Sad Feet

Over at Grist, Yolanda Crous, in an essay on the enviro-friendly kids movie, Happy Feet, tells us how bothered she was as a kid by hammy after-school specials with "messages." Now, thankfully, she's been reformed and is no longer irritated with Happy Feet's environmental preaching:

The good news: I was not annoyed by Happy Feet's environmental message. The movie manages to introduce complex issues (food chain disruption) in surprisingly subtle ways (birds start stalking baby penguins because they don't have enough fish to eat).

But then comes the rub. The problem with the movie, as she sees it, isn't that it's too preachy--it's that it's not preachy enough!

Everything else in the movie annoyed me... [this] cookie-cutter cartoon-with-an-environmental-message also comes with a few unadvertised messages -- and socially irresponsible ones at that. Apparently, all females in the South Pole are hip-swaying, breathy-voiced, man-crazed pushovers, all Mexicans are short, and all African-Americans are superfly playas. It seems Antarctica is a land of overwrought stereotypes as well as overwrought singing.

It's comforting to know that even if you grew up bored and exasperated by the hammy, obvious messages of after school specials and "very special episodes," you can mature into a decent, stereotype-aware, socially-responsible California liberal who knows that, however much kids might just want guilt-free entertainment and fun, what those youngsters really need are hearty liberal morals and political correctness.

You Can't Say That on Television

Rick Perlstein has a piece in TNR arguing that Democrats should seek to marginalize the GOP by demonizing the South as racist. He repeats Thomas Schaller's argument that Democrats should forget about the South, but right now are afraid (or not allowed) to do so.

The very heart of his argument is a taboo notion: that the South votes Republican because the Republicans have perfected their appeal to Southern racism, and that Democrats simply can't (and shouldn't) compete.

[snip]

What's more, if Republicans have succeeded by openly baiting a region of the country not really American (the latte-swilling Northeast), Schaller says, "The Democrats need their own 'them,' and the social conservatives who are the bedrock of Southern politics provide the most obvious and burdensome stone to hang around the Republicans' neck." Democrats should cite "Southern obstructionism as a continuing impediment to the investments and progress the country must make in the coming century." There's just one problem: You can't do that on TV.

Oh you can't, can you? Look, there's a sliver of truth to the argument that Democratic strategists aren't allowed to openly inveigh against the South. But if it's not done directly, it is done indirectly in all sorts of ways. The left is constantly making snooty inferences about the dumb, backwards Southerners, whether in references to NASCAR, homophobia, trailer parks or yokel accents--there's a reason the coastal pundit class is often referred to as "the elites." And if they haven't gone after an explicit anti-Southern strategy, they've gone in the back door and frantically attacked religion instead, often implying a link between such critiques and the religiously dominated South. Perlstein and Schaller act as if they're breaking taboos by advocating a brand new, hard hitting strategy, but for the most part, they're merely telling Democrats to be open about what they're already doing.

Mad Mel Returns

Ross Douthat points out that, despite Mel Gibson's personal and media troubles, he's still a formidable force at the box office. To which I would add (and this is coming from someone not entirely thrilled with The Passion) that he's also an extremely impressive filmmaker as well.

And now, after having seen Apocalypto, all I can say is: you really have no idea. I mean, not to hyperbolate or anything, but ... wow.

Items of Note

Two things:

1. New York Magazine has taken its already seriously shallow, seriously addictive Look Book and gone all high tech on us with video. That's right, it's even addictiver. Look, a Euro-Cali-foreigner NYU art student! Like, OMG, is that actual city girl squawk??

2. I will still never see a movie with the word "Movie" in the title.

The buy back hustle

Normally I stay away from foreign policy, but this TNR column on what to do in Iraq sort of demands a response. In it, Niall Ferguson argues that what the U.S. government needs to do is to bribe the various insurgent groups and warring parties, starting the major step of buying up their weapons. Basically, his argument is that “with a fraction of the money that goes to our boys' cheeseburgers, you could buy and decommission all the AK-47s in Iraq.”

But what Ferguson is doing is confusing the value of the AK 47s with the money we’d have to spend on them. And, more importantly, he’s assuming that the insurgents, who I think most reasonable people agree are pretty heavily invested against U.S. forces on a personal level, would play ball. Unlikely doesn’t even begin to cover it. Instead, they’d probably charge us a premium on the weapons, knowing what we have at stake. Some groups would likely hold out on us, selling many of their weapons—again, at a premium—but keeping a significant amount in reserve. Those with reserves would continue attacks, causing those without to use the extortion money to rearm, possibly even at a higher level than they began with (due to the high sums paid). The end result would likely be that weapon buy back program would get abused by warring sects looking to take advantage of their rivals and that some groups would try (and quite possibly succeed) to use the program as a trade-up to better weapons—hardly the sort of result anyone’s looking for.

Who you gonna call?

Personally, I liked the university. They gave us money and facilities, we didn't have to produce anything! You've never been out of college! You don't know what it's like out there! I've worked in the private sector. They expect results.

The American's list of the 10 Best Business Movies must have been tough to put together, for the movies had to at least mostly meet these qualifications:

(1) a great movie, (2) a relatively realistic picture of business, and (3) an attitude not openly hostile to capitalism as we know and love it.

That's as tough as it sounds, but the list they came up with is pretty good. It does have, however, one seriously glaring omission--the original Ghostbusters. What? You think I'm crazy? How about this: it's a movie about three brilliant but offbeat guys who can't find support in academia, so they take out a loan and enter the private sector to perform a valuable, unique service. Immediately after doing so, they get hassled by government environmental regulators who push the political leadership to squash their business, but eventually they go on to best the bureaucrat and save New York--and without making concessions in their practices. How's that for a story of capitalist success? And don't even try to tell me it's not a great movie.

Addendum: Also, the movie deserves mention just for this quote, which one could argue describes an awful lot of work in Washington:

Janine Melnitz: Do you believe in UFOs, astral projections, mental telepathy, ESP, clairvoyance, spirit photography, telekinetic movement, full trance mediums, the Loch Ness monster and the theory of Atlantis?
Winston Zeddemore: Ah, if there's a steady paycheck in it, I'll believe anything you say.

