An Evening With Oscar

It's the gay Super Bowl, and Los Angeles pretty much shuts down during it, so I'll be incapacitated for the next few hours. We're making Indian food in honor of Slumdog Millionaire, although I am part of the backlash and don't think it's a particularly good film. Last year's entrants blow this year's away, but I agree with Nate Silver that it's virtually assured of victory. I liked the film when I saw it and promptly forgot everything about it the moment it ended. The Wrestler was my favorite film of the year.

In the documentary feature category, which I call the real award, I think Werner Herzog will get what amounts to a lifetime achievement award for "Encounters At The End Of The World," which will be the 2nd film about penguins to win in this category in four years. I thought Trouble The Water was the best I saw this year, though I haven't seen Man On Wire yet. If everyone in Los Angeles were required to see The Garden, nobody in LA would be re-elected (particularly Antonio Villaraigosa). But I like films that look like a modicum of thought went into shooting them.

Enjoy wonderful, dazzling Oscar.

Oscars

I've seen 2 of the 5 Best Picture nominees, Slumdog Millionaire and Milk (The others are Frost/Nixon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and in a bit of a surprise, The Reader). Slumdog's going to win, but I was more partial to Milk. Benjamin Button got 13 nominations, but that's mainly because it sits in that "Best Picture bait and Visual Effects bait" space, and ultimately it will probably be disappointed throughout the ceremony. Odds and ends on the nominees:

• Mickey Rourke should win Best Actor for The Wrestler, though that's a very strong category. Marisa Tomei, who was just not that good in that movie but somehow has cachet because she implausibly won an Oscar before, got nominated as well.

• That Best Animated Film category has ghetto-ized those movies, despite Wall-E probably being as good as any Best Picture nominee.

• Great to see the amazing Trouble The Water up for Best Documentary Film. I've actually only seen one of these five, which is bad for me. Man On Wire and Encounters At The End of the World (the second Werner Herzog film for the little studio I used to work at to be nominated) have had great reviews. Don't know anything about The Betrayal or The Garden.

• Waltz With Bashir is going to win Best Foreign Film. I have to go see that.

• No Best Song for Bruce Springsteen's original for The Wrestler, which is surprising, but Slumdog is likely to sweep the musical categories.

• A couple pleasant surprises in the writing categories. Irish playwright Martin McDonagh got a nomination for In Bruges, which I just saw over the weekend, and which I found extremely good. Wall-E got a writing nod as well.

...This is hilarious. I knew that Benjamin Button (or Forrest Gump II) looked familiar.

Traditional Christmas Movie Reviews

I have been seeing a movie on Christmas Day for several years now, and judging from the crowds at my local movie houses, a lot of patrons joined me. I managed to avoid the record-setting Marley and Me, but I did take in a double feature.

Slumdog Millionaire was a fine enough fairy tale, but I forgot everything about it the minute I left the theater. The art direction, cinematography and editing were excellent, but overall the story left me as cold as something like "Billy Elliott" or "The Full Monty" did (I wasn't too surprised when I saw it had the same writer from "The Full Monty"). It was your typical crowd-pleasing, coincidence-laden bit of treacle, without much beyond the surface and an interwoven Mumbai mob plot right out of your below-average B-level Tony Scott film. Also, I think the shaky-cam hyper-real look has worn out its welcome (although this could be because we were late to the crowded screening and sat in the third row). That said, I found it enjoyable when I was watching it, and the closing Bollywood musical number almost redeems everything.

Now, by contrast, The Wrestler is a grounded, authentic story, even if it is fairly archetypal. The acting, in particular by Evan Rachel Wood and the astounding Mickey Rourke, is top-notch, and the story of a past-his-prime wrestler living a rootless and searching existence was extremely compelling. The themes of loneliness, self-destruction and fame all make for a great crescendo, albeit a slightly predictable one. Darren Aronofsky is no stranger to style-over-substance flair (Requiem for a Dream, Pi) and yet the film's look is restrained while remaining oddly pretty.

Two additional things. The Arclight in Hollywood now has "21+" screenings where you can buy a drink at the café bar and bring it into the theater, which make so much damn sense I don't know why it isn't the rule across the country. It was a bit jarring to have the bartender unaware that we were headed into the screening 10 minutes before we began and giving us our order in glasses instead of plastic, however.

