No, "The Left" Isn't Apologizing For Roman Polanski

I haven't proffered an opinion on the Polanski case, but let me say now that I am against people raping 13 year-olds and getting away with it! Yes, I'm going out on a limb! According to Howard Kurtz, that makes me no longer a liberal, since he quotes wingnut Ed Morrissey, who lazily attributes defenses of Polanski to "the Left." Which, as Jamison Foser points out with multiple links, isn't true. Scott Lemieux piles on. Indeed, the most prominent defenders of Polanski are certain friends in the movie industry, which of course becomes "the Hollyweird Left" in the wingnut construction, as well as Anne Applebaum, whose husband is a Polish government official working to free Polanski (Applebaum casually forgot to mention that in her piece). In other words, friends of his. They saw a documentary that put the whole thing in a favorable light for Polanski, and that allowed them to assuage their guilt.

Steve Lopez has a very good piece today, noting that far too many of these defenders have elegantly chopped out the most damning parts of the testimony from the trial:

Q: What happened then?

A: He reached over and he kissed me. And I was telling him, "No," you know, "Keep away." But I was kind of afraid of him because there was no one else there.

She testified that he put his mouth on her vagina.

"I was ready to cry," she said. "I was kind of -- I was going, 'No. Come on. Stop it.' But I was afraid."

She said he then pulled off her panties.

Q: What happened after that?

A: He started to have intercourse with me.

At this point, she testified, Polanski became concerned about the consequences and asked if she was on the pill.

No, she told him.

Polanski had a solution, according to her.

"He goes, 'Would you want me to go in through your back?' And I went, 'No.' "

According to her, that didn't stop Polanski, who began having anal sex with her.

This was when the victim was asked by the prosecutor if she resisted and she said, "Not really," because "I was afraid of him." She testified that when the ordeal had ended, Polanski told her, "Oh, don't tell your mother about this."

He added: "This is our secret." [...]

Q: Did you resist at that time?

A: A little bit, but not really because . . .

Q: Because what?

A: Because I was afraid of him.

It's pretty outrageous that Polanski's gotten away with claiming victimhood for 30 years after serving 42 days in jail (before the trial) for drugging and raping a 13 year-old. I like his movies but I don't have to absolve his behavior for that reason. We don't have a cultural exemption - or a political one, for that matter - in the US justice system. Let him do his time.

And by the way, that's the prevailing opinion of many on "the Left."

...Many are making use of the fact that Samantha Geimer, the victim, is willing to show compassion and doesn't want to see Polanski prosecuted. After a guilty verdict in a trial, I don't think that's her decision to make anymore, actually.

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.

Crips And Bloods: The Manifestation of a Failed Prison Policy

The Stacy Peralta-directed documentary Crips And Bloods: Made In America looks at the history of gangs in South Los Angeles over the last 50 years, and the violent civil war on the streets that has raged for the past 30, killing as many as 15,000 residents, three times as many as in the Unionist/Catholic war in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 80s. Anywhere else in the world, UN peace negotiators would be brought in and Security Council resolutions passed to stop the violence. In South Central, the battles continue, and children growing up among the chaos, according to a recent RAND Corporation study, have higher rates of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) than children growing up in Baghdad.

One of the more amazing things about the documentary is that, despite unparalleled access to the gang-bangers surviving on the streets over the past 30 years, there is precious little about the actual feud between the Crips and Bloods. Most of the history of why they fight and why they kill has been lost in the minds of the young leaders on both sides who suffered an early death. Crips and Bloods shoot and get shot largely because they are supposed to oppose one another. Wearing the wrong colors in the wrong neighborhood is a death sentence, but it's unclear why. At one point, one of the original gang leaders, Masuka, says that "one of the ways the oppressor state functions is by turning the subjects against one another."

The story traces gang culture from the earliest days, through the Watts riots of 1965, the Black Power movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the rise of the Crips and Bloods, as South Los Angeles fell into a self-perpetuating cycle of decay and despair. After the major factory jobs left in the early 1960s, residents were without opportunity and without hope. Crack cocaine and other drugs eventually became the only economic salvation. And it led to violence and warfare in the streets.