Little did I know...

Stranger than Fiction is a cute movie with a clever premise and enjoyable performances. It doesn't quite reach the inspired heights of eloquent quirkiness of its genuine Kaufman predecessors, but it's engaging and pleasant throughout. It’s quite clever at times, especially in its charming, graphics-laden visuals (why aren’t such devices used more often outside of commercials), but mostly it’ the sort of fine-but-not-fantastic film that I wish were the standard in romantic comedies. Instead, they’re rather rare, meaning that when we get them, some critics tend to get carried away.

The biggest problem with the film is the one that Kaufman's films always bump into but overcome: what to do with a semi-blank, inwardly-focused, downer of a protagonist. In Kaufman's films, the melancholy male lead is always meant to represent Kaufman (or, in Adaptation, actually be him), so he doesn't give the characters much in the way of specifics. In Adaptation, Nicholas Cage's Kaufman character was a nicely played but still fairly vague collection of undeveloped neuroses and banal longings for fulfillment in work and relationships. In Eternal Sunshine, the Jim Carey character was a total blank other than his nervous, shy-guy demeanor. The only thing we actually knew about him was that he was a cartoonist. Being John Malkovitch featured the most dynamic of the bunch, but even there, Cusack's character basically boiled down to just another struggling artist looking for love.

Kaufman gets around this problem a number of ways: he clearly deploys his leads as creatively-inclined everymen, inviting male viewers to fill in the blanks of his leads with their own lives. And he surrounds those characters with an array of eccentric, finely-detailed supporting characters and--more importantly--driven, passionate female leads that build a lot energy and interest on their own as well as add a little electricity to the male leads simply by giving them something so lively and desirable to chase after.

Stranger than Fiction gives us a perky, attractive female lead in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s baker, and she carries most of her scenes rather effectively, doing a lot with fairly minimal material. But the other supporting characters are watchable mostly because of the excellent performances by Dustin Hoffman, Emma Thompson and, yes, even Queen Latifa. Hoffman's coffee drinking, never mentioned in the dialog, was, I suspect, his own invention, and Thompson was positively born to play disheveled, cynical intellectual types.

In the end, this is not quite enough to offset the total emptiness of Will Ferrell’s Harold Crick. I know the blankness was intentional—the sterile, repetitive, monotone sets at his home and office are designed to emphasize this trait—but it just doesn’t make for a terribly compelling protagonist. He’s got decent if somewhat generic goals (get the girl, stop the author from killing him), but with so little to the character, it’s tough to make his approach to achieving those goals all that interesting. It’s not that it comes off particularly bad, just that it feels, well, kind of empty and wanting--in other words, just like Crick.

Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn

As far as Gone With the Wind goes, I'm in the deep minority in not caring too much for it. It's beautiful at times, and the first two hours it's tolerable if not particularly engaging, but by the time the last few hours roll around, I always felt as if the film was more intent on inflicting misery than portraying it. Anyway, it's nice to know I'm not the only one.

All Hail the Crasher in Chief

Yes, yes, it's shameless self promotion and the buddy-system and all that, but I'm still going to recommend this Washington Times profile of my friend and coworker Jason Talley's activist group, Bureaucrash.

Jason Talley works at a public policy institute on Connecticut Avenue, but his job looks nothing like the jobs of most other 20- and 30-somethings in Washington.

He wears jeans and a sweat shirt to work, and not just on Fridays.

His office is decorated like a college student's room, with deep red walls and shelving units holding carefully marked bins of T-shirts. A sleek desk, black slipcovered couch and green screen for videography complete the decor.

Not jealous yet? Check out his job title: crasher in chief.

Still not enough Jason Talley for you? You can check out Bureaucrash's typically lampooning take on the election here.

The pundit version of the one man band

No matter what you think of Ben Stein and his conservatives-should-raise-taxes tack (I find it somewhat but not wholly persuasive), he has the no-kidding best-ever author tagline. "Ben Stein is a lawyer, writer, actor and economist." He's a veritable human Swiss Army knife.

I had no idea that sheets cost the same as a small BMW

The NYT Magazine profile of Tom Stoppard is, if less than enlightening about the man as a playwright, fairly smart in terms of dissecting the mystery of Stoppard as a man. Writer Daphne Merkin lets us know that “Stoppard strikes me as an inveterately bookish man, one more passionately taken up with the life of the mind than with his aversion to being mistaken for a Serious Issues kind of playwright would indicate,” which strikes me as rather similar to what Robert Brustein recently wrote about Samuel Beckett: “That this most solitary and unengaged of writers should have chosen the most social of the arts as his favored medium is also anomalous.” Now, as then, this strikes me as no surprise. Drama is very much the art of breaking down and critiquing relationships, and it makes sense that those most successful at it are thoughtful outsiders. Shouldn’t we expect those who are especially gifted at faking human interaction to be wily introverts?

And of course, this being the New York Times, Merkin is obligated to gush over Stoppard’s European refinement:

Stoppard seems to be a man of discerning and somewhat rarefied tastes; he writes with a fountain pen (no Uniballs for him) and has a house in the French countryside to retreat to when he’s not in London.

I believe it is true that nothing makes an NYT reporter swoon like fountain pens and French country homes. (That's you, Judith Warner.)

Borat is nothing! Borat is everything!

The movie critics were as unanimous as they can be in declaring the awesome hilarity of Borat, making the slapdash, gross out mockumentary one of the best reviewed films of the year.

But now the real fight is on as the pundits vie for interpretive authority over this oddly energizing film. Nearly everyone agrees that Borat is funny, very funny—“a sidesplitting triumph of slapstick and scatology,” as Charles Krauthammer calls it—but what does it all mean?

