care of the basics, Wal-Mart proves that you don’t need a quirky collection of economically unstable stores in order to build community. All you really need is a place – any place, as long as it’s open -- and preferably one that gives you a host of strange things to heckle with your friends while spending a little bit (if not a lot) of money.

*If you doubt this article’s class-A hipster cred, it appears to have been written by a Lower East Side dwelling Pitchfork writer.