Second, the opening title sequence to The Wrestler consisted of a pan across a series of fliers and magazine articles and memorabilia for the career of Rourke's character Randy "The Ram" Robinson, and in it, title designer Kristyn Hume revealed my secret life as a fictional wrestling star:



I totally kicked his ass in that fight, although he brought a foreign object in the ring for the win. Let's just say that now you know why Randy the Ram needed all that creepy plastic surgery.

Passing Thought

Isn't this "Benjamin Button" movie just the story of Mearth from Mork & Mindy? And since "Button" is based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, did an 80s sitcom plagiarize one of the most respected 20th-century American novelists? And if so, why not plagiarize a better concept than "guy ages backwards?"

A New Tone

Barack Obama is inviting the surviving members of the Tuskegee Airmen to the inauguration.

When the Tuskegee Airmen, the all-black force of elite pilots, emerged from combat in World War II, they faced as much discrimination as they had before the war. It was not until six decades later that their valor was recognized and they received the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian honor Congress can give.

Now, the roughly 330 pilots and members of the ground crew who are left from about 16,000 who served are receiving another honor that has surpassed their dreams: They are being invited to watch the inauguration of Barack Obama as the country’s first black president.

“I didn’t believe I’d live long enough to see something like this,” said Lt. Col. Charles A. Lane Jr., 83, of Omaha, a retired Tuskegee fighter pilot who flew missions over Italy.

He's also not backing away from his own heritage and conservative smears and will use his middle name in taking the oath of office.

One simple matter comes down to three little words, and on them he has made up his mind: he won't shrink from using his full name when he takes the oath of office.

During the campaign, Obama's detractors would often invoke his middle name, Hussein, in an attempt to falsely paint him as a Muslim. Obama, a Christian, doesn't care.

"I think the tradition is that they use all three names, and I will follow the tradition," he said. "I'm not trying to make a statement one way or another. I'll do what everybody else does.''

A president of inclusion. Imagine that.

He's even going to improve left of center hip-hop!

OK, enough with the focus on tangential cultural improvements. Back to the issues.

Random Sunday Errand Thoughts

So I pop in the Urban Outfitters to see what the kids are wearing these days, and there are about 30 Obama T-shirts and buttons on display. "Obama Said Knock You Out," "Barack and Roll," you get the picture. In the spirit of bipartisanship, I suppose, there were a couple pro-McCain buttons off to one side, including one that read "No Pain, No McCain."

Now, I don't even think that's positive, is it? Doesn't that suggest that a McCain presidency would be extremely painful? I'm not disagreeing with the analysis, but either Urban Outfitters is really phoning in the McCain slogans or they're having some fun.

The other fun part of my day was listening to some random radio show which extolled the virtues of rummaging around in your kids' clothing and personal effects to search for drugs. At one point the host intimated that the kids appreciate this, because it shows their parents care for them and are paying attention to them.

We really are becoming more of a surveillance state every day, aren't we?

Card Carrying Liberal

I'm in some good company at around :22.



(this is a Living Liberally project to use "The Liberal Card" as a discount card for local businesses. Great idea, BTW)

An Historical And Cultural Perspective To This Election

I want to share something that hit me today in the midst of my July 4th. It's not particularly profound or revelatory but I think it is, however flawed, important - an important lesson about how we are witnessing something truly different in this country this election year.

Have you ever tried to recite the names of the Presidents in order? Somehow I've managed to shoehorn that into my brain. After reading a little Presidential puzzler that came in my morning LA Times, I decided to run through the list again.

George Washington
John Adams
Thomas Jefferson
James Madison
James Monroe
John Quincy Adams
Andrew Jackson
Martin Van Buren
William Henry Harrison
John Tyler
James Polk
Zachary Taylor
Millard Fillmore
Franklin Pierce
James Buchanan
Abraham Lincoln
Andrew Johnson
Ulysses S. Grant
Rutherford B. Hayes
James Garfield
Chester Arthur
Grover Cleveland (first term)
Benjamin Harrison
Grover Cleveland (second term)
William McKinley
Theodore Roosevelt
William Howard Taft
Woodrow Wilson
Warren Harding
Calvin Coolidge
Herbert Hoover
Franklin Roosevelt
Harry Truman
Dwight Eisenhower
John F. Kennedy
Lyndon Johnson
Richard Nixon
Gerald Ford
Jimmy Carter
Ronald Reagan
George H.W. Bush
Bill Clinton
George W. Bush

Not that this is a criterion for much of anything, but I look at that list of names, and consider someone named Barack Obama in there, and there's a certain twinge of pride. To have all those white Protestant men and this other name, and face, brushed up against them, is almost shocking. There's barely a whiff of ethnicity in that last - Van Buren and Roosevelt are Dutch, at least, and a few are Irish. If you want to graphically understand one of the differences that we could see in this election, read that list aloud and say "Barack Obama" afterwards. It's quite jarring.