According to one camp, represented rather well by Jonah Goldberg, Daniel Larison, and S.T. Karnick, pretty much nothing. It’s good for some chuckles, but that’s about it. According to Krauthammer, it’s indicative of “an unintentionally revealing demonstration of the unfortunate attitude many liberal Jews have toward working-class American Christians, especially evangelicals.” Christopher Hitchens, one of the few who will argue that the movie isn’t very funny (“infantile and repetitive, and doesn’t know when to stop”), claims that the movie reveals “that Americans are almost pedantic in their hospitality and politesse.” Steve Sailor gives us the Sailoresque interpretation that it’s really funny because of the way it exploits ages-old East European stereotypes (he writes here that "the reason the critics go on and on about how "Borat" exposes the horrors of anti-Semitic Red State America is because they need a politically correct excuse for laughing at the Stupid Foreign Man"). And a chorus of the usual suspects, as well as Cohen himself, celebrate the movie for its brave exposure of America’s (not-so) hidden racism and stupidity.

I’m sure there are other viewpoints I’ve missed, but this is a reasonably representative sample. Now what are we supposed to make of it?

Well, at the risk of stating the obvious, I think the last bit is really pushing it. Parts of the movie might work, like John Podhoretz writes, as “a satire of anti-Semitism,” but the conventional liberal view that the movie is primarily an indictment of a strong undercurrent of racism in America is just absurd. At best it tells us that there are still some boors out there, like the rodeo manager who speaks so crude and ill of Muslims and gays, with unfortunate views, and then gives us an opportunity to laugh at them for acting as they do.

Mostly, though, I tend to think that these varying viewpoints are all somewhat correct. Is it reasonable to view the movie as just the funny and nothing but the funny? Absolutely. It’s a riot, and a dumb, bawdy, vulgar one at that. And on a lot of levels, that’s all it needs to be.

But, like a lot of much-maligned performance art pieces (and Cohen is, like the Jackass crew and Tom Green, really a commercial, populist heir to the legacy of 70s and 80s performance art), it tells us something—a lot of things—about ourselves and those on screen, whether Cohen and its creators intended to or not. So, it does reveal something about our willingness to put up with outrageous behavior, and maybe it tells us a little about the way some religious practices are viewed by outsiders (not surprisingly, they think of them as weird), and it does play a little bit to forgotten foreign stereotypes. It’s a big, episodic movie, and depending on which scenes you think are key, you can pull a lot of different ideas from it.

As I wrote in my review, I think, somewhat like Hitchens, it tells us something about our country’s reflexive politeness and unwillingness to scold bad behavior when it comes from foreign cultures, and, maybe more importantly, I think it gives a space in which to appreciate and laugh at the many, many peculiar people in our nation, and the wonderfully bizarre, often hilarious situations into which their personal quirks put them. The movie acts like a big billboard that says, “Look and laugh, America, at what a gloriously absurd place you are, at all the strangeness and hilarity you breed.” It gives us a chance to realize this and to laugh at the grandiose absurdity that flourishes all around us.

Addendum: Okay, I suppose if I wanted to get really meta, I’d say that the movie itself isn’t even the most interesting thing to look at here. Instead, I'd argue that it's all just a Rorschach test that tells us more about the pundits than it does about the movie. Hitchens delivers a contrarian defense of the movie’s alleged suckers (and marks himself even more by claiming the movie isn’t funny); Sailor tells us the hidden reason behind our laughter is our reaction to racial stereotypes; Krauthammer explains that it reveals the misperceptions of liberal Jews; Larison warns us against reading too much into pop culture; Goldberg tells us the pundits are all full of themselves; I wax ecstatic over the glories and oddities of American excess. Somehow, none of this is surprising.

On being a movie critic

It's a great job, as anybody who meets you is quick to tell you. But as professional movie reviewing fades away and we all think long and hard about our fallback careers (or live in denial), my advice to every kid who emails from high school, or calls from college, or who angles into doing unpaid reviews for this website or that college paper, is the same.

Don't even start. Don't try this at home. It'll break your heart.

--The Orlando Sentinel's Roger Moore.

It's like a hip-hop peace accord

If Nas and Jay-Z can hang, collaborate even, maybe there's hope for Israel and Palestine as well. This should've been Michael Steele's theme song.

Two time-bending reviews at NRO

No, I can't wait till Thanksgiving either. But during today's wait, I've got a review of today's two new time-bending big-screen releases, Tony Scott's Déjà Vu and Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, over at NRO. Here's an appetizer to hold you over untill the meal:

In movies, one always feels the constant pull of time. Books can be read at different paces, skipping sections or reading them again, but movies, like life, march us inexorably forward. Existing eternally in the present moment, movies approximate our own experience with time. Yet they also provide us the ability to bend and dissect it, revisiting the past or taking a glimpse at the future, whether in the sliced up non-linear narratives of Quentin Tarantino or in era-hopping time-travel films like Back to the Future. This week, two new films — Tony Scott's Déjà Vu and Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain — deploy a smorgasbord of slick cinematic pyrotechnics in their attempts to reconcile the problems of human interaction with time. And in doing so, both films reveal that our true obsession isn't with the ticking of the clock, but with the mortality to which it inevitably leads.

David Fincher does Zodiac

The most breathtaking, visually brilliant director working today has a new movie coming out, and oh my does it look stunning. Word is, the film is good, maybe even Seven good.

Tis the Season to Be Indie

It's possible that I'll soon have more to say here. Or, no, scratch that, more time to say it. But for now, here is my one and only Christmas music recommendation. (Yes, it's true: I am an unrepentant wannabe hipster, through and through. It's so bad I can't even swing recommending Bing Crosby or whatever ironically. I'm truly hopeless.)

P.S. I really do like the boys at Chud. They're good geeks. But, like so many of that breed, they can be so dern rude, just downright crude and unpleasant sometimes (even disregarding obvious personal loyalties).

I've got an idea...

First a journal of ideas. Now a magazine of ideas. Let the idea wars begin!

It's just like The Prestige

It's hard out there for a trend-spotting journo in Park Slope.

