Swiftboating Obama
Someone named Taylor Marsh has been granted a spot at The Huffington Post (my favorite news site) to try to do her best to make Hillary Clinton the Democratic nominee for president. There’s nothing wrong with that — Marsh is pretty open about who she supports, she’s not posing as an objective journalist in this regard.
What I object to is that Clinton and her supporters will do, apparently, anything to get elected, including adopting the tactics of Karl Rove to attack their opponents. The Rove doctrine says: don’t attack an opponent where he’s weakest, attack him where he’s strongest. If a man does important, high-profile work with children, start a whispering campaign that says he’s a child molester. If a man has the compassion to adopt a homeless minority child, tell all the bigots of the nation that “he has a black baby.” And if he’s a certified war hero (and your own candidate is a proven rich-boy draft-dodger) call him a coward and a traitor.
In the case of Obama, since the man is a gifted orator able to move millions of people with his soaring rhetoric of hope and change, call him a plagiarist and say he’s a con man. Obama’s foes, who have spent the past eight years intently studying Rove’s techniques, have little else to go on. They tried at the beginning to do the “attack him where he’s strongest” game, putting out memes like “Is Obama Black Enough?” and “He Has No Ideas Behind His Rhetoric,” both of which are utter hogwash. Now this. A couple of weeks ago, there was a conservative columnist who couldn’t help wondering aloud if Obama could speak so well if he had no teleprompter. That’s right, a man whose hero, George W. Bush, cannot string two words together under any circumstances without sounding like a complete idiot, is worried that Obama might not be so great an orator as he seems to be, and therefore should not become president.
And I keep waiting, but I’m not seeing the Obama camp coming up with crap like this. There’s plenty a crafty, cynical politician could do to smear Clinton and McCain, but I don’t see Obama or his staff doing that. Which I think accounts for a lot of why Clinton isn’t doing as well as she’d like to be.
(For what it’s worth, at least at HuffPo they let other columnists answer ridiculous charges.)
Sam on Temple of Doom
I’ll admit, I was a little nervous about showing Sam (6) Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. It’s darker than Raiders, its sexuality is bothmore “adult” and more juvenile, its violence is more brutal, it shows children being whipped and people being lowered into boiling lava after having their still-beating hearts ripped out, its protagonist turns evil, all that stuff.
With one exception. The character of Willie Scott didn’t bother him for her whining, shrieking girlishness or her shallow, conniving gold-digging — she bothered Sam because she wasn’t Marion Ravenwood. “Wait — there’s a different woman every time?” he asked, a little worried. I’m not sure what his concern was, and I wasn’t sure how to discuss it, but it seemed to worry him that Indiana Jones, having professed his love to Marion in the last movie, is now running around with anyone else. In his world, I reckon, a man chooses a woman and that’s his mate for the rest of his life. After all, Anakin Skywalker doesn’t have a string of honeys on his way to becoming a Jedi — he picks his mate when he’s nine years old and sticks with her until she dies in childbirth, and then he’s alone forever. That’s the way it’s supposed to go.
(Once he got accustomed to the idea of Indiana Jones’s serial monogamy, he began to wonder about who might be “the woman” in the new movie. He’s kind of hoping it’s this person, but I assured him that Marion Ravenwood is back — and about damn time too, in my opinion. Karen Allen, one of my all-time movieland crushes, looks fabulous.)
Apart from that, Sam was terribly excited by Temple of Doom. He accepted the “wtf?” dance number that opens the movie, he loved the nightclub shootout and the car chase through the streets and the dive out of the airplane. As usual, he had no trouble following the exposition, even when it was delivered by men with strong accents during scenes of people eating live snakes and chilled monkey brains. I think that’s all down to Spielberg’s uncanny visual sense — I can’t think of another director, from Hollywood or elsewhere, who is able to convey so much story simply through choice of images. When Indy and company show up at the deserted Indian village, with its brown fields and bare trees and homely, sad people, Sam, who has never been to India and knows little of Hinduism, immediately said “What’s the matter with the village? Where is everyone? Did someone take the children? Why would someone take their children?” None of these plot-points had been hinted at in the dialogue, yet Sam instantly understood the emotional hook of the movie and its central mystery, instantly knew what the protagonist would want. He was easily ten minutes ahead of the narrative, which eventually has a bony child wandering into the village clutching, for no discernible reason, a fragment of an ancient scroll that explains the thing about the magic rock that blah de blah de blah.
Sam did crawl up into my lap when the Thugee ceremony began (let’s face it, it’s not every day you see a man lowered into boiling lava), but minutes later he was confiding in me that he liked Temple of Doom “better than the first one” and by the time the mine-car chase came along, Sam was moved to start this conversation:
SAM: Is the movie almost over?
DAD: Oh no — they’ve got a whole lot more to go.
SAM: Good! I don’t ever want it to end.
I’m totally with Sam on this point. For all of Temple‘s brutality and darkness, once the third act of kicks in it becomes a non-stop cliff-hanging thrill machine, one unrivaled in cinema in terms of sheer inventiveness, joy and wit.
(I intend to analyze the Indiana Jones movies, and the rest of Spielberg’s work in the near future, but Sam pointed out one piece of art direction that had eluded me through many viewings of this movie: the stage in Willie’s nightclub act at the beginning of the movie is echoed in the Temple of Doom design, with the symmetrical dragon head being replaced by a giant skull. Both Willie’s act and Mola Ram’s sacrifice ritual are, essentially, show business, created to achieve an emotional effect. Both ceremonies also include unexplained, fantastic events: Mola Ram is able to take a man’s still-beating heart from his chest and have him stay alive, and Willie is able to enter her dragon’s mouth and participate an elaborate, impossible dance routine.)