I think policy matters, and direction for the country matters, and to put 43 Presidents on one side and this man on the other doesn't make a lot of sense. But there's another side, a side of imagery suggested by heritage, the cultural wallpaper, if you will, that says "yes, this really is a sea change, this really is a revolution of sorts." I think that will have an undeniable effect nationally and globally. On the policy side it's up to us and engaged citizens like us to never let up with pressure and move this candidate in the right direction. On the imagery side, if you stop and think, there really is a marvel to this, a small miracle, something so unexpected and brave. There's a significance to it. I don't know if I can put it totally into words. But read that list and you may find it as well.

Happy 4th.

UPDATE: On the flip side.

Taco Trucks And The Future Of California

I know that we're going to have a historic new Speaker today, and tomorrow the Governor is going to prevent a revised budget that will set the course for the next few months in the Legislature. But for the moment I want to talk about taco trucks.

Los Angeles County has enacted rules basically banning the taco truck, the rumbling restaurants on wheels serving Mexican food to lunchtime office workers, day laborers and others throughout the city, particularly in East LA. The previous order by the County Board of Supervisors was to force taco trucks to move every hour or face a $60 fine. Most trucks paid it as the cost of doing business. Now the supervisors have upped that fine to as much as $1000 and possibly jail time.

Make no mistake - the taco trucks are being harassed because restaurants don't like the competition. As one truck owner said, "We are hard workers and we pay taxes... we are poor people feeding other poor people." In a rare moment of perceptiveness, Dan Walters noted that this is a "new chapter in an old and dreary story of political interference with the economic aspirations of low-income and/or immigrant Californians." The restaurant lobby is maybe not as powerful in LA as in San Francisco, but it obviously had enough juice to eliminate their competition in this case. Walters folds this into a stupid argument about how all business should be unregulated, but in this case he's right - if you want to offer the opportunity for the new and struggling in our society to experience upward mobility, barriers like this are really restrictive and unnecessary.

Taco trucks are about more than a meal in Los Angeles - they truly are a culture, and one that has migrated onto the internet. The Great Taco Hunt, a blog dedicated to the LA taco scene, has a loyal following. People will drive many miles for a decent taco here, and given the traffic that's a real commitment. So some residents are fighting back. Save Our Taco Trucks has also 6,000 signatories to a petition to rescind the law, which goes into effect on Thursday. Tomorrow, they're holding a final event at Tacos El Galuzo to raise awareness about the ordinance and share one last legal taco.

You can see the stirrings of how politics will be waged in the save-the-taco-trucks movement. There has been a wave of local organizing this year, around the Presidential race, around the budget, around proposed education cuts and park closures, and even around hyper-local issues like the taco truck. This is a new era for California, where technology reduced barriers to communication and allows those with like interests and concerns to find one another. When the Board of Supes takes down this silly ordinance - and they will - they will have seen the power of modern organizing.

Pour a Little Bottle Full Of 20-Sided Dice On The Front Lawn

Gary Gygax is dead.

Not only did I spend way too many hours playing Dungeons & Dragons as a kid (and so did ALL of your friends, ladies, including your husbands), but I've continued to use D&D references as the ultimate geek jokes for the last 20 years. So to Gygax, thanks, for that. I might have to dig out Fiend Folio today and reminisce.

Headline Of The Millennium

Dolly Parton postpones tour, blames breasts

Impossible to improve upon that.

Yes We Can

This is an amazing music video, maybe the best use of celebrity talent I've ever seen employed in a campaign. Obama's rhetoric does have a poetic quality to it, and putting it to music is just natural. Add in the viral nature of putting the song on the Internet, and the bold call for social justice and the desire to become our better selves, and I think it's just a real gem. It also adds to the generational, creative class nature of the Obama campaign that we're seeing in recent days.