Lost, in haiku

Via The Governess:

Lost
A jungle plane crash
Really exciting, at first
Now I hate you all

The evolution of the hipster

There's probably room to argue with Megan O'Rourke's essay-review on the book Up is Up and its topic, New York's early 80s Downtown lit scene. She admits the period produced a lot of bad poetry, but still decides to praise it for "an electrifying social energy that helped blast out an intellectual space for then-“transgressive” female and gay writers," which one could maybe argue is just a squirmy way to get around criticizing that community for mediocre artistic output. But O'Rourke certainly scores when she characterizes the differences between the edgy art/lit establishment of that time and the snooty, well-bred hipster scene of today:

“Up Is Up” drives home the argument that it wasn’t just rising rents but AIDS that brought this period to a definitive end. The age of outrageous play was replaced by an age of sex ed and condo conversions. The media may proclaim Red Hook or Bushwick the new Bohemia, but these neighborhoods simply don’t have the seedy charge of the East Village in the 1970s and ’80s — and contemporary hipster style, intellectual and sartorial, hardly has the same anti-authoritarian bristle. As little kids in New York in the 1980s, my brother and I were scared (I blush to remember) of punks’ metallic studs and mohawks; it’s hard to imagine first graders being terrified of a hipster in a trucker cap and expensive jeans.

Trucker caps are so 2002, but otherwise this is spot on. The artsy fartsy edge scene, whether in music or art or literature, has replaced unhinged rebellion and anger with reflexive cynicism and an all encompassing sense of superiority and disdain. Lashing out didn't work, so the scene evolved into a smarty-pants peanut gallery. We traded the everyloner's rage of Eric Bogosian for the sideline snarkiness of Jon Stewart and dry meta-cultural fluff like The Hipster Handbook. And while some, including me, may from time to time bemoan the lack of passion in anti-establishment youth culture, it's probably better in the long run. Those prone to such sentiments don't rouse as much rabble, don't terrorize the rest of society, but instead consign themselves to simply heckling it from their perch. In the process, they create what used to be known as counterculture but now is simply an alternative mainstream. The world, or at least the U.S., is big enough for all of it.

The Pynchon Problem

Against the Day is a historical novel about the secret relationship among dynamite, photography, and multidimensional vector spaces that treats the emergence of the 20TH century Zeitgeist from a clash between revolutionary anarchism and the plutocratic Establishment.

Well, that solves a lot. More Against the Day links, all similarly (un)helpful, here.

Salutations!

Wow, this brings back memories. I haven't read or seen Charlotte's Web in probably 15 years, but I must've seen the movie two dozen times as a kid. Looks like Walden Media realized that, having already gotten their hands on The Chronicles of Narnia, the next most beloved children's tale of the last half century ought to be their next picture. Anyway, most of the cloying, obnoxious kiddie flicks the studios roll out under the family banner this time of year irritate me to no end, but, although I'm not sure it really needed a remake, it looks like this could actually work. I mean, really--Steve Buscemi as Templeton. Brilliant!

And while I'm at it, it also looks remarkably... real. I know those animals are either all or partially CGI, depending on the shot, but still, I'm impressed. After fifty years of trial and error (yeah, I'm talking about Mr. Ed) our country's dedication to creating ultra-realistic talking farm animals has seriously paid off.

Stop! Hoyer time

Matt Yglesias points us to this rather useful report in The Nation on how the Murtha/Hoyer race went down. In the end, it looks like it's rather less of a big deal than, say, Christopher Orr would suggest. At least as things are currently. Here's what the article concludes:

Democrats from both camps contended that while Pelosi may have miscalculated in backing Murtha so aggressively, the entire race will be forgotten in a week. "She's a very smart woman who made a mistake in judgment," said Barney Frank. "But it's a one-off thing." Added David Obey, the 68-year-old incoming chair of the Appropriations Committee: "I've seen a lot of bigger fights. This was mild by comparison."

This is probably right, at least for now. In the end, this was a gentleman's duel, and not even to the death, rather than a steel cage match. But if Pelosi's leadership runs into trouble again--especially if opposition is led by Hoyer (or appears to be)--the more dismal interpretations of the majority leader race will return, and this will be used as evidence that she was "weak from the start." In other words, she can probably carry this one, but adding weight this early could be trouble if the ice turns out to be as thin as some suspect.

Open for business

New blog for the office.

Two for Today: Bond and Fast Food Nation

I’m doing double duty (article-wise) again. In NRO, I’ve got a review of the much-anticipated new Bond film, Casino Royale. What did I think? Not too shabby, for a Brit:

Craig’s casting irked some Bond diehards, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s glorious news—especially for men with receding hairlines. Of course, Craig’s Bond is no average Joe couch potato. He’s as trim and cut as they come, and he takes every opportunity to brandish his sculpted physique. Concerned female readers should fear not: Craig struts shirtless on multiple occasions, usually just for the sake of showing off. The physical presence he brings to the role differs from previous Bonds; instead of the slender, refined elegance we’re used to, he compresses his compact, bulldog’s build inward, giving Bond a boxer’s hunch and a squinty glower, as if balled up and ready to strike. He’s a bad boy, and his every pose shows he knows it.

And in The American Spectator I’ve got a piece on Richard Linklater’s rambling anti-corporate yakfest, Fast Food Nation.

Fast Food Nation kicks off with a suit-clad fast food chain boss telling one of his executives to investigate a meat packing plant rumored to be allowing fecal matter to infect the beef. But the only thing that's contaminated here is director Richard Linklater's meandering, unfocused movie, which has an unmistakable whiff of Causeitis—a compulsive inability to avoid taking up any of the many issues in the lefty activist canon.

In other words, read both essays (if you can handle that much Suderman-blather), but when you’re deciding what to do this weekend, stick with Bond.

Blockbusted

Blockbuster has apparently forged a deal with the Weinsteins that will give it sole rental rights to their movies. So forget Netflixing the next Bob and Harvey flick; it's drive to Blockbuster or shut up. Ezra Klein, naturally, thinks this is a travesty of cinematic justice:

In what seems like a truly stupid idea, the Weinstein's have inked a deal to give Blockbuster exclusive rights to their future DVDs. So Bobby, The Nanny Diaries, The Protector, and many others will be kept out of Netflix, Hollywood Video, and local stores. Blockbuster will be your only option. Which is bad for consumers, who'll see their choices restricted, and bad for those involved with the movies, who'll see their efforts constrained to a limited audience. It's the TimesSelect of film distribution: bad for everything but the bottom line.

I was ready to agree with him until he mentioned The Nanny Diaries. The fewer people that see that movie, the better.