The most revealing sequence in the film comes when every current gang member is asked about their childhood, and they all - to a man - respond that they were products of a broken home, without fathers, with the family members who raised them selling drugs out of the house, caught at an early age without positive role models or figures to enable their own empowerment. Those living in South LA with strong family units had mothers and fathers who kept them off the streets and away from the gangs. Those without had little hope. And this is a very direct consequence of an insane prison policy that locks up nonviolent offenders, particularly in the black community, at absurdly high rates. One out of every four black men will be imprisoned at some point in his life, and particularly in California, the inability of the system to handle all the warehousing of inmates leads to a lack of rehabilitation and an expanded recidivism rate. In fact, the explosion of gang activity inside the prisons ensures an increase outside the jail. This revolving door in and out of prison rips apart families and leads to a sustained cycle of gang activity and violence. The "war on drugs" is unquestionably a war on people of color and the lower classes.

That is the faillure we are talking about when we look at California prison policy, a failure that will now lead to mass release in the absence of leadership in Sacramento. Policymakers would rather lock away the problem instead of facing the terrible blight in the black community. Indeed, they have locked up these people inside AND outside of prison, confining them to the few miles in South Central that is their turf; there are stories in the film of young gang members who have spent their entire lives in a 10-block radius. The border between South Central and suburbs like Lynwood and South Gate has been a virtual pen for black youth for 50 years, with anyone crossing the border risking a beating or even their lives. We built communities that are prisons, through restrictive housing covenants and police directives to "maintain order". This is what created gang life, out of mutual protection from whites. And what now sustains it is not only the locking up of parents from sons and daughters, not only the locking up of blacks inside ghettos and away from opportunity, but the locking up of minds, the locking in of self-loathing and the snuffing out of the flame of hope.

While South LA is now as Latino as it is black, the difficulties for residents and the ravages of gang life remain. While violent crime has decreased since 1992 it remains unspeakably high. As we look at prison policy in California, and in particular the efforts by elites in Sacramento to block any meaningful reform, despite bending over backwards from federal receivers to work out agreements that allow for inmates to retain their Constitutional rights to be free from cruel and unusual punishment, we need to think about the Crips and the Bloods, about why they persist, about why they fight, and about why we made them.

Real-Life Slumdogs

This item from yesterday is going to get more and more ink as Slumdog Millionaire received more and more awards.

Their roles in Slumdog Millionaire have won them international acclaim and seen them rub shoulders with the film’s glamorous stars and its British director.

But the reality of life for Rubina Ali and Azharuddin Ismail is far closer to that of the characters they play in the story of love, violent crime and extreme poverty in India.

The child actors’ parents have accused the hit film’s producers of exploiting and underpaying the eight-year-olds, disclosing that both face uncertain futures in one of Mumbai’s most squalid slums.

Rubina was paid £500 for a year’s work ($710) while Azharuddin received £1,700 ($2414), according to the children's parents.

However a spokesman for the film’s American distributors, Fox Searchlight, disputed this saying the fees were more than three times the average annual salary an adult in their neighbourhood would receive. They would not disclose the actual sum.

Both children were found places in a local school and receive £20 a month for books and food. However, they continue to live in grinding poverty and their families say they have received no details of the trust funds set up in their names. Their parents said that they had hoped the film would be their ticket out of the slums, and that its success had made them realise how little their children had been paid.

The optics of a movie poised to make a $100 million dollars and two of the stars living in poverty is really bad. It is not the responsibility of the producers to end poverty for the lives of these kids and their families, but compared to how actors are paid in the United States, this is kind of outrageous. And the reason for that is that actors have aggressive, activist unions in this country to prevent this from happening. If a film is showing globally, the pay scales for everyone in the film probably ought to be standardized, as well. And this is an example of, as Dylan Matthews says, the importance of global unions.