Here's a story about the making of the song:

The Black Eyed Peas' frontman, songwriter and producer known as will.i.am, along with director and filmmaker Jesse Dylan, son of another socially active musician, Bob Dylan, released a new song Friday that attempts to do just that.

The music video "Yes We Can" premiered on ABCNewsNow's "What's the Buzz" on Friday. It was inspired, will.i.am told ABC's Alisha Davis, by Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign and in particular by the speech he has gave after the New Hampshire primary.

"It made me reflect on the freedoms I have, going to school where I went to school, and the people that came before Obama like Martin Luther King, presidents like Abraham Lincoln that paved the way for me to be sitting here on ABCNews and making a song from Obama's speech," will.i.am said.

"The speech was inspiring about making change in America and I believe what it says and I hope everybody votes," Dylan said.

It's pretty special. I don't know that the country can be collectively inspired by a particular anymore, there are simply too many media choices these days. But this is one way to gather interest in civic engagement that is completely outside the box.

There Will Be A Review

I know "No Country For Old Men" swept the key awards this weekend, an augur of Oscar success, but "There Will Be Blood" is a better film, a masterpiece, a showcase for an almost otherworldly acting performance, a film with the best score I have heard in my lifetime, and the telling of a story that is timeless.

Daniel Day-Lewis appears in virtually every frame of its two and a half hours, and his Daniel Plainview is a man with demons, with inadequacies, with shortcomings, with the inability to connect or even tolerate other human beings, to the extent that he uses his most cherished fellow human being, his adopted son H.W., as a prop, a way to ingratiate himself to communities out of whom he wants to swindle their natural resources. He eventually comes to resent his son, for an event that makes him rich. An oil well gushes and blows out H.W.'s eardrum, an oil well that will reap untold fortunes for Daniel. Not being able to relate to his son, to communicate with him, he rejects him, sends him away, breeds anger and a final rift. Here's that key moment, as recounted by Premiere's Glenn Kenny:

H.W. has been the only person Plainview has ever really confided in. Now he can’t communicate with him. Plainview’s exchange with his right hand man Fletcher Hamilton (Cieran Hinds) is telling in a number of ways. “Is H.W. okay?” Fletcher asks. “No, he’s not okay,” Plainview says. Soon, he looks again at Fletcher. “What are you so miserable about? We’ve got an ocean of oil under our feet…and only I can get at it!” Note the use of the first person singular here. Of course it suggests Plainview’s selfishness, callousness…but it also suggests a sundered partnership. Had H.W. been standing with Plainview and Fletcher, uninjured and whole, Plainview would have been speaking to H.W., and he would have said “we.”

The movie is less about the oil business and its historical underpinnings, and the wildcatters and businessmen who built it, than about one man and his family, including the surrogate family of the Sundays, particularly the brothers Eli and Paul, played by Paul Dano. Paul only shows up in the first moments, to tip Plainview off to a fertile tract of land in the Little Boston area. Eli is the preacher who becomes Plainview's nemesis from thereafter. There's a lot of talk about the ending of the film, which some have found discordant. I found it perfectly relevant. Eli becomes the son that Plainview can lash out at, unlike H.W., who is closer to his flesh and blood. In a movie full of real family and fake family, only by the end and only to Eli can all of the emotions of humiliation and self-loathing and anger be displaced. Daniel Plainview, by the end, an alcoholic, insular, closed figure, eventually devours himself.

The Glenn Kenny review is more of a spoiler, by the way.

Oscar Nods

Pretty surprising. I've only seen one of the Best Picture nominees, but seeing No Country For Old Men, There Will Be Blood and especially Juno up there makes an indie lover feel good. Maybe this is finally the year the Coen Brothers get the Best Picture Oscar they deserve.

Based on quick projections, I'd say No Country for Best Picture, Julie Christie (Away From Her) for Best Actress, Daniel Day-Lewis (There Will Be Blood) for Best Actor, Javier Bardem (No Country For Old Men) for Best Supporting Actor, Cate Blanchett (I'm Not There) for Best Supporting Actress, The Coens or P.T. Anderson for Best Director, The Coens or P.T. Anderson for Best Adapted Screenplay, and Diablo Cody (Juno) for Best Original Screenplay.