No, seriously, this just doesn't strike me as all the malicious. Dumb, perhaps, and bad for business, but nothing to get worked up over. For some unknown reason, Klein thinks this will be profitable, and maybe in the short run, the Weinsteins will eke out some gains from whatever payouts Blockbuster makes for the rights. But my guess is that this rather odd business model will fail to draw much foot traffic into the spiraling black hole of earnings that is Blockbuster. Brick and mortar rental stores are dying fast, and between the varied threats of Netflix, iTunes movie downloads, and the planned Xbox Live HD download service, I can't imagine this small deal, covering only a few movies, doing much for either company. Blockbuster won't get much of a boost, and, though the Weinsteins will get Blockbuster's payments, their rental numbers will be the pits. After a while, both sides will see the folly of their deal and the whole thing will go under. It's called a market, and it works.

And, on a side note, close your browser for a moment of net-silence in honor of Milton Friedman. Or, in lieu of that, click here to watch a choral version (really!) of Friedman's classic take on corporate social responsibility.

Now that's brave, part II

Let it be known that Hollywood's post-Passion courting of the "Christian market" won't get in the way of it displaying some good old fashion anti-religious sentiment, and in a kid's movie, no less. Chud reports:

[Eva] Green’s next project is also with a big studio, New Line, where she’ll play the witch Serafina Pekkala in The Golden Compass, based on the first book in the His Dark Materials trilogy. Daniel Craig’s in that one too, playing the small role (this time) of Lord Asriel. The film has had a hard time getting off the ground, and at one point it was thought that the book’s overt anti-organized religion slant would be kept out of the film (which would really render the whole story moot), but Green assured me all that good stuff will be in the film. “I hope the studio will be brave enough and keep the darkness. But yeah, the Magisterium, the Church, is very present.”

Always nice to see such courage and openness from a movie studio. I think Jonathan Last already had the, erm, last word on this sort of "Hollywood bravery" though.

You've got a friend in suburbia

Want more friends? Ditch the condo high rise and head for the single-family-home sprawl. What would the world do without economists?

That is, like, soooo meta

Over at TechLiberation, Tim Lee and Jim Harper invite fellow tech wonks and internerds to assist them with a--hold on for dear life while I type this--peer produced paper on peer production. It's like if Charlie Kaufman were to write a policy paper. Just thinking about it puts my brain in the gravitron. Yeesh.

And while you're there, read Adam Thierer's awesome smackdown of the critics of so-called "predatory pricing" of game consoles. Paragraphs like this are what 2006 is all about, kids:

Unless he wants to make the argument that video game consoles have suddenly become life essential goods on par with food and water, his argument is just plain silly. After all, would anyone die if they had to wait a few weeks before they bought a stand-alone video game console at regular retail prices? How spoiled are we as a culture when we're even having a debate about fair video game console allocation?

Personally, I'm waiting for some indignant to socialist to just come out and demand console game equality for all citizens. And that means two controllers. No skimping!

Children of Springfield

Well, after months of wait and delay, this was somewhat disappointingly, or at least unexpectedly, empty. I'm still mulling it over, but Slant may have it right.

On the other hand, the new trailer for The Simpsons movie is not only inexplicably hilarious, but provides a perfect corollary to A.O. Scott's delightful NYT Magazine essay on physical comedy. I don't think I could really effectively explain why I cracked up at seeing Homer slammed back and forth like that (although the ludicrously obvious literalization of "a rock and a hard place" certainly adds a lot), but Scott's description of the minivan gag in Little Miss Sunshine seems appropriate:

The gag is executed again and again, and it never gets old. There is nothing in it that needs to be explained, and it does not presume anything about its audience other than a capacity to delight in the incongruous and the absurd. [The movie] ... earns its status as a first-rate movie comedy on the basis of this dumb, cartoonish visual joke, something any child would understand, a silly idea executed with sufficient dexterity to make it funny beyond words.

Homer screaming "Doh!" shouldn't be funny once, but it's worked effectively hundreds of times. For all of The Simpsons' knowing, referential humor, it's often the big, physical gags that gets the loudest laughs. Thank goodness for dumb fun.

Lifestyle politics

I ought to be polishing (well, writing a conclusion to) my review of this, but instead I’ll dive headlong into Larisonland, a place I often fear to tread, if only out of a pervasive phobia of getting buried and eventually suffocating under a mountain of blog copy.

In responding to my point about the difference between political conservatism and lifestyle conservatism, Larison writes:

Each time I read over Peter’s post, the bit about ideology always brings me up short. On why preserving a way of life focused on natural loyalties and guided by a spirit that values restraint, prescription and prudence, among other things, is not an ideology.

[snip]

It has long seemed to me that ideology is that sort of abstract commitment to a proposition or theory that one makes that has little or no relevance to how you live. Being a good liberal involves accepting a number of rather dubious claims about the nature of man and society and setting policy accordingly. Allegedly, what you do in your own, “private” life is no concern to anybody. Likewise, being a good communist or fascist ideologue has everything to do with toeing party lines and supporting the right kinds of policies. Living ethically is neither here nor there, except insofar as it comes into conflict with policy.

[snip]

Ethics is the heart of real politika, the things concerning the polis or community. One’s ethos, one’s way of life and habitual practices, defines what kind of politics a man has, and what kind of community he and his will create and maintain….If conservatism is a worthwhile state of mind and persuasion, conservatism ought to have something important to say.

Larison has lots of smart stuff to say—often thousands of words of it every day—but it seems to me, once again, that what Larison is doing is making conservatism into a sort of manifesto for living. But to my mind, that’s not the place of political alignment; that’s the job of the church, of the conscience, of whatever overarching ideas about existence to which one subscribes. To be a conservative is not necessarily to be a Christian, though I believe the two go in kind with minimal friction. A religion can, and probably should, dictate, in however general or specific terms, a way of life to its followers.

But a political ideology, a political movement, one that is primarily about figuring out proper means of governing, should be, in fact, the opposite—a way of allowing opposing, contrasting, varied ways of life and belief to thrive with as little interference as possible. Larison’s conservatism would be preached from the pulpit, infused in every minute and every decision of life, and while I have no quarrel with (and, in fact, heartily support) careful, principled existences, I don’t wish to see that sort of all-encompassing belief take over the political realm. There is a place*, for sure, to discuss how one should live their life, what principles, faiths, and notions are decent and good, but the goal of politics, and thus of political movements, should be to clear a space for those ideas to flourish, not try to inject itself into the discussion.