Perhaps it's too much to ask for studios to use the same day rates when filming overseas as they do when filming domestically, but they should at the very least be obligated to let foreign actors collectively bargain. India's a special case, in that Bollywood actors already have a union from which foreign production teams can hire. Other countries with smaller film industries might not have enough actors to form a strong bargaining unit. What is to prevent an actor in, say, Laos from being exploited?

This is why we've got to get functioning global unions organized. We have federations, yes, but you don't see ITUC negotiating contracts with multinational corporations. Those kinds of negotiations need to happen if we're to avoid loopholes like this. As long as national unions are striking separate deals, and corporations are operating without much concern for borders, labor just won't be able to keep up. If, on the other hand, SAG and FWICE etc. joined into a Global Actors' Union which could then negotiate a global contract with Warners Bros, Sony, and the like, the studios won't be able to skirt off to the third world when they don't want to pay actors at union rates.

Film companies are constantly seeking out tax breaks and cost controls (not on their expansive marketing budgets, but on the raw costs), which is why we have runaway production. A level playing field would eliminate the possibility for them to race to the bottom. Union membership in the United States is finally back on the rise after a long period of decline. But in this interdependent, globalized world, the biggest disincentive to outsourcing would be global unions.

...while I'm on the union topic, a word about the rift between SEIU and UHW in California, which has led to UHW breaking away and trying to form their own union. I have friends on both sides of this rift, so I'm in no position to take anyone's side. Ultimately, I find these intra-union debates to be somewhat healthy and grounding for the labor movement. They are a model of what can happen in a bottom-up democratized setting. It's not always clean, but I'd rather it be messy, honestly. The other thing is that unions have un-affiliated and re-affiliated countless times historically. The Change to Win/AFL-CIO split was supposed to be groundbreaking and unprecedented, and now four years later they're talking about reuniting. There are real issues at stake here, but with the continuum of disunity and reunification, I'd just as well stay out of something so dynamic it'll probably change within a matter of months.

And this won't hurt the Employee Free Choice Act at all. That's stupid - there's such a thing as common ground.

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?"

Milk

I attended a screening of "Milk" last night put together by the Courage Campaign, and wanted to give some thoughts on it. (Though it's a familiar story, there are some spoilers below.)

The film itself is superb. I wasn't sure if it could reach the heights of the excellent Rob Epstein documentary "The Times of Harvey Milk," winner of the Best Documentary Oscar in 1984, but it got very close. The use of archival footage and the location shooting entirely in San Francisco (they used the exact same storefront to recreate Milk's "Castro Camera" shop that became a hangout/political office at the time) gives it a vérité quality, and the performances are so first-rate and natural. Sean Penn's performance as Milk is ascendant, reflecting all of his persistence and joy as well as his human frailty. Milk was in the closet until he was 40, and that denial of self ("I haven't done one thing that I'm proud of") propelled him to live the rest of his life as a perpetual motion machine, constantly engaged in activism. He pushed those in his orbit to come out, to show up, to claim their rights and take back their democracy, saying "They'll vote for us 2 to 1 if they know one of us." And yet one of the first political acts he undertakes after setting up shop in San Francisco's Castro neighborhood is partnering with the Teamsters to boycott Coors beer for refusing to sign a union contract. Eventually, after a successful boycott, the Teamsters began to hire openly gay truck drivers. Milk was an activist and part of a movement for human rights, but also a pretty shrewd political actor.

Obviously, the headlines of California's passage of Proposition 8 loom heavily on the film. And there are a few things to take away from that. First of all, Milk lost. A lot. He ran for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1973. He lost. He ran again in 1975. He lost again. He ran for state Assembly against Art Agnos. He lost. Then in 1977, the board of supervisors ran district elections instead of a citywide slate. And then he won. Setbacks just made him more determined to continue the fight, both in the streets and through the political process. He could have given up at any time, for his own sanity and the stability of his love relationship (his partner and erstwhile campaign manager leaves him, not wanting to go through another campaign). And once elected, he immediately sought to pass a gay rights law, trying to bait the religious right to put up a referendum in the city (eventually they offered Prop. 6, the Briggs Amendment, which would have allowed the state to fire teachers for being gay or even TEACHERS WHO SUPPORTED THEIR GAY COLLEAGUES). The point is that you keep showing up and fighting, never settling for the way things are. The setbacks didn't end the movement, they awakened it.