The documentary nominees are pretty good too:

“No End in Sight” (Magnolia Pictures) A Representational Pictures Production: Charles Ferguson and Audrey Marrs
“Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience” (The Documentary Group) A Documentary Group Production: Richard E. Robbins
“Sicko” (Lionsgate and The Weinstein Company) A Dog Eat Dog Films Production: Michael Moore and Meghan O’Hara
“Taxi to the Dark Side” (THINKFilm) An X-Ray Production: Alex Gibney and Eva Orner
“War/Dance” (THINKFilm) A Shine Global and Fine Films Production: Andrea Nix Fine and Sean Fine

I hear Taxi To The Dark Side is amazing.

Culture Beat With The One-Word Reviewer

No Country For Old Men: amazing

Ween's new album La Cucaracha: awesome

Led Zeppelin live: rocked, apparently

The show I'm currently working on: crap

So it goes.

This is very sad.

Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like "Slaughterhouse-Five," "Cat’s Cradle" and "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died last night in Manhattan. He was 84 and had homes in Manhattan and in Sagaponack on Long Island.

His death was reported by Morgan Entrekin, a longtime family friend, who said Mr. Vonnegut suffered brain injuries as a result of a fall several weeks ago.

I have practically an entire bookshelf devoted to all my Vonnegut. Great writer, great man, nobody captured the wistfulness of comedy, the comic response to catastrophe, better than he.

And his last book, A Man Without A Country, was an informative and engaging collection of essays which described the absurdity of our current times with biting wit and, underneath, a real anger at these so-called patriots who took away the country he served in WWII. He could run rings around this collection of fools, and he did. He knew the suffering of war because he saw it first-hand in Dresden. He wasn't so blithe about the tragedy of human life. He laughed because there was nothing else to do.

He said it would be his last book. He was right. Kilgore Trout must have told him.

So it goes.

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’ ”

-God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

UPDATE: Scouring the 'Net it occurs to me that I've finally found something that could unify the whole progressive blogosphere: they were all reading Vonnegut books in high school and college. This is a significant passage from 2003:

I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’etat imaginable. And those now in charge of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka “Christians,” and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or “PPs."

REO Speedwagon Played a Wal-Mart

Here's some Saturday night fun for the "that's the saddest thing I've ever heard" file (h/t Cable & Tweed).

REO Speedwagon became a rock icon with number one hits "Can’t Fight This Feeling" and "Keep On Loving You." They played giant stadiums in the 70’s and 80’s, but Friday they performed at the Walmart in Eagan (Minnesota).

The band is promoting it’s first new album in a decade and it has an exclusive deal with Walmart.

"I’ve been watching them for 30 years," said Jay Powell from Cottage Grove, "and I had to come to Walmart to meet them, I never would have thought that."

This is where we're at, kids. Never mind the embarrassment of hearing that the Speedwagon had to roll up to the Wal-Mart to get out their message of rock. No, the sadness here is that it was such a good business move for them. In far too many small towns, the Wal-Mart is pretty much the only place you can physically buy new music. It's completely normal and great to see in-store performances at Virgin or Amoeba Music or HMV; this is just an extension of that. But the fact is that there's literally NOWHERE ELSE TO GO in much of the country other than a big-box store if you're a band and you want to reach people. The 'wagon admits that.

Walmart has an exclusive deal to sell a three CD set that includes a DVD and some greatest hits. For two weeks it is the only place to buy the new music.

"We're people-people," said lead singer Kevin Cronin, "and this is where people come to buy music."

Teaming up with a big retailer like Walmart or Best Buy is the latest sales gimmick by artists targeting adults.

"Because they're the ones still buying music in the CD jewel case form while their kids are downloading it for their iPods," said John Rash, Director of Media Negotiations for Campbell Mithun Advertising.

Of course, this isn't limited to music. The Wal-Marts of the world have muscled out the competition in lots of sectors. It's become the de facto town square, and now, an events center.

We can imagine what this means for the culture. Wal-Mart can and has dictated what they will sell in their stores. That's their right, but when they're the only game in town, it has the effect of walling off music or art or magazines or books to entire regions of the country. The Internet obviously mitigates this effect, but not completely. The culture becomes homogenized, then, as bands have to sign exclusive deals with department stores to ensure their distribution.

I think there's a larger point here beyond it being unbelievable that Kevin Cronin took to the stage Friday and yelled "Hello, Wal-Mart!"

The question is, given this development, how far are we from this being on the pop charts?