*That place is probably in dorm rooms and on little-read blogs.

Essay writing

I read lots and lots of essays each week, most between 700 and 1500 words. It's sort of compulsive, and has been since I was in high school. Even when I don't have to, I still read them a lot.

The form of an essay, like the form of a blockbuster movie, is usually pretty predictable, and, as with movies, a lot of the time when an essay goes awry it's as much to do with the structure as anything else. I notice the form now, of course, but I didn't always, and I don't think many folkspay much attention to it. But, as someone who has written essays for a living for quite a while pointed out to me the other night, essays have a basic, almost mechanical structure that one learns to build over and over again. That's what makes them work, and what makes them so economical and effective.

But somehow I got to thinking about this in context of education. As anyone who's ever read, much less taught, a high school English or comp course, the vast majority of kids just don't have any clue how to write an essay. It's a mystery to them, some ancient secret, like heiroglyphics, having to do with a thesis and a five paragraphs. They're taught that there's a formula, maybe, but they don't have a natural understanding of why or how that formula works.

Why is that? Maybe it's for the stupendously obvious reason that most high schoolers, and even many college students, don't read essays. If they read their school assignments (which is unlikely), they're reading entry level academic texts and standard canon novels. But they're not getting to read smart columnists, critics, and other regular essayists on any sort of normal basis. If they read short critical essays, it's most likely that they're reading some of those hideous example essays culled from other students. But even the best of those are mediocre, written, it's likely, by not by great essayists, but by students who've learned to put a few simple sentences in order and game their graders by just not screwing up. The whole system seems designed to produce mediocrity.

Seems to me the best way to teach essay writing isn't just by spelling out the formula a few times, but by giving people daily exposure to it, and letting it seep in through repetition. Plus, reading clearly written essays about current topics is bound to be more fun than most of the standardized junk that shows up in high school text books.

Twiddling our thumbs to Lost

Ross Douthat is correct that this House Next Door post by Andrew Dignan gets a lot right about what's wrong with Lost--except that these are the same problems the show has had since about a third of the way through the first season, when it started to become clear that the entire spooky island setup was just a tease, and when the writers made plain their intention to answer no questions--or answer them only in the most utterly unsatisfying manner possible.

Dignan also keys in on what I think will ultimately be the show's undoing for even its most ardent fans:

The other problem I alluded to is that Lost -- a show so overlong it torments my TiVo every week by running a couple minutes past the hour -- insists on confining all essential plot to the final five to eight minutes of any given episode. This means we spend the better part of 50 minutes twiddling our thumbs until we return from the last commercial break.

I have a very strong suspicion that this fill-time-till-the-finale approach isn't merely how the show operates on a single episode basis, but how it will play out as an overall series. The whole of the series is filler, designed to frustrate and seduce us into watching until some last minute, sure to be underwhelming, unfulfilling, great big shocker. But the only thing truly enormous and shocking about it will be the amount of water cooler bitching it causes.

Good morning, fanboys and true believers

The new Spiderman 3 trailer is pretty excellent (especially in glorious Quicktime HD), and it looks as if, unlike Spiderman 2, it won't simply be a retread with better effects and action sequences. It's disappointing, of course, that the trailer didn't give a glimpse of ultimate Spidey arch nemesis Venom. After all, the Comic Con kids all got to see him, right? But then, thanks to the wonder of the interwebs, the studio refusing to do an official web release doesn't really stop anyone.

Chris Rock and South Park

Meanwhile, Deborah Solomon’s usually vapid Questions For… column actually delivers a bit of useful substance thanks to the impossible-to-squelch Chris Rock. Rock explains, very briefly, his comic method (find funny ways to explain absurd notions), talks about what material he's working on, and also tells that South Park is, to his mind, the most consistently funny thing out there:

Any episode of “South Park” is funnier than 90 percent of the comedy produced in any given year — movie, TV, just any episode of “South Park” is generally the funniest thing put out that year.

Though I don’t watch the show nearly as much as I should, I’d probably agree. Parker and Stone, especially now that they’re down to an 8 or 10 day production schedule, have developed a nearly perfect formula for gutting American culture and exposing its contradictory, absurd, and downright ugly insides. Nothing escapes their ridicule, and their vehicle—snotty Midwestern kids who’re spoiled, arrogant, innocent, and (mostly) guileless all the same time—is really inspired, because it mimics, in an exaggerated manner, the self-contradictory way in which Americans often think of themselves and those around them.

In his essay on the decline of physical comedy, A.O. Scott points out that “the best jokes of the moment are aggressively timely, pegged to the news headlines and as accepting of their quick obsolescence as blog posts,” and wryly suggests that “in the future, they will no doubt require footnotes.” This is certainly true with The Daily Show, but I think South Park has managed to find a way to be both hypertimely and lasting. The show’s genius lies not just in its ability to skewer current events, but to do so in an almost classically comedic, character-and-gag based manner. They’re not simply riffing on the news, they’re (like The Simpsons) continually adding to a fairly meticulously developed comedic world—a comic lens through which to view anything and everything. This means that instead of simply reacting to current events, letting it lead them along, they’re actively incorporating those events into their universe. They don’t let the news bring them into its world; they bring the news into theirs.

All your snakes on a plane are belong to us

Rob Walker’s “Consumed” column this week is perhaps the smartest take on the Snakes on a Plane phenomenon. He pretty much hits the mark on why the line itself was so instantly funny when he writes that the phrase spawned a season’s worth of bizarre punchlines because “the only thing funnier than a character on Entourage saying something so stupid is a real-life film industry professional saying it.”

And he decimates the buzz about citizen marketing and fan advertising—which famously failed to pay off for Snakes—with ease:

New Line didn’t get a free ride from these creators; if anything, the creators got a boost from New Line: The movie promoted the hype more than the hype promoted the movie.