That's a pretty good lesson. So is this. During the Prop. 6 campaign, Milk met with the Democratic Speaker of the Assembly to go over campaign literature. They didn't feature any gay men or women, instead framing the issue as one of human rights. They refused to show the face of the discrimination. Milk raged against the flyers, and was told to keep it down, that the country wasn't ready to accept an issue about gay rights, that the human rights angle would be more palatable.

Does that sound familiar?

Milk didn't buy it, instead offering to debate Sen. John Briggs anywhere, anytime, throughout the state, presenting himself as a gay man arguing against the extreme measure, as the face of someone much like those who would be harmed by it. Prop. 6 lost, 65-35. Thirty years later we never learned this lesson, and the next time marriage equality comes up for a vote that simple fact, that you have to tell people who they'd be voting for and who they'd be voting against, not with abstraction, cannot be overlooked.

Finally, what cannot be forgotten is that the 1978 election which defeated the discriminatory Prop. 6 was the same election that passed Prop. 13, which slashed property taxes and required a 2/3 vote in the legislature to raise any taxes in the state (and for any special taxes in municipalities). This symbol of the tax revolt on the 1980s has caused 30 years of perpetual budget crisis in California, a virtual destruction of state government. This is undiscussed in Milk, but the idea that all of these assaults on functional government and respect for rights are connected, that what impacts seniors and working people and minorities and the LGBT community are in many ways the same, is a part of the movie and of Milk's life. Only by working together on all of the relevant issues, across groups, across ethnic and class boundaries, will we ever be able to withstand this assault and create a more decent society. The next few years of crisis offers a moment to harness the creativity and activism that has expanded over the past few years and unite those marginalized or traditionally shut out of the conversations in Washington, to bring grassroots movements forward. I believe the legacy of Harvey Milk, 30 years later, is still being formed.

Another Wingnut Comedy

You'd think they would have quit while they were behind with the 1/2 Hour News Hour. Not so, alas...

I'm holding a palm card that was just given out at the Heritage Foundation to promote the new David Zucker film An American Carol. If I fill out the card, I can take one of four pledges, such as "Yes, I will send the trailer to my contacts" and "Yes, I want to be AN AMERICAN CAROLER or THEATER CAPTAIN." It's an induction to a movement, as the slogan on the card makes clear: "Finally, a movie for us."

By "us," of course, the filmmakers and promoters mean conservatives. Executive producer Myrna Sokoloff has put together a "pro-soldier, support our troops, pro-America" comedy, which Stephen Hayes previews in the new Weekly Standard. In it, filmmaker Michael Malone (Kevin "brother of Chris" Farley) and his organization MoveAlong.org are trying to repeal the Fourth of July when three angels—the Angel of Death, George S. Patton, and George Washington—come to him and convince him to change his ways.

I guess Bill O'Reilly appears in this as himself.

Jesse Taylor has the definitive take on this, but let me add that conservatives fundamentally don't understand comedy. Their idea of a joke is:

Knock-knock.
Who's there?
The ACLU is giving away our cherished rights to terrorists!
Yeah, and they're ugly! Let's shove a broomstick up their ass!

If that's what you're looking for, this movie won't disappoint:

In a clip we saw, Washington takes Malone to St. Paul's Cathedral to lecture him on freedom of religion and "freedom of speech, which you abuse." Malone is grossed out by dust in the priest's box, so the doors open onto the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center. "This is the dust of 3000 innocent human beings!" bellows Washington. Malone whimpers that he's just making movies. Washington won't have it. "Is that what you plan to say on Judgment Day?"

"That scene," said Sokoloff, "is hard to put in a comedy. But we had to do it."

That scene is hard to recite without vomit spurting from your nostrils, but I can't say it stopped them.

Honestly, this could become some kind of late-night cult favorite, an artifact of the Bush-era insaneosphere. We can all go dressed up as our favorite warblogger and throw Cheetos at the screen.

* I should note here that I have the dubious honor of having worked with both Kevin Farley (on a commercial about a dozen years ago) and Kurt Long, one of the anchors of the Half Hour News Hour. I seem to be a magnet for the fringe players in wingnut comedy.

Support the Troops

I finally got around to seeing The Ground Truth last night, part of my mini-Iraq documentary film festival I've put together on Netflix (become my movie friend!). Because much of the film is devoted to how these soldiers tried to put their lives together once they returned home, through bouts of depression and PTSD, through divorce and anger and arrests for disorderly conduct, it was fitting that this study was released today.

Army soldiers committed suicide in 2007 at the highest rate on record, and the toll is climbing ever higher this year as long war deployments stretch on. At least 115 soldiers killed themselves last year, up from 102 the previous year, the Army said Thursday [...]

"We see a lot of things that are going on in the war which do contribute — mainly the longtime and multiple deployments away from home, exposure to really terrifying and horrifying things, the easy availability of loaded weapons and a force that's very, very busy right now," said Col. Elspeth Ritchie psychiatric consultant to the Army surgeon general.

"And so all of those together we think are part of what may contribute, especially if somebody's having difficulties already," she told a Pentagon news conference.

The tricks that the military uses to get out of treating these soldiers are recounted in The Ground Truth. They'd offer treatment but only if you stayed on the base away from your family after returning home from a year in Iraq. They'd ask you if you had PTSD, and if you said no, you'd end your rotation, but if you said yes, you'd stay in Iraq. These were the allegations, and considering that the VA Secretary related PTSD to football injuries the other day, and that VA officials were pressuring their colleagues not to diagnose the disorder to save money on veterans health care, I believe every word of it.

I guess that veterans aren't treated particularly well after any war; go all the way back to the Bonus Marchers if you don't think so. They're broken down in basic training, taught to be dehumanized and desensitized to killing, used on the battlefield and then expected to be stowed away like any other munition. But they're people, changed by war, and without some care and treatment those without the strongest constitutions find it hard to adapt. This is a residual cost of war and these suicides should be treated as casualties. Furthermore, any future war should include this blight as a part of the calculus for making the decision.

And if anyone starts to make the argument that these men and women would have committed suicide anyway, as some make to the soldiers in the film, they can kiss my ass.

Late Night YouTube

Sorry but this is brilliant:



I'm thinking Matthew Broderick is Duncan Hunter, if you extend out the metaphor.

Roderick Jaynes Unmasked!

For years the editor of all Coen Brothers movies has been listed as "Roderick Jaynes." The filmmakers describe him as an English recluse who came out of retirement to work for the Coens after a long career in England. He lives in Haywards Heath. Of course, there is no Haywards Heath, and there is no Roderick Jaynes. The entire persona is a figment of the Coen Brothers' fertile imagination; they edit their own movies.

Jaynes has been nominated for two Oscars, including one last night. In 1996, when he was honored for Fargo, I don't think they showed a photograph, but last night they did:



There have been several aliases who have received Oscar nominations (mostly in the era of the blacklist), but Jaynes is the first fictional character to receive any.

Here's an old interview with Jaynes from 2001.

I think I'm going to put "Broderick Raines" on my future editing projects.

UPDATE: Jaynes is distraught.

How did the fictitious Jaynes, whom the Coens describe as a cranky British recluse in his 80s, take the loss? "We haven't talked to him," Ethan Coen said backstage. "We know he's elderly and unhappy, so probably not well."

Just So I'm The First To This Joke

This is a story about Iseman and Maverick.



(by the way, the McCain campaign's response is here. Also, he hired a lawyer late last year, Robert Bennett actually, the guy who defended Bill Clinton in the Lewinsky case, to knock down allegations that he "did favors for a D.C. lobbyist." Curiouser and curiouser.)

UPDATE: WaPo adds detail.

Concern about Iseman's presence around McCain at one point led to her being banned from his Senate office, according to sources close to McCain.

Either McCain's people are the most paranoid in the world, or there's some serious stuff underneath all of this. You don't ban someone from a Senate office for no reason, even if you are trying to uphold a squeaky-clean image.

UPDATE II: I think Yglesias has this right:

Does John McCain's campaign really want to go on record with the idea that he has "never done favors for special interests or lobbyists"? I would, personally, find it shocking if there were truly zero instances in the man's 25 year congressional career in which he did something for a special interest. What about Charles Keating? This seems like an invitation for trouble down the road.

The fact that telecom lobbyists with business in front of the Senate Committee he chaired were on the campaign plane and jetting around with him is really enough smoke on that one. McCain is a creature of Washington, and as such he's caught up in the whole ball of corruption. But he's a Villager in high standing, so I expect the media to try to take the bullet for him.

UPDATE III: I'm a damn prophet.

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.

Friday Random Ten

My New Year's Resolution is to see more live music. But here's some of the taped variety:

The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get - Morrissey
Sol (Batucada) - Kinky
Lion's Jaws - Neko Case
Tryin' To Breathe - Dilated Peoples
Readymade - Beck
Vive Le Week-end - Stereo Total
Mama & Papa - Supergrass
The New Workout Plan - Kanye West
Mean Ole Frisco - B.B. King
Broken Hearted Hoover Fixer Sucker Guy - Glen Hansard

Just to break off of that last song, Once is certainly in the top 5 best movies I've seen this year, and maybe the best. It's an absolute gem, a small film in the best sense of the word, a paean to the power of creating art.

Redacted From My Memory

It's of course silly for Bill O'Reilly to lose his mind over a movie he hasn't even seen, and both Mark Cuban and progressives in general are right to hammer him for it. But I wouldn't get too out in front defending "Redacted," people. Because I saw it last night. And it's a piece of crap.

The movie is a fictional treatment of a highly-publicized incident in Samarra where US soldiers raped a 14 year-old girl and killed her and her family to cover it up (so what's "redacted," exactly; everything in this movie is well-known yet poorly dramatized). There's a movie to be made out of that, about the horrors of war, how it dehumanizes you, and breaks you down, especially if you're on an impossible mission where you can't separate friends from enemies. "Redacted" is not that movie. It just basically drops two psychopaths inside the US military and lets them have their fun. Instead of complexity, instead of trying to understand the situation soldiers face, this is nothing more than a screed.

The acting is from out of a 3rd-grade play, and the simplistic use of video and blogs (the movie is derived from "found footage" of security cams, vlogs, press coverage and eyewitness video from soldiers and insurgent groups) is an insult to viewer intelligence, too. DePalma claims that the script comes right out of the mouths of actual soldiers in Iraq. Not only do I not buy that, it's highly insulting to fall back on some desire for verite to justify a shitty script. You're allowed to add drama and eloquence and half-decent writing. There are all these annoying "video toaster" wipes everywhere, because I guess that's what them amateurs do. And for some reason, the voice of outrage at the rape and murder has to be a militant tatooed woman with a nose ring, as if only people on the so-called "fringes" of society would find such conduct abhorrent.

DePalma already made a movie called Casualties of War which depicted an atrocity by the American military, and he did it with a sufficient amount of dramatic tension. This is just a narrow-minded piece of dreck.

Deliver Us From Evil

This sex scandal inside the Vatican that every chat show is yammering about (that's what the news has become, a series of chat shows) is nothing so much as redundant. This one is sensational, as there's actual videotape of the senior official propositioning the young man right inside his Vatican office, but it's no different than the spate of cases that has sadly turned the profession of pious priest into a punch line.

Television viewers saw the Vatican official sit alongside his guest and say: "You're very good-looking."

"Thank you," replied the younger man, before putting it to his host that he was about to commit a sin.

"I don't feel it is a sin," said the official. When the other man insisted that it was at odds with the teaching of the church, the Vatican official brought the conversation to an abrupt end.

When his guest bade farewell, saying "It's been a pleasure," the Vatican official replied: "Not for me, because you don't fancy me."

As it happens, I caught Amy Berg's fantastic documentary Deliver Us From Evil last week. While focusing on one particularly heinous perpetrator in the California diocese system named Oliver O'Grady, who molested as many as 50 children before being sent back to Ireland, where he now walks the streets as a free man without the local police even knowing about his prior crimes, the movie does detail the centuries-old struggle in the Catholic church with sex abuse cases, and the deep-seated corruption inside the system, which seeks to minimize these cases by ignoring the victims and making every attempt to shield the guilty from prosecution and publicity.

Indeed, sex abuse has been an issue in the Catholic Church for centuries. It can be argued that this stems from the practice of clerical celibacy, and the arrested state of sexual development which priests are subjected to by sublimating their physical desires from right around adolescence. Are you aware why the Roman Catholic church instituted the concept of celibacy, around the 4th century AD? For the first several hundred years, priests, bishops, and even popes were married men. Even today the practice of celibacy is not considered dogma or doctrine but a discipline, that could be changed by the Pope at any time. While many after-the-fact rationales were given for forcing celibacy on the laity, the real reason was simple: money.

When Paul dealt with qualifications for bishops, elders and deacons, his restriction was only that they be “the husband of one wife.” By the third century, bishops were being denied the right to a second marriage.

The problem for Christianity was it started to become financially prosperous.

The rich, the thoughtful ones who understood that their earthly goods were barriers to heaven, were delighted to hand over chunks of wealth to the priests and bishops as a down payment on easier transmission from one place to the next. (The soul’s equivalent, the wealthy presumed, of time-sharing a jet instead of having to stand in line at a purgatorial Southwest counter.)

Not only were priests and bishops becoming wealthier, they were becoming worldier. Many were married, others just had “open marriages” -- concubines. Worse than that -- in the church’s eyes -- the priests and bishops begetting sons regarded the endowments being made to the church as personal property. So the same rollicking clerics were setting themselves up as landed gentry and passing the fortunes along to their primogenitor sons and heirs.

In the 11th century, five popes in a row said: “Enough already.” Then came tough Gregory VII. He overreacted. He told married priests they couldn’t say Mass, and ordered the laity not to attend Masses said by married priests and naughty priests. The obvious happened. Members of the laity soon were complaining they had nowhere to go to Mass.

The edict was softened a bit to allow Mass-going. As usual, the women were blamed. Concubines were ordered scourged. Effectively though, the idea of priestly celibacy was in -- though not universally welcomed among the clerics themselves. And handing over church money to sons of priests and bishops was out.

They simply refit Catholic teaching to promote the idea that celibacy was always part of the system, changing history to fit the economic needs of the church. This was a power play, and denying the rampant scandal right at their feet is part of preserving that power. A rich and entrenched church was willing to break any law and subvert any investigation in order to maintain that lofty perch.

Indeed, there should be absolutely no surprise that this was happening under the nose of Pope Benedict XVI. The entire scandal in the United States did as well.

In May 2001, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and later elected Pope Benedict XVI on the death of his predecessor, sent a letter to all Catholic Bishops declaring that the Church's investigations into claims of child sex abuse were subject to the pontifical secret and were not to be reported to law enforcement until investigations were completed, on pain of excommunication. The secrecy related only to the internal investigation, and the letter did not attempt to discourage victims from reporting abuse to the police.

It didn't attempt to discourage victims because it wasn't written to victims; it was an internal memo giving the bishops their marching orders. And over the years, those bishops denied any wrongdoing, shuttled molesters off from one parish to the next without informing the authorities, and basically tried to keep a lid on the scandals until they eventually exploded.

This is not good for Christianity as a whole; new studies have revealed that believers and non-believers have an increasingly negative view of the religion. This is because those at the highest levels have, through dishonesty and cover-up, betrayed the ideals of their faith. The church is a slow-moving organ that extends opposition to reform as far as possible. This has damaged their trust between them and their parishioners, and has left those of us on the outside shocked at the level of corruption.

The Real Rudy

Somebody had to make this movie (and actually, somebody did; it's called Giuliani Time), and Brave New Films has released their first installment of The Real Rudy, detailing Giuliani's record as mayor and not the hype. Combined with the International Association of Fire Fighters video "Urban Legend," the truth about Rudy is out there. For those in the reality-based community, it's not the social issues or the stance on guns that spells Giuliani's downfall: it's his judgment.



This one's about the decision to put the emergency operations center in the 23rd floor of 7 World Trade Center, the only area where terrorists had attacked in New York City. Due to this enormous error, emergency communications were severed and fire fighters never got the message to evacuate the soon-to-fall South Tower. It's a devastating piece.

The Very Silly Senator Morse

I always thought that this clique of Foreign Policy Scholars, who pay no attention to facts or dissenting opinions, was a new phenomenon... until I saw this (h/t Attaturk):



This is from a film called War Made Easy, from the makers of Hijacking Catastrophe, another excellent film. The featured speaker is Wayne Morse, Senator from the great state of Oregon, and much of it is from a Face the Nation episode circa 1964. Morse was one of only two Senators, both Democrats, to vote against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. And in so doing, he went up against a political and foreign policy establishment that is eerily similar to where we are today. The Face the Nation exchange is absolutely fascinating, with Morse challenging the entire notion that a President has unique and untrammeled authority in matters of foreign policy. The journalist who questions him considers this a highly unserious answer, and makes no attempt to hide his disdain. For those who can't see the YouTube, here's a transcript:

Questioner: Senator, the Constitution gives to the President of the United States the sole responsibility for the conduct of foreign policy-

Morse: Couldn't be more wrong! You couldn't have made a more unsound legal statement than the one you have just made. This is the promulgation of an old fallacy, that foreign policy belongs to the President of the United States, that's nonsense-

Questioner: To whom does it belong, then, Senator?

Morse: It belongs to the American people, and our Constitutional fathers made it very, very, clear.

Questioner: Where does the President fit into this in the repsonsibility scale.

Morse: What I am saying is under our Constitution all our President is, is the administrator of the people's foreign policy. Those are his prerogatives, and I am pleading that the American people be given the facts about foreign policy-

Questioner: You know, Senator, that the American people cannot formulate and execute foreign policy.

Morse: Why do you say that? Why, you're a man of little faith in democracy if you make that kind of statement. I have complete faith in the ability of the American people to follow the facts if you'll give them.

Questioner: It isn't a lack of faith, Senator-

Morse: And my charge against my government is we're not giving the American people the facts.

This was well over 40 years ago, when we had a President using a trumped-up event to take the country to war, and Sen. Wayne Morse was a lonely soul challenging his government to tell the truth, to trust the American people, to live up to the ideals of democracy. For this he was dismissed as extremely silly. The next time he was up for election, he lost - to Bob Packwood. He would never return to the US Senate.

This idea that the people have a say in the workings of their government clearly irritated the journalist, presumably a Washington journalist, doing the questioning. His belief in the oligarchy of self-appointed elites represents an insidious trait in American political culture that we see to this day. It is not of much interest to the Beltway that this President is arrogating extreme amounts of executive power unto himself, because they see the self-aggrandizement of power as a noble goal. They believe that government is run best by themselves and them alone; that the foreign policy "consensus" is one made in the cocktail parties and right-leaning think tanks of the capital rahter than in the country at large. And this is nothing new, as we have seen.

This is the truly dangerous outcome of vesting power in the hands of people who do nothing but talk to each other and overlook each others biases. It's been a problem in this country almost since the beginning of the Republic. The Internet and blogs afford an opportunity for other voices to connect and mass against this deeply wrongheaded, groupthought, expansionist view of the world. But it won't be easy. Just look what happened to Sen. Morse.