And, as those who went to the rowdy opening night shows know, the hype—not the movie—was what drove those screenings. We yelled and shouted and tossed plastic glow in the dark snakes at each other not because of the movie, but because of the pre-movie hype on which we, not the movie, were finally realizing. It was a fully audience created experience, a Web 2.0 virtual community moment made physical.

Alternately...

In lieu of cinephile heaven, the New York Times Magazine gives us a movie issue. Small pleasures, right?

200 Screens!

Now we know what cinephile heaven will be like:

When moviegoers die, instead of paradise they go to Paris,
for where else can you find 200 screens
showing nearly every film you’d want to see, not to mention movies
like Captain Blood, in which bad boy Errol Flynn
buckles his swash across the seven seas, and though I’m not dead,
I may be in heaven, walking down the rue St. Antoine,
making lists of my favorite movies, number one being Cocteau’s
Beauty and the Beast, but I’m with Garbo at the end:
“Where is my beast? Give me my beast.” Oh, the beasts have it
on the silver screen—Ivan the Terrible, M, Nosferatu,
The Mummy—all misshapen, murderous monsters,
because no matter how beautiful we are, inside we know
ourselves to be blood-sucking vampires, zombies, freaks cobbled
together with spare parts from the graveyard,

There's more.

Coppola time

I saw Marie Antoinette again last night, and it's just as amazing the second time. I can only hope that Sophia doesn't tread down the path of weirdness and mediocrity like her father. Those of us who want to remember Mr. Coppola's prime, though, will have our opportunity: AFI's next director retrospective will feature screenings of the first two Godfather films, Apocalypse Now, and The Conversation.

Bottled promise

The Washington City Paper's oddly entrancing dating blog notes this poetic, stagy--and deadly accurate--quote from the movie Beautiful Girls, which is almost enough to make me want to see the movie:

Supermodels are beautiful girls, Will. A beautiful girl can make you dizzy, like you've been drinking Jack and Coke all morning. She can make you feel high full of the single greatest commodity known to man-promise. Promise of a better day. Promise of a greater hope. Promise of a new tomorrow. This particular aura can be found in the gait of a beautiful girl. In her smile, in her soul, the way she makes every rotten little thing about life seem like it's going to be okay. The supermodels, Willy? That's all they are. Bottled promise. Scenes from a brand new day. Hope dancing in stiletto heels.

It's true, of course, even when you're not talking about supermodels, and whether your preference is "corn-fed Southern Christian types" or "dark-eyed beauties," (or maybe something in between).

Curses!

I should've noted this earlier, but over at Brainwash, Louis Wittig has a fantastic essay on a new movie named after the ultimate four letter word. Those sensitive to profanity should run, run, run away, but the rest of you, read up!

And on a side note, I managed to see Little Children, The Queen, and Babel last weekend, and all are worth writing about at some point, but this week hasn't been exactly fantastic for having time to produce a lot of copy.

Winging It

Chud has a totally exhaustive multi-author overview/review of the entire run of The West Wing as well as full length reviews of the first six seasons. It’s pretty intense, and if it sometimes get a little repetitive or fan geekish (these are movie nerds, not political wonks), it also gets an awful lot right about one of the defining TV shows, really one of the defining cultural reference points, of the last decade. Say what you will about its politics (for the record, they hovered somewhere between laughable and outright hideous), but it was classy, whip-smart drama, especially during the Sorkin era. And maybe now is the right time to revisit the show—as Garance Franke-Ruta points out, “An entire generation of Washingtonians is completely unfamiliar with life in a city that is not run by Republicans. This is going to take some getting used to.” No kidding.

Now for some real news...

That election business is so this morning. And Rummy? Old news, kids. Here's ABC with the day's smartest quote:

Famed divorce lawyer Raoul Felder agreed that for Spears, "Election Day is probably the best day of the year to announce a divorce."

That's news I can use.

Do you have what it takes to be a citizen?

As the talking heads blather on with their vapid non-analysis tonight, I'll be heckling poll returns from an undisclosed location. For those of you still looking for a party, however, let me at least reccomend the virtual equivalent: everyone's favorite salsa-dancing paleocon, Michael Brendan Dougherty, will be posing as Comedy Central's token conservative at their InDecider Blog. Any drinking game for the evening should involve taking a swig any time a news anchor says anything resembling "in an extremely tight race," which would include phrases like "coming down to the wire," "too close to call," and "just edging out." If in doubt, drink (a motto that works on more than just election night).

Lifestyle conservatism

Of course, there will always be people like Daniel Larison who, while generally supportive of limited government, narrow their eyes with suspicion and crack their knuckles in preparation for long, vehement blog posts at any suggestion that Christianity and libertarianism ought to make nice and hold hands.

In Larison’s most recent pro-Crunchy polemic, he makes the case, once again, against those who would deride the paleo-crunchy emphasis on duty, obligation, tradition, and community, arguing that these—not economic policies or other stands on government action—are the most important elements of conservatism. And in some sense, he’s convincing. There is a general feeling these days that conservatism has drifted away from principle and defining ideology and toward rather narrow policy prescriptions. I suspect there’s some truth to this, but it may also simply be a matter of inexplicable mood, of circumstance, and, for me, of my magnifying-glass view of the Beltway scene that amplifies local sentiments.

But Larison wants to do more to conservatism than restore its principled approach to government. He wants us to see it as a way of life. For that I give him credit; where most folks are content to take the bus into town alone, Larison wants to rocket to the moon and take the entire conservative movement with him. Presumably, once we’re there, we’ll set up a Catholic-run organic farm community and devote lots of time to slow-cooking moon-pies and rocking, zero-G style, on our lunar porches. And there will be government there; good, ordered government, no matter what that nutty Heinlein guy thought.

Larison’s idea is compelling, of course, for those of us who’d like to think that true conservatives aren’t just folks with similar views of government, but also with strong dedication to certain tenets of how to prioritize one’s daily existence. After all, it’s nice to think that your particular political ideology isn’t just a good way of running government, but also a good way of being a person. Larison would have us turn conservatism into String Theory for living: a sort of unified theory of everything, government, church, family, and individual. But like that theory, a much sought but unproven idea that relies on vague notions of truth and beauty with little regard to anything else, Larison’s lifestyle conservatism requires a lot of its proponents, and may, in the end, attempt to be more sweeping than is possible.

The dichotomy he presents us with is tough: Is conservatism a way to be, or is it a way of letting people be? As much as I have sympathies for the former, I tend to think it’s more of the latter—the best way to let others have their way while staying out of mine. Larison thinks otherwise. This may be due to a conflation of religious and political instincts, or it may be a result of belief that good order genuinely provides better lives for people than self-motivated spontaneous organization. Probably some of both. Either way, it seems to me that this—the battle between conservatism as way of life and conservatism strictly as political guide—will, more than any particular policy battle, be the defining struggle for the right over the coming years.

Libertarians and Christians, again

There has been much flap as of late over the supposed tug-of-war between the social conservative/Christian and libertarian wings of the Republican party. Ryan Sager’s book, of course, and the recent Cato study on libertarian swing votersby David Boaz and my friend, office neighbor, and AFF head honcho (the group that publishes Doublethink), David Kirby, both argue against the social conservative wing and for a renewed focus on limited government. This week’s National Review features a thoughtful cover-story response to these anti-statist cries by Ramesh Ponnuru that, if possibly not out of the park, is certainly a solid triple.

Ponnuru is, unfortunately for folks like me, right, I suspect, that strict, principled economic conservatism probably doesn’t have much hope in our current political climate. On the other hand, as he points out, our national character, built on a strange mix of individual and collective, cutthroat capitalism and level-field egalitarianism, is such that we aren’t likely to turn toward wholesale statism any time soon. True blooded libertarians will probably remain frustrated for a while, but then—so will fanatical progressives. Sorry Ezra Klein.

Still, I think the split between the libertarian and the religious wings is perhaps not as intractable as Sager and others seem to think. So permit me to prove Michael Brendan Dougherty correct when he writes, in a Washington Monthly piece on AFF and young conservatives that you really ought to read, this of many recent conservative critiques of Republicanism: “At the end of the day, the arguments all seem to boil down to something similar: If it were more like me, the Republican Party would be better off. It’s failing because it’s like you.”

The libertarian bashing of the conservative Christian wing seems somewhat unnecessary and misplaced to me. As both a Christian and someone with strong libertarian tendencies, I obviously see little need for conflict between the two groups. And in fact, there are striking similarities in the way they’ve both been treated by the current Republican party. Both groups have, in many ways, been given far less influence over policy than they might’ve hoped, in part because the current Republican party knows that there’s simply no really feasible place left for them to go. Yes, libertarian types do have a disproportionate number of folks who’re primarily concerned with social and civil liberties issues rather than economic issues, and those people can find reason to vote Democrat. But there are few principled libertarians who’re willing to sacrifice the entire spectrum of economic issues for a few social ones. It’s borderline impossible to justify voting for any candidate whose party is explicitly geared toward more government involvement in the economy.

Similarly, Christians are unlikely to find much support for anti-abortion policies or for crucial freedom of religion issues in Democrats. While individual Democrat candidates may be more friendly, the party as a whole is not particularly compatible with Christians, especially seeing as how it is the party of choice for militant atheists.

And, as I’ve argued here before, both groups would be best served by more limited government. Christians may stand to make short term gains by pushing for the government to enact Christian-policy, but the majority of what they want would be best accomplished by the church. Yes, there are some touchy areas: abortion will always be a dividing line, and Christians will probably tend to be more hawkish on foreign policy. But Christians should (and often do) understand that it’s risky at best to give power to a secular entity such as government; to do so diminishes the influence (or at least possible influence) of the church. On the whole, I think, and especially in terms of domestic policy, libertarians and Christians have an incentive to work together. Libertarians, then, need to be taking advantage of this by, instead of blaming the Christian right for the downfall of the Republican party, reaching out to it and reminding it of its interest in limited government. If that were to happen, it’s likely that their combined influence would become enough that the Republican party would have to take notice and wouldn’t be able to take either group for granted as it’s done.

Fountains of Art

For those of you interested in Darren Aronofsky's forthcoming bit of sci-fi weirdness, The Fountain, NYT has an excellent multimedia section on the 12 pieces of movie-inspired art the director commissioned to go along with the movie. The contribution from Dave Gibbons (Watchmen) is especially nice. I'm still trying to figure out what I think of the film, but I really like these pieces, and I think this sort of project is a perfect fit for the film. The movie often feels like a sort of abstract painting in motion, and it's more about images and feelings that narrative and character, so having visual artists respond to the film--rather than us word-bound critics, makes a lot of sense.

Borat Attack!

I’m in NRO this morning adding my piece to the Borat hype machine. For once, it’s deserved:

Guerilla comedian Sacha Baron Cohen’s new film, Borat, takes the Hiroshima approach to comedy: It’s an uncompromising, total assault on civilization. Nothing is sacred, and the aftermath leaves no one standing. You can be appalled at its vulgarity and debate its virtues, but there can be no doubt of its devastating effects.

To call this movie crass would be like calling Cindy Sheehan “a little kooky.” The word doesn’t even begin to describe it. Cohen has a fundamental dedication to pushing every scene to its most gasp-inducing extreme. But unlike so many other purveyors of gross-out gags, this is not merely a string of stunts. The genius of Borat is how the character exploits our country’s obsession with conflict-avoidance and multicultural tolerance. It’s a shiv to the guts of appeasement, and it just might be the best — and certainly the funniest — deconstruction of American pretensions ever made.

Read the whole thing at National Review Online.

Iz niiize

In The New Republic, Andrew Curry reports on the supposedly disturbing trend toward social conservatism in some parts of Europe:

[T]oday, there is a deep divide between Western Europe and the ten countries that joined the EU in 2004--all but two of which were once part of the Soviet bloc. In these states, the idea that EU membership is a threat to national sovereignty and traditional society, rather than an economic boon, is taking hold. According to a 2003 Pew Global Attitudes Survey, roughly two-thirds of Bulgarians, Poles, Czechs, and Slovaks say their way of life needs to be protected from foreign influence. Homophobia, opposition to abortion, racism, anti-Semitism, and nationalism are all on the rise.

In other words, as Borat would say: In my country, there